Lucy Gellman Photo
Marco Rubio holds at Thursday’s town hall meeting.
Portsmouth, N.H. – “Talk to me,” an undecided New England Republican implored Marco Rubio, “about the war on drugs.”
In the process, he handed the ascendant Republican presidential candidate an opportunity to speak to New England moderates while holding on to his conservative base — the challenge that Rubio faces as he seeks to clear the field of party establishment-backed contenders in next Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary on the heels of a strong showing in this week’s Iowa caucuses.
The undecided voter — a supporter of libertarian Rand Paul, who dropped out of the race this week — posed the question to Rubio, a Florida senator, at a town hall meeting that drew 300 attendees in this cozy coastal community near the New Hampshire-Maine border.
“Are we winning?” he asked. “Are we losing? What will that look like under a Rubio presidency? Convince me to vote for you, and give me and my wife one less thing to fight about.”
Rubio seized the opening in hopes of building upon the growing consensus that he — not Chris Christie, not Jeb Bush —can best speak to audiences beyond the right-wing base nurtured by outsider candidates Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.
“We are not winning the war on drugs,” Rubio responded, “because the war on drugs should not be against addicts. It should be against drug cartels.”
The crowd murmured in assent, as Rubio walked a tightrope among the Liberty wing’s demands for drug policy reform, the traditional New England Republican centrism on social issues, and the mainstream conservative’s promise to be tough on crime.
If you closed your eyes, you could for a moment believe you were listening not to a conservative Republican candidate, but Democratic Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, who has championed a “second-chance society” initiative that eases up on drug users while targeting the dealers.
“As you are well aware, there is a huge heroin epidemic going on in much of the country, and in particular here in New Hampshire,” Rubio continued, breaking from his Republican counterparts’ take-no-prisoners town hall focus this week on military strength and illegal immigration to discuss an issue that has come to dominate local concerns in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine .
“These drug cartels have targeted places like New Hampshire, and we need to wage war on them. But that being said, I do believe that, if someone is a user, if someone is an addict, we should not treat them as a criminal. We should treat them as someone who has been addicted to a substance, and needs help getting off of that substance.
“There’s a difference between a drug dealer and an addict. The addict is a victim, someone who has gotten hooked on a substance and needs help. The drug dealer is a parasite, an individual who has been targeting people in society to make money regardless of what the social cost may be.”
The crowd in Portsmouth.
The crowd agreed, nodding at Rubio’s tolerance towards addicts and cheering on his mercilessness towards dealers. Picking up steam, Rubio transitioned to criminal justice reform, another issue for libertarians and New England Republicans alike.
“Today, in some communities, we are locking people up because the police pulled you over and caught you with a joint,” he said, building off of a story of his own near brush with the law while at a party with friends when he was 18. “So now, you’re going to go to jail for the night. Now that’s on your record. That stuff gets into your head. You try to get hired, and it’s sitting there.
“And here’s where it gets really bad: with poor people, with minorities in the inner city. They can’t hire a lawyer, so they get a public defender who has 5,000 people on his case docket. They say, just plead guilty to this misdemeanor, but what they don’t tell you is that it’s going to be a part of your record for the rest of your life. Now you can’t join the military. Now no employer will hire you. They’re afraid to hire you because you have a record. I do believe we need to divert young people from jails early on. I do support ways of getting around” the over-incarceration and criminalization of youth offenders.
As Rubio concluded his response to the libertarian voter, the crowd smiled and nodded and applauded enthusiastically. Not with reckless abandon, as at Donald Trump’s rallies, but with clear appreciation for a candidate who strives to unite his party, and the country, around a reasonable personality and a malleable conservative message.
“The unity we will aim for is not a unity on which we will agree on everything,” Rubio proposed, inadvertently echoing another freshman senator who quickly rose to the highest political office in 2008. “It will be bringing some dignity back to that office. The dignity of saying, in the end, ‘I am the president of the United States and, whether you like me or not, every single day I’m going to work on behalf of you and your family to keep you safe and make you more prosperous.’ You have to have a president who loves the American people, even if some of them don’t love you back.”
After the town hall, longtime Rubio supporters Susan and George Carlisle of Portsmouth said the event reaffirmed their enthusiasm. “Listening to him speak, he’s just so smart and so commonsense and has such a command of all of the issues,” said Susan, who is 60. “He’s going to be a great president for everybody.”
George, 66, heartily agreed: “He understands the issues because he lives them. He’s got a young family. He wasn’t born with money. He’s had to work his way up. He’s had people tell him it wasn’t his time. It definitely is his time, and I think he can unite America.”
Lucy Gellman contributed reporting.
Lucy Gellman and Thomas Breen are spending the week in New Hampshire with canvassers, campaign staffers and volunteers, and candidates. To hear more voices from the Rubio camp, click on or download the audio above. This segment is the seventh installment in a playlist of many voices from the road.
I agree with Rubio, although as a practical matter, it is often difficult to distinguish between addicted users and pure "dealers" who don't use and sell for profit. Lots of addicts turn to selling to fund their habit, and many of those arrested are prosecuted more aggressively because of the large quantities of drugs on them. I'd like to see some reliable data showing that we really are in fact incarcerating pure user addicts before I can buy the notion that we are irresponsibly jailing people with addictions.