The line that I’ve italicized from an article by John Miller that profiled then-Senate-candidate Marco Rubio in an October issue of National Review helps to explain why Rubio won, and why conservatives are so excited about it:

Rubio’s favorite subject is American exceptionalism. It’s at the heart of virtually everything he says, whether he’s addressing a classroom of college students at Southeastern University in Lakeland or trying to summarize his candidacy in the one minute Univision allotted for closing remarks. “America is not just different, America is better,” he says. “People didn’t vote for a left-of-center, Western European social democracy — and that’s not what Obama sold us, either.” He warns that if the United States stays on its present course, debt and taxes will sap the entrepreneurial spirit that has defined it from the start. “Big government doesn’t hurt the people who have it made,” he says. “Big government wipes out the people who are trying to make it.”

We’ve particular reason to take that assertion to heart, in Rhode Island, because the policies that are strangling the state aren’t harming the very wealthy (as local progressives like to claim) so much as the young and ambitious who wish to build something for themselves, their families, and their communities. As a consequence, such people have been fleeing the state for years, and there’s no hope of recovery unless that trend is reversed.