Last week Senator Marco Rubio addressed the annual CPAC conference with tired classic GOP rhetoric. My colleague Lauren Schwartz gave an outstanding account of Rubio’s offensive and crass speech on Friday and her analysis opens up more questions about Rubio and where the GOP is headed.

In 1996, the Republican nominee for President, Senator Bob Dole used his nomination acceptance speech to set the framework of a party that wanted to go back to the 1950s America (before the civil rights era) and rejected any facet of multilateral action in foreign policy. Dole was trounced in the November election.

As the media anointed “Republican savior” Rubio has picked up the Republican themes of yesteryear. Rubio’s rhetoric both serves him well for a potential Presidential run with the first caucus state, Iowa being a traditional place where the GOP electorate is hard right on social issues. That is why Rep. Steve King, one of the most quotable right-wingers in Congress is favored to be the GOP nominee for the open Senate seat from Iowa being vacated by liberal titan Tom Harkin.

Rubio finished second in the CPAC Presidential Straw Poll, second to Senator Rand Paul. The Kentucky libertarian who in recent weeks was one of just four Republicans to vote for Chuck Hagel’s nomination and filibustered John Brennen’s nomination due to his opposition to drones will NEVER be nominated the 2000s Republican Party. (I should note here that my views are closer to Rand Paul’s positions on foreign policy than I am to either President Obama’s OR the GOP’s. I believe strongly in an America first foreign policy, but that is a topic for another day and perhaps another forum) This is a party so dominated by war mongering neo-conservatives and the corporate class, that Paul will be seen as an enemy rather than a potential ally who can help grow a shrinking party.  Much like his father, he will be a protest candidate, one who makes solid points about where the Republican Party should position itself but one who will be mocked by the insider class of “conservatives” that run the Republican Party in Washington.

Thus, Marco Rubio of candidates who can actually be nominated for President was the favorite of CPAC delegates. Rubio’s rhetoric has been carefully selected for political purposes and to appeal to the types of people that attend CPAC or watch the conference on TV. Last  month, Rubio was given the highest score in the US Senate by the reactionary National Taxpayers Union. Recall last year, Rubio was one of only five Senators to get a perfect 100% score from the American Conservative Union who have been tracking Congressional votes since the early 1970s. This is a real achievement for any Republican Senator. Any hint of moderation, any vote even on a procedural matter which is out of line with conservative orthodoxy prevents a 100% rating from these types of advocacy organizations. As someone who has tracked interest group voting scores since the mid 1990s,  I can unequivocally state that from my perspective, Rubio’s record puts him on the far right, even further right than many of the  conservative zealots elected in the 1994 Gingrich wave and other tea-parties in both chambers elected in 2010.
Rubio has been carefully selecting his words and his rhetoric since November, Those who think Marco Rubio just accidentally misspoke about the age of the planet only weeks after the 2012 election, have not been paying attention to previous Iowa Republican Presidential Caucuses. With Rubio the flavor of the month, or perhaps year for Republicans who are desperate to reach out to Latino and young voters, the freshman US Senator is smartly putting himself towards the right on economic and religious/social issues while seeking middle ground on immigration policy as the GOP quickly evolves on that issue.

The challenge for Rubio is to somehow keep the Republican Party desperate for him while continuing to play his cards correctly with BOTH national Republican power brokers/media elites  like those at CPAC AND the fundamentalist Iowa caucus goers. The Iowa Caucus winners on the GOP side include the televangelist Pat Robertson, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum. To say Iowa, a largely Democratic state at the Presidential level has a religious dominated Republican caucus would be an understatement. Rubio has to show he can connect with this important base of Iowa voters if he is to get one of the few tickets out of Iowa to New Hampshire, assuming he runs for President in 2016.

Previous Republican “flavors of the month” have fizzled out almost entirely. After Obama’s first election Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal was the presumptive 2012 frontrunner. Then he gave his State of the Union response and has been under a rock ever since. A year later it was Chris Christie and we know how Republicans feel today about him. Remember after the 1994 election when Pete Wilson was going to be the GOP savior?  Heck, the Republicans even awarded San Diego, where Wilson had been Mayor the 1996 convention because he was going to be the nominee! Well Wilson’s race-baiting cost the GOP California for a generation and hastened the movement of Latino voters to the Democrats. Wilson himself didn’t last long in the 1996 Presidential Race and has been quietly marginalized since.

Rubio seems to have survived mini-crisis better than other Republicans. His “sip watched around the globe” could have been fatal if he was as unnatural as Jindal, Christie or Mark Sanford but he survived it. He has also seen other Republicans implode on the national stage saying more or less the same things as Rubio is.

The rhetoric Rubio has chosen to run with has defined him as a far right conservative who longs for an America of yesteryear. Yet the media seems to view him as a futuristic figure, one who can take the Republican Party forward. Thus far the Rubio-mania sweeping the Republican Party and national political media has yet to wear off. But when it does, the Senator will be more closely examined and the obvious limitations of his potential candidacy will be exposed.