Though Crist has the cameras, Rubio's still red hot

A little after 4 p.m. Tuesday, Marco Rubio pushed open the door of the Habana Cafe in Gulfport. The waiting crowd burst into cheers.

The first thing Rubio did was work the room personally, often being grabbed, hugged and kissed like a beloved son.

Jo Hastings, the Habana's owner and the event host, greeted him with a hug and exclaimed, "I canceled my liposuction for you!" Rubio laughed and said it was a first.

The crowd was about 60 when he got there and got to be about 80 at its largest, although people were coming and going. The minimum contribution to Rubio's campaign for the U.S. Senate: $25.

Rubio's campaign had just announced a stunning $4.5 million raised in the last quarter, yet there he was collecting $25 checks. Rubio said he was proud of it and that it can be harder to get $25 out of somebody than to get their vote.

Hastings introduced Rubio, 39, as a Republican "rock star." He took a place about a third of the way up the open staircase leading to the restaurant's second floor, so that people were both above him and below him.

He spoke for about 18 minutes, and he was very good. Electric, even. His main points:

(1) America is an exceptional nation, created and re-created by people who came here from around the world seeking freedom, a nation whose strength makes the world safer.

(2) Yet we are foolishly squandering our strength, even risking destruction, by an addiction to debt, to spending, and government that is strangling the American economy and entrepreneurship.

(3) We can neither cut the government enough, nor raise taxes enough, to fix it. The answer is to use the government to grow the economy, starting with tax cuts: making the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 permanent, and eliminating the capital-gains and estate taxes.

Feel free to debate. I am just telling you what he said, and that it went over very well.

"It's not an exaggeration," Rubio warned, "to say that if we continue on the path we are on right now, soon, perhaps sooner than we expect, America could have a sovereign debt crisis triggered in our own nation. …

"Forty cents of every dollar the federal government spends is borrowed from my children's and your children's and grandchildren's generation. No Americans before have ever done that — not at this perverse level, not at this sustained rate."

A little later, he concluded: "If you like the direction this country is going, if you think it's good to have people in Washington who will say or do anything to get elected … if you think it's okay to continue borrowing from our children and their future, just so we don't have to make tough choices today … if you believe any of these things, then you should not vote for me."

Well.

As matters stand today, Rubio is still being edged in the polls by his principal rival, Gov. Charlie Crist, running as an independent, partly because Crist is in the oil-spill limelight. Crist is a rock star too, just of a different brand, his main assets being likability and a genial populism.

Rubio, in contrast, has a focused message that he delivers brilliantly in settings such as the one Tuesday in Gulfport. The test is translating it into all the superficialities of modern elections. If he could get all Floridians 80 at a time into the Habana Cafe, I suspect he would win.