The oddity of the Rubio situation is that I don't recall such an obvious VP frontrunner in any previous cycle. Now, preseason Veepstakes is notoriously silly; after all, guessing the pick even when there's just a few weeks to go and we know who is doing the picking rarely works out well. And the usual caveat applies: the bottom of the ticket doesn't really matter very much in November. So I'm not speculating about whether Rubio will actually get the nod. But it is, I think, worth pointing out that near as I can tell there's been a pretty solid consensus that Rubio is the obvious selection, and that such a consensus is unusual. My guess is that this story doesn't really shake the current consensus -- although whether everyone's expectations now have anything to do with who actually gets the pick is unknown and unknowable.
Well, I'm not so sure about that. Courtesy Chris Cilliza:
Say what you will about the birthers, but don’t call them partisan.
The people who brought you the Barack Obama birth-certificate hullabaloo now have a new target: Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a man often speculated to be the next Republican vice presidential nominee. While they’re at it, they also have Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana and perhaps a future presidential candidate, in their sights.
Each man, the birthers say, is ineligible to be president because he runs afoul of the constitutional requirement that a president must be a “natural born citizen” of the United States. Rubio’s parents were Cuban nationals at the time of his birth, and Jindal’s parents were citizens of India.
The good news for the birthers is that this suggests they were going after Obama, whose father was a Kenyan national, not because of the president’s political party. The bad news is that this supports the suspicion that they were going after Obama because of his race.
