A couple of weeks ago, I chatted with Marco Rubio, the young American senator from Florida who is a possible Republican vice-presidential candidate. As we talked, an image of a Labrador sprang to mind: with his dark, gleaming eyes and glossy appearance, Rubio is a bundle of infectious, positive energy and bouncy good cheer.
He arrived clutching the ultimate political bone: a memoir, released just in time for the 2012 campaign, entitled An American Son. This is a classic of its genre: it relates how Rubio, 41, pulled himself up from a hardscrabble Cuban immigrant background to attend college, before marrying his (blonde, gorgeous, ex-cheerleader) wife, producing four (highly telegenic) children, and becoming a politician, while constantly thanking Jesus, loving his parents and extolling the American dream. Or as he writes: “I am the child of immigrants, an American with a history that began with a special place in his heart for the land of lost dreams his parents had left, so their children wouldn’t lose theirs.”
On one level, it is temptingly easy for someone like me to smile at this; in the British culture where I grew up (but no longer live), such unbridled optimism seems so alien that it automatically sounds fake – particularly when it is presented without any sense of irony at all, and wrapped in the clichéd phrases of America’s founding mythology and a political focus group. And yet, on another level, Rubio’s book also sparks a profound pang of sadness in me. For if there is one key thing that is missing in Europe right now – and which the continent desperately needs – it is precisely that sense of positive energy and mission that men such as Rubio embody, with their cheerleaders, immigrant roots and all.