Republican Presidential Candidate and Florida Senator Marco Rubio courted Burlington voters during a town hall meeting on Monday, just weeks before the Iowa Caucus gives candidates their first real numbers outside of opinion polling.
Rubio spoke in front of a crowd of about 200 at the Burlington Public Library. Rubio has spent his first and so far only term in the senate focusing primarily on foreign policy and defense issues, and discussed his plan to fight terrorism.
“We need to have a real war on terror, not a rhetorical war where people say really aggressive things,” Rubio told the crowd, “a real one, and that means the best armed forces on the planet neutralize and destroy them. And if we capture them alive, they get a one way ticket to Guantanamo [Bay] where we find out everything they know.”
Rubio, who had over $100,000 in student loan debt upon graduating college, also touched on educational issues when asked by a caucus goer. He proposes an alternative accreditation system that breaks what he refers to as a “monopoly” on accreditation for schools, and arrangement he blames for rising educational costs.
“One of the first things I want to do is create an alternative accrediting model, that Federal Aid is available for, that allows you to gain learning and the ability to gain college credit from a variety of self-driven sources. Online course work–often for free, military service, life experience, something you learned in an internship,” said Rubio. “Self learning is real.”
Before he spoke at the meeting, he spoke on KBUR about the recent standoff with armed protesters, angered over federal government land use and the arrest of several individuals for illegal burning on federal land. Rubio says he sympathizes with their frustration, but not their methods.
“You can’t be lawless. We live in a republic,” Rubio said. “There are ways to change the laws of this country and the policies. If we get frustrated with it, that’s why we have elections. That’s why we have people we can hold accountable.”
Rubio is currently third in both Iowa and nationally behind Texas Senator Ted Cruz and frontrunner and businessman Donald Trump, polling at around 12% in the RealClearPolitics Average.
