Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio — a first-term U.S. senator from Florida — says the “political class” in Washington is “completely out of touch.”
“I mean not just out of touch, but out of date. Out of touch because they don’t understand what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck. Maybe they never did or maybe it’s been so long they’ve forgotten,” Rubio said. “The issues they spend a lot of their time fighting over or talking about sometimes are not the things that are impacting us.”
Rubio has been saying it’s time to “turn the page” and let “a new generation” of leaders govern and, a week ago, Rubio got a roar of approval from the crowd at the Values Voters Summit when he broke the news that House Speaker John Boehner would exit congress at the end of this month.
Rubio held a town hall meeting in Cedar Falls last night. A man in the audience expressed his dissatisfaction with Republican leaders in congress and asked Rubio if he’d use the “bully pulpit” to force congress to do things, like get rid of ObamaCare.
“What you’ve just described is not just the anger that’s out there today, what you’ve just described is why I’m running for president,” Rubio said. “…I’m running for president because we can’t change any of this unless we have people like that in the presidency.”
Rubio is campaigning in Dubuque this morning.
(Reporting in Cedar Falls by Iowa Public Radio’s Pat Blank; additional reporting by Radio Iowa’s O. Kay Henderson)