Marco Rubio doesn’t inspire much passion in anyone. This is why he's dangerous.
This is why he’s dangerous.
...
“Rubio knows how to feed the angry preoccupations of many GOP base voters while simultaneously coming across as hopeful and optimistic,” he writes. “Last night, Rubio, in what appeared to be an appeal to the deep resentment of many of these voters, skillfully converted legitimate questions about his personal financial management into evidence of Democratic and elite media contempt for his relatively humble upbringing, which he proceeded to explain he had overcome through hard work. Rubio’s narrative is both laden with legitimate resentment and inspiring!”
Playing to angry conservatives while simultaneously coming across as a nice, if bland guy to more mainstream crowds? That sounds exactly like the formula that Bush employed against Al Gore in the 2000 campaign. While Rubio avoids the now-loaded term “compassionate conservatism”, his pitch, that he supports conservative policies because he thinks they help working class people, hits exactly the same note.
If Rubio wins, there’s a strong chance that the 2016 election will be a redux of the 2000 campaign: A dim but affable-seeming Republican who comes across as kind of harmless against a smarty-pants Democrat that the media can’t help but portray as high-strung. That combination not only leads to a rather boring campaign, with debates between the nerd and the aw-shucks guy putting everyone to sleep, but it suppresses voter turnout.
Now it’s also true that Rubio causes no real excitement on the Republican side, either. But while that can hurt him in the primary, it’s no big deal for him in the general election. Republicans have an army of elderly voters that never miss an election, which is why they kill in midterms but don’t do as well in presidential election years. Plus, while Republicans may not be fired up about Rubio, they will be fired up about keeping the Democrat out of office—whether it’s Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders—which will drive up turnout on their side.
The 2000 election is one that George W. Bush should have lost and it was only because he had certain post-voting-day advantages in his favor that allowed him to massage the results enough to get declared President: The state with disputed votes was run by his brother, the Supreme Court was dominated by Republicans, and angry mobs of conservatives were able to prevent election officials in Florida from completing proper recounts. Those advantages have only grown since then. Most swing states have Republican leadership. The Supreme Court is still dominated by conservatives. Voting irregularities that hurt Democrats are preordained, due to Republican legislation that suppresses votes. And angry conservative mobs are a lot easier to form these days, especially with the internet, than they were in 2000. If it’s close, the Republican has all the advantages.
http://www.salon.com/2015/10/29/we_must_now_fear_marco_rubio_the_gops_best_bet_is_sneaky_slippery_and_deceptively_dangerous/
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He's also all over the place on positions, the more recent ones showing him as extreme as Ted Cruz. Not that the right sees that as extreme! But -- many right-leaning independents won't like hearing associated with him the kind of stuff that caused them to leave the party -- determined attempts to rev up that giant sucking sound, association with the Kochs, denied global warming and opposing greenhouse gas controls, privatizing Social Security and Medicare (claiming they are "unsustainable'), repealing the Affordable Care Act, for and against abortion and immigration reform, now aggressive militarily and against the Iran treaty, but both for and against the Iraq War, on and on.
At least I hope so. I also think Hillary would come off well against him. Voters mostly don't know him, so don't have deep-set beliefs in him that would be hard to disturb.
A nice plus in all this is that Rubio is giving up his Senate seat. That means when he loses he'll be out of Congress too. Oh, yes -- and his billionaire's investment in him will have been wasted. 
and if it's not cheating, FDR.
But yes, since TV became a thing, the taller candidate always wins.
Jimmy Carter was shorter than Ford. But that only barely worked.
How tall is Hillary Clinton?
Interesting point about television, Marshall McLuhan has the theory about TV being a cool medium and the cooler ones win, or something like that, so this is why Kennedy looked good, Nixon bad in their debates.
.. was lazy and didn't google "short presidents" 
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