Domo arigato, Marco Roboto
Rubio- otic: A self- humiliating speaking style marked by the droning repetition of an overly rehearsed line, no matter the context, as if mechanically programmed or even the result of mechanical malfunction.
Marcomentum: A political rise that Marco Rubio enjoyed until he went all Rubio- otic on Saturday night.
More often than not, New Hampshire provides a dramatic moment that changes a presidential nominee and sometimes even a president.
Ed Muskie was the Democratic front- runner in 1972. He held a strong lead in a head- to- head matchup with President Richard Nixon.
Then Nixon’s dirty- tricks team concocted from whole cloth a letter that smeared Muskie as appearing bigoted against French- Canadian Americans. Then the Manchester Union- Leader published an editorial calling Muskie’s wife a hard- drinker of salty language.
Muskie defended himself and his wife in a news conference in a snowstorm. He said the water on his face was melted snow. Reporters thought it tears. He was finished.
There are other defining and pivotal moments in New Hampshire history: “I paid for this microphone,” Ronald Reagan said in 1980 and ended George H. W. Bush’s self- proclaimed “big mo,” meaning momentum, from Iowa. “Where’s the beef?” asked Walter Mondale of Gary Hart after Hart had won Iowa by proclaiming “new ideas.” A Bill Clinton reeling from revelations about sex and military- avoidance declared, “I’ll be with you till the last dog dies,” and defined himself as “the comeback kid” after finishing second in the New Hampshire primary of 1992.
It came to pass that such a moment occurred Saturday night in a debate among the Republican presidential candidates.
The moment may have been so large as to nominate Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, and, thus, elect Hillary Clinton. She can beat either of those extremists.
But she might have been defeated by Marco Rubio. That was until Saturday night, when the previously robust Rubio got reduced to mush by Chris Christie in the clearest and most wince- inducing first- round political knockout I have ever felt a need to divert my eyes from.
The seismic context is that, as of Saturday evening, the Republican mainstream establishment had just about fully settled on Rubio, the surging third- place finisher to Cruz and Trump in Iowa, as the anointed alternative to those two unelectable extremists. Rubio had risen to second in New Hampshire polls. He needed only to continue his uptick through the Granite State and thus put away his establishment rivals— Christie, Jeb Bush and John Kasich.
Then he would go forth as the well- financed non-Trump and non- Cruz, and, by my now- ridiculous prediction, the nomination and even the presidency.
Rubio’s meltdown Saturday night had been hinted beforehand by a growing awareness that he campaigned in a way that could be described either as brilliantly “on- message” or soullessly programmed.
It was obvious going into the debate that Christie, Bush and Kasich needed for Rubio to stumble. It was obvious one or more of them would go hard after him. It was more likely that any damage would be inflicted by Christie, a former prosecutor, than by Bush, who is terminally nice, or Kasich, whose message is all about positive moderation.
As I put on Twitter an hour or so before the debate: “If Rubio is presidential timber, Christie and maybe Bush will force him to prove it tonight.”
Christie forced. Rubio is not presidential timber.
Christie directly challenged Rubio as a young senator who had accomplished nothing, unlike himself as a governor. He said Rubio delivered only programmed lines.
Rubio responded with a programmed line.
It was that we need to dispel the “fiction” that Barack Obama, though an inexperienced senator when he became president, didn’t know what he was doing as, supposedly, he went about systematically destroying a great country.
Rubio’s adviser- driven idea was to deflect the attack on his own inexperience and cloak himself in the ever- convenient GOP tactic of trashing the Democratic president.
Christie pressed. Rubio replied with the same line about the Obama fiction. Christie said, look, there he goes again. Then Rubio, as if a needle stuck on vinyl, said the same line, or a close version thereof, two more times.
The audience grumbled on the second repetition. On the third, it sat in silence as if stunned at the starkness of the revelation of the young phenomenon’s empty suit.
Until that moment, Rubio had been the smartest and most articulate Republican presidential candidate. He might yet be that— unless, it appears, he’s under pressure, which a president sometimes is, and under which Hillary Clinton will surely put him.
If there is an establishment alternative to Trump and Cruz, it is now about as apt to be Bush as Rubio— but not Kasich, who is too moderate, or Christie, whose function, performed with such brutal brilliance Saturday night, is hatchet- man.