In a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference Friday that largely looked beyond current problems, Marco Rubio called on conservatives to "imagine" a new America.
After a failed 2013 bid to reform the immigration system, the senator from Florida and likely presidential contender, once a tea-party darling, seems to have gotten back in the good graces of the crowd at CPAC, eliciting multiple standing ovations.
"We are one election away from triggering another American century," he told the crowd.
Checking all the major conservative boxes, Rubio told the crowd that even though the country is on the road to decline because of the Obama administration's policies, "Americans know we're exceptional." "Imagine," he said, if America repealed and replaced Obamacare, if the country's laws "protected human life," and if we had a commander in chief who thinks that "the way to defeat ISIS is not to find them a job."
"The question before us in November of 2016 is what kind of country we're going to be," he said.
Rubio continued to hit President Obama, calling him "failed" and lamenting the administration's foreign policy that he said "treats the ayatollah in Iran with more respect than the prime minister of Israel."