ArcaMax

In the business of low political blows, gun rights advocate Wayne LaPierre reminds us of Hillary Clinton's best not-so-secret weapon: her amazing ability to drive her rivals and critics nuts.

"I have to tell ya," said the National Rifle Association's executive vice president and CEO to thundering applause at their annual meeting Saturday, "eight years of one demographically symbolic president is enough."

Oh? Well, at least no one can say he was playing the race card or gender card. He was playing the "demographically symbolic" card, leaving it up to his audience to figure out what's so bad about being "demographically symbolic" anyway.

One wonders, for example, what Sen. Marco Rubio thinks about that. The Florida Republican threw his own hat in the ring for president on Monday with a speech loaded with demographic symbolism -- and significance.

Staged at Miami's Freedom Tower, a richly symbolic landmark for Cuban refugees from Fidel Castro's Cuba -- many of whom were processed at this "Ellis Island of the South" -- Rubio spoke movingly about his own Cuban immigrant parents and a major theme of his political career: restoring the American dream.

The examples of his father, a bartender, and his mother, a maid, symbolized his message on income inequality, which has risen as a driving issue for both parties in this early stage of the presidential race.

And, in ways that reminded me of then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama's rise eight years ago, Rubio turned his comparative youth and inexperience into an asset against Clinton, who declared her own candidacy a day earlier.

"Yesterday, a leader from yesterday began a campaign for president by promising to take us back to yesterday," he said. "But yesterday is over, and we are never going back."

He delivered that message so movingly that one almost could forget that on major issues like Obamacare, climate change and President Obama's executive actions on immigration and Cuba, he favors what many reformers would call steps backwards to the yesterday before Obama took office.

But as a fresh face, a rising talent and a conservative who aims to reinvent government while many of his fellow Republicans want only to shrink it, Rubio stands out as a significant, not just symbolic candidate. Like Obama, he beat long odds to win his 2010 election and seems energized by the tough challenge he faces now.

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