Unless, of course, part of pocketing his “thirty pieces of silver”, Marco plays the role of Rick Santorum to Jeb’s Mitt Romney. Jeb runs as the slightly right of center father figure while Marco and Palin duke it out. Jeb’s front groups firebomb Palin with negative ads, while both Marco and Jeb campaign with clean hands so that they can at least make the argument to conservatives that, unlike Mitt, they had nothing to do with the B-29 raids against Palin.

Remember, most ordinary voters consider Marco a true conservative. He got his bona fides by taking out Crist in 2010 in both the Primary and the General. Tea Party people forgot that his fast promotion inside the Florida State House to Speaker came because Jeb and the other Party Bulls saw a guy who could become a national figure someday and bring Mountains of Pork back to the Sunshine State. They saw in Marco what Eddie Jones saw in Obama many years ago in the Illinois State Senate.

Marco Rubio’s career is a stark contrast to Palin’s. The man was and is a conservative, but he was never Movement. Unlike Palin, he was never in revolt against the Party apparatus: he used the Party Apparat to advance his career. But he, and the State GOP, were shrewd enough to use the TEA Party when the opportunity presented itself.

Marco used the TEA party when he and Jeb’s staff realized that Charlie Crist had overreached himself.  By late 2009, most Florida Republicans thought Crist’s embrace of Obama and his grasping for the empty Senate Seat unseemly and careerist (which it was). That revulsion led to Marco’s landslide primary victory.

However, Marco’s one great mistake was to telegraph his distancing from Palin during 2010. That told me that he was a Jeb guy through and through, and that he would be a Bush stooge in D.C.. It telegraphed the same thing to a lot of other people (like you, for example, Light). However, Palin observers are NOT most people. Most voters don’t pay close attention to the hand signals that make up politics. Most voters consider Marco  Rubio a right-winger like Palin.

Marco is a client. Marco will never betray his
patron. You don’t do that in Florida
politics. ESPECIALLY in Miami Cuban politics. Marco would appear in
public in a Che t-shirt before he would turn on Jeb.

There will be a continuation of the great Cow Palace struggle that has been going on since 1964 between the Rockefeller Wing of the Party, represented by Romney and the Bush Family, and the Goldwater Wing of the Party, represented by Palin, if only because there is no Nixon figure in the GOP that is conservative enough to appease the Right and satisfy the moderates.

Here’s the key that makes me a Church of One, however. I strongly believe, and always have since she came on the scene, the Palin is the only figure who can reach out to both sides of the Party and take Nixon’s place. Right now, in her political lifeline, she’s where Nixon was after he exposed the Hiss Spy Ring in the Truman Administration: Liberals swore hatred upon the Young Nixon unto his death. They saw the Hiss Case as an attack on the New Deal, when in fact, Nixon’s aims were far more limited and careerist. But even had they known the truth, they never would have forgiven him for exposing the truth about liberals: that they indulged the mass murderer Stalin.

Palin occupies that same position in the Party that Nixon did. Like Nixon, she has known defeat and loss. Like Nixon, her enemies believe that she is dead and gone. However, first the Moderates must Come a Cropper, to have the lie revealed that they can lead the GOP back to where Reagan led them.

So it shall be with Palin, who is in the wilderness now, as Nixon was.