Pandering to the Tea Party

LITTLE ROCK — I haven’t been playing this right. All along, I thought my grandparents were just economic refugees from a dysfunctional country with a warm climate. I never thought beyond the obvious: that they put down new roots in America because it was a prosperous nation that offered them better lives than the country of their birth.

But I needed to repackage my family story better.

If I were more ambitious, I would have been tirelessly promoting myself as the grandson of exiles.

Yes, I should have stuck a line at the top of my bio to say that my grandparents came to America “following Benito Mussolini’s takeover of Italy.”

OK, that’s not quite true. Mussolini and his fascist blackshirts didn’t march into Rome until 1922, which was a couple of years after my mom’s parents boarded ships for Ellis Island.

But it’s close enough.

It certainly was for Marco Rubio, who has thumped his exile street cred all the way to the U.S. Senate.

“In 1971, Marco was born in Miami to Cuban born parents who came to America following Fidel Castro’s takeover,” his official Senate biography read.

Until last week, when the St. Petersburg Times actually looked at the immigration records and discovered that his parents really left Cuba in1956, more than two years before the Castro-led revolution. In fact, Castro was powerless and living in Mexico when Rubio’s parents immigrated to America.

So I guess you could say that they pre-fled Castro’s communism.

I could at least claim that my grandparents pre-fled Mussolini’s fascism while Il Duce was actually in the same country as them. But that would be nitpicking.

What’s important is that Rubio be allowed to cling to his exile status.

Rubio needs his exile story.

For without it, his family’s story isn’t that much different from today’s stories of economic refugees who come from poor, politically corrupt places south of the border in search of a better life in America-the same people his political base wants to greet with electrified fences and double walls.

You’re not going to excite the Tea Party by talking about continuing America’s long and noble tradition of welcoming economic refugees to start new lives here.

Better to go with the fleeing-communism angle. That’s their speed.

Even if it’s just pre-fleeing communism.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to revise my bio to enhance my victimhood.

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Frank Cerabino writes for the Palm Beach Post.