GREENVILLE, SOUTH CAROLINA— Sen. Marco Rubio was a no show here at the 2016 Conservative Review convention in Greenville, South Carolina. And it appears that the organizers of the convention had no idea that he was going to bail out on the conference at the last minute.
Mark Levin, a prominent conservative author and Conservative Review’s editor-in-chief, expressed his disappointment in the Republican nominee for President in a press conference following the convention, which was attended by thousands of Republican voters.
A reporter asked Levin, “What do you make of Marco Rubio not being on the schedule?”
“This is a conservative convention. First he said he was coming. Then he didn’t come. So the voters can draw their own conclusions from that,” he answered.
Breitbart News then asked Levin how long ago Rubio committed to coming to the Conservative Review convention, and if reports were true if Rubio sent surrogates Trey Gowdy and Sen. Tim Scott to speak on his behalf.
A staffer for the conference confirmed that Rubio had pledged to attend and speak at the conference earlier in the week.
“This isn’t about surrogates speaking. Are they running for President of the United States?” Levin asked. “This is about the candidate speaking.”
“If the conservative convention is not good enough for Marco Rubio, it’s not good enough for his surrogates,” Levin said. “Cruz didn’t send a surrogate in here. Carson didn’t send a surrogate in here. The others who stayed away … that’s up to them.”
“I have nothing against Tim Scott and Trey Gowdy, but this is the conservative convention, and we had some presidential candidates show up,” he said of Carson and Cruz, adding “and their guy [Rubio] bailed out.”
Levin speculated: “Maybe he had a meeting with the Ripon society or something. Or LULAC [League of United Latin American Citizens], or La Raza.”
“It was pretty damn rude of Rubio, quite frankly. It is up to him to do what he wants to do, but … we had several thousand people to hear what he wanted to say,” Levin concluded.