Sen. Marco Rubio's youthful appearance should help in his bid to become the nation's 45th president, says Daniel Henninger, deputy editorial page director at The Wall Street Journal.
"It's funny, a lot of people say, well he looks so young. But … I'll bet you that for half the electorate he doesn't 'look' young, he looks like them and a lot of the people that age, say between 21 and 45," Henninger said Tuesday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
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"They kind of are looking for somebody from their generation and Rubio is lucky in the sense that … Hillary Clinton, who we assume will be the nominee, is 67 years old and she got her start in politics a long time ago.
"Rubio has decided, look, I'm 43, if I wait and someone else gets elected, I could be 51 before I get a chance to run again. It's sort of like declaring for the NBA draft. He's ready."
Henninger said Rubio has an "upward striving aspirational appeal."
"This is the kind of upward striving that he grew up with and he's incorporated into his political persona and it's rather appealing," he said.
But the power of Clinton's political machine should not be underestimated, according to Henninger. Clinton is now on her first campaign swing, riding in a van from New York to Iowa.
"Make no mistake, she's going out there in this van, this Scooby tour. This is the beginning of the big blue machine," Henninger said.
"The Clinton operation is huge. It's going to be well-funded and their expectation, the Democrats' expectation, is that they will just carry Hillary around from stop to stop and that the campaign machinery, the organization is going to put her across.
"[They will be] spending money on advertising, getting the vote out, and her job is essentially to deliver the message. Whether she's up to that is a good question. We're going to find out."
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