Did Marco Rubio Squander His Big Moment?
Rubio responded by attacking Christie’s record in New Jersey. “But I would add this,” he said. “Let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He is trying to change this country.”
It was a familiar, and effective, maneuver for Rubio: slashing at his opponent, then ending above the fray with a larger point. But Christie, calling the audience’s attention to the move, described it differently: “the drive-by shot at the beginning with incorrect and incomplete information and then the memorized 25-second speech that is exactly what his advisers gave him.”
.. The debate had barely begun, and Rubio had walked into a trap. Accused of being a mindless reciter of talking points, he mindlessly recited talking points, over and over and over again. It was a theme the press had repeatedly noted, as it grew bored watching him give the same speech, the same answers to questions, time and again; Rubio’s besotted advisers termed it “message discipline.” On the debate stage, his inability to do anything but repeat the same line threatened to confirm the very criticism leveled against him: that behind his pretty rhetoric, there was little else.
.. If the debate does pop Rubio’s bubble, it will be a blow to the professional Republicans of Washington, D.C., for whom he seemed to represent the party’s last hope... “Tonight is closer to what I expected when I got behind Jeb, and exactly what I was worried about when others rallied around Rubio.”