Dick Cheney‘s former fluffer Stephen F. Hayes is turning his affections toward Florida Senator Marco Rubio, beginning an inevitable trend of fawning post-election coverage preparing conservative audiences for an eventual Rubio run for the Republican nomination for president. Rubio, who is Cuban-American, is quickly displacing Bobby Jindal as the Republicans’ great nonwhite hope. Hayes’ piece begins his profile by communicating to his audience just how down Rubio is:
After 20 minutes, the candidate was summoned to the stage. He removed the headphones and left his iPod on the table. I asked two of Rubio’s top aides—Albert Martinez, who handled communications for Rubio during his rise in Florida politics and served as a consultant on the Senate race, and Alex Burgos, the communications director on the Senate campaign—what Rubio listened to in order to get himself in the right frame of mind for such a big moment. Burgos guessed it was probably Tupac. Martinez thought maybe NWA. Rubio, 39, like so many men his age, is a closet fan of gangsta rap.
Martinez picked up the iPod, glanced at the last tune played, and shook his head. “I don’t believe this,” he said, laughing. It wasn’t gangsta rap, but club music. Rubio, who had spent three hours in debate prep the previous afternoon, had been gathering his final pre-debate thoughts to “Sexy Bitch,” by French DJ David Guetta and rapper Akon.
Rubio is so cool and dangerous that he listens to “gangsta rap” from more than a decade ago. In case the reference to “gangsta rap” doesn’t date this observation enough, NWA’s most successful member now makes family comedies. I don’t fault Rubio’s taste–Pac is in my top five–it’s just that this is an amusing bit of deliberate ethnic signifying for an audience whose clearest recollection of these artists is Tipper Gore‘s effort to ban their albums.
Meanwhile, something tells me that Rubio is unlikely to get this kind of treatment over at FOX Nation, based on his music tastes:
Ironically, NWA was far more politically controversial for their time than Weezy is for his. In the late 80s and early 90s, in the midst of the crack epidemic, a lot of white people found NWA genuinely frightening. There isn’t a frat boy in America who doesn’t own one of Lil’ Wayne‘s albums. Sex, guns, patriarchy and unregulated capitalism, what’s for a Republican not to love? The only reason they would have to stay in the “closet” about their affections for the music is that racial wedge politics remain such a useful tool. As the president himself once said, the problem with Hip-hop these days isn’t that it’s subversive, it’s that it’s square.
