The End of Marco-mentum
After Mitt Romney lost in 2012, the G.O.P. undertook an “autopsy” to determine how it should best adapt to the changing American electorate. If Republicans were intent on appealing to young voters and being more inclusive of minorities, especially Hispanics, Rubio represented a model face of the idealized Republican future — at least as it was imagined by the Republican Party leaders and many conservatives in the news media. To them, immigration reform was a kind of magic bullet that would allow the G.O.P. to expand its base and address the prescriptions of their autopsy while keeping the rest of the platform essentially unchanged.
.. He wondered aloud whether they should have canceled the event: “Remember what happened to Ben Carson?” A few weeks earlier, a car accident on an icy road in Iowa had killed a Carson campaign worker and injured three volunteers.Rubio should have stopped there, but he didn’t. “The last thing we need is a story that somebody died on the road,” he added. It was a rare moment of exhaustion transparency that showed just how deeply the grim calculus of the campaign news cycle had seeped into the candidate. His chief concern was the “optics” of someone dying on the way to one of his events. It would be bad “story” for the campaign. (Rubio added later that it would be a “tragedy” if there was an accident.)
.. Rubio ascended to join Kelly, who was being tended to by four different makeup people, one of them painting her hair with a fat brush. Rubio rated only two makeup artists. The crowd started chanting.
“Megyn, Megyn, Megyn!”
This was one of those scenes that underscored the transcendent power of celebrity at the expense of so much else in today’s politics (and, of course, there is no better examplar of this than Rubio and Kelly’s mutual tormentor, Donald J. Trump). Kelly smiled out at the crowd, pulled out her phone, and started filming everyone as they chanted her name. “We’ve officially entered the Hall of Mirrors,” said The Washington Examiner’s Byron York
.. Even in likely defeat, you can still see a bright future for Rubio in the G.O.P. The problem is, no one has any clue what the Republican Party will look like after Trump is done with it.