Defenders of the long, arduous process by which the United States elects a president often say the marathon campaign’s chief value is that it finds people out. On Saturday night that old saw was confirmed once again – and the candidate being found out was Marco Rubio.
The freshman Florida senator went into the final Republican debate before New Hampshire votes on Tuesday as the rising favourite [lol – Svi]. Many tipped him if not to win outright then at least to become the standard bearer of the party’s establishment or (relatively) moderate wing, the man who could take on the ultra-conservative Ted Cruz or the untamed fire-breather Donald Trump. A good performance tonight would seal the deal.
Instead, Rubio had a disaster. His chief antagonist was New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who seized the earliest opportunity to put the young senator through the mincer. Building on a theme that he had tried out at a packed rally earlier that day, Christie taunted Rubio as a callow ingenue who could do no more than regurgitate a “memorized 25-second speech”.
Rubio proceeded to make Christie’s point for him. Instead of answering the question put to him, he repeated the soundbite he had just uttered – a riff about Barack Obama having a deliberate plan to transform America. Christie pointed this out to the watching audience, Rubio doing exactly as he had described, retreating to the comfort zone of a well-rehearsed stump speech. Rubio promptly repeated the soundbite again.
It was a damning, jaw-dropping moment. It looked like that sequence from the 1970s thriller the Stepford Wives, when a software glitch reveals that a human-like character is in fact a robot. “I thought we were friends,” the android says over and over again.
Rubio never recovered. A small comfort, of a sort, came later when a close-up showed the Florida senator sweating under the lights and under pressure. At least it showed he was human. Pretty soon, though, there was a video mash-up of those broken-record answers and a parody Twitter account: @rubioglitch. Social media branded him the “marcobot”.
