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Tom Jackson is in a 12-step program for recovering sports writers; as part of his rehabilitation, he writes a column centered on the people, politics, passions and peculiarities of Pasco County. Email

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Pasco County News | Breaking News

Taste of Marco Tour revisited, sort of

Posted Sep 1, 2010 by Tom Jackson

Updated Sep 1, 2010 at 04:12 PM

A leftover or two from the Taste of Marco Tour that sailed through Pasco County Monday.

The time for attaching particular expectations to the candidate, of course, is now, before he has established a legislative record in the office he seeks. Which may be why, after Rubio advocated repealing “ObamaCare” and replacing it with a plan relying on market forces and “lawsuit abuse” reform, a trio of his supporters took his position to mean perhaps what it did not: a restoration of their monthly resupplies of erectile dysfunction medications, cut off, they say, by their provider shortly after passage of the health reform package.

It’s hard to imagine Rubio, or any candidate running under the conservative banner, making the argument that government dollars should ever have been spent on, well, non-essential pharmacological agents.

On the other hand, the argument could be made that in a more perfect repeal-and-replace America, our threesome would have the option (through Paul Ryan’s federally subsidized free-market voucher plan) to seek coverage that included the prescription plan of their choosing … and you can well believe more than a few medical insurance companies would be competing for their business.

But I’m not sure that’s the position they were staking out.

The same trio didn’t say so outright, but they plainly were disappointed with Rubio’s nuanced take on America’s illegal immigration troubles, including his failure to embrace Arizona’s attempt to address its own particular difficulties.

While sympathizing with the people, legislature and governor of Arizona – it wasn’t an immigration law they enacted; it was “the Arizona public safety law” – Rubio nonetheless lamented the fact that Arizona felt compelled to act. Instead, he blamed Washington’s refusal to enforce federal laws.

But our trio was in a round-‘em-up-and-ship-‘em-back mood. After all, they said, an e-mail making the rounds that claims three presidents – Hoover, Truman and Eisenhower – deported 13 million illegals proves we’re capable of mass roundups when elected officials have spines not made of linguini.

Well. Various fact-checking outfits have established that while Hoover and Eisenhower had repatriation schemes – Eisenhower’s bore the lamentable title “Operation Wetback” – the assertions in the e-mail are, at best, wildly, enormously and ludicrously exaggerated. See for yourself here: Hoover, Truman & Ike: Mass Deporters?

Still, refusing to shake a fist of solidarity with the Tea Party movement on behalf of beleaguered Arizona, even while laying out a perfectly reasonable alternative, is the sort of positioning that allows the New York Times to claim that Rubio has begun to trim his conservative sails—an assertion that is obviously nonsense. Conservatives across the land agree that where the federal powers are enumerated, Washington should be unshirking. Seeing to the sanctity of our borders and to looking after the foreign nationals on our soil is, unmistakably, among the federal government’s assignments. It wasn’t hedging to come out in favor of Washington performing its duty so that the individual states wouldn’t have to.