Marco Rubio has had a rough 2013. He began the year as potentially the next Republican presidential nominee. But he spent the ensuing ten and a half months trying to please everyone who could get him there.

Take immigration. To even begin to describe his contortions on the attention-getting issue is nearly impossible because he has flip-flopped so many times. The gist is that he went from a supporter of comprehensive immigration reform to an opponent of the same, but freighted both stances with caveats and qualifications. The same dynamic shaped Rubio’s approach to the debt ceiling and the government shutdown. No doubt scared that he had turned off primary voters with his immigration vacillating, the theretofore temperate senator abruptly decided to get as close as possible rhetorically to Ted Cruz. The move was so absurd and strained, and so out-of-character, that he ended up looking even more craven than he had during the immigration debate.

The whole sorry exercise has made plain to friend and foe that there is no man or woman in the United States Senate who is more calculating than the junior senator from Florida. Rubio clearly desires to please the right wing of his Party while also showing centrists and establishmentarians (and the people who fund GOP presidential campaigns) that he is no ideologue, and is in fact a man who cares primarily about getting things done. The result has been that he has stained his reputation, and seen his standing fall among Republican primary voters.

So what’s a bright young presidential hopeful to do when his political fortunes hit a losing streak? Straight out of the consultants’ playbook, Rubio decided the time was right for that heartiest of political-aspirant traditions: The Great Big Important Foreign Policy Speech. Rubio grabbed a friendly lectern at the American Enterprise Institute for 35 minutes to speak on America's role in the world.

It was not exactly a break with recent history. Anyone who has followed Rubio's career, or even his flailing 2013 performance, could probably have guessed that the talk would try to do two things: The first would be to find a middle ground among the possible 2016 primary contenders. And the second would be to speak in broad generalizations, so as not to be tied down by what other people refer to as convictions. And on at least one level, the exercise worked: The headline from the Politico story on the speech declared “Rubio neither hawk nor dove." Right down the middle!