Rubio: 'No way' a governor is ready on foreign policy
U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio covered many issues in a meeting with The Des Moines Register's editorial board on his first day in Iowa as a declared candidate for president.
Here are a few:
• Why elect a U.S. senator? Rubio, a first-term U.S. senator and former state legislator, contrasted his background with those of both President Barack Obama and potential 2016 opponents whose experience includes service as a governor.
His background on the Senate Foreign Relations and Intelligence committees, Rubio argued, gives him critical experience that no governor has.
"I believe that I take over on Day One as president prepared to lead this country in the most crucial obligation the president faces, as commander in chief," Rubio said. "Governors can certainly read about foreign policy, and take briefings and meet with experts, but there is no way they'll be ready on Day One to manage U.S. foreign policy."
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As a first-term U.S. senator, Rubio has been compared to Obama, who was an eight-year state senator in Illinois before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004 and then the presidency in 2008. Rubio contrasted their experiences by noting that his nine years in the Florida House included two as speaker, in which he had substantial administrative duties. He has now served more than four years in the Senate.
• Foreign policy. The U.S. faces major challenges in the Middle East and in dealing with Russia and China, Rubio argued. Those challenges call for substantial shifts from current U.S. policy and should make international affairs a dominant issue throughout the 2016 campaign.
Regarding the Middle East, Rubio called for a stronger partnership between the United States and one faction of the multilateral conflagration there.
"The U.S. needs to work with our Arab Sunni allies — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Jordanians and the Gulf kingdoms — to put together an anti-extremist army of combined forces that would receive U.S. logistical and intelligence support and sometimes air support," he said.
That force would fight both radical Sunni extremists, like al-Qaida and ISIS, but also resist expansion by Shia-Muslim Iran.
To push back against Russia's expansionist efforts in Crimea, eastern Ukraine and elsewhere, Rubio called for a "reinvigorated" NATO that focuses on security in Europe. In Asia, similarly, Rubio said the U.S. must improve partnerships with countries like Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Vietnam to push back against Chinese expansionism.
All of these efforts will require more military spending. Rubio said he supports an annual defense budget of $611 billion — a figure proposed for the upcoming year in an earlier budget prepared by former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Current proposals are tens of billion less than that.
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• Health care. Rubio said he supports "repealing and replacing" the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, in favor of policies he said would encourage competition, improve choices and drive down the cost of insurance coverage.
Those policies include allowing individuals to buy coverage with pre-tax income, providing refundable federal tax credits for low-income people who couldn't otherwise afford coverage, eliminating mandates for the types coverage that insurers must provide, improving transparency in health care costs and reforming medical malpractice laws to reduce "defensive" medicine.
• Medicare and Social Security. Rubio made clear that addressing the United States' $18.2 trillion debt will require tax-generating economic expansion but also reforms to the country's two main entitlement programs: Social Security and Medicare.
Rubio said he would not support changes for current beneficiaries but said Americans under the age of 50 "are going to have to accept that one way or another, our Social Security and Medicare is going to look different than our parents' did."
That could include a later retirement age for full Social Security benefits, he said, or a "choice program" in Medicare, in which beneficiaries receive a subsidy to shop for private health coverage.