By the second minute of Marco Rubio’s official Republican response to the President’s State of the Union address last night, it was clear that the Senator’s body was betraying him. His lips caught each other in the way they do at moments of stress, when we are suddenly confronted, after long lapses of unthought, with the actual mechanics of speech. Under the hot lights, Rubio’s mouth went dry. A few minutes later, sweat trickled down his right temple, and he moved his hand instinctively to wipe it away. The dry mouth persisted, and, at times, his eyes flashed with a kind of pleading and mounting desperation: the speech was less than halfway over, with words and words to go. His hands, already large in the frame when he kept them low in front of him, flashed a few times to his lips. And then back to his temple.

By the eighth minute, he seemed to have adjusted, and it looked as if he might push through to the end. But then, three minutes later, he made a gamble and reached for a water bottle offscreen: he lurched down to his left and fumbled a bit, making a terrifyingly intimate moment of eye contact with the audience before taking a quick sip from an unfortunately tiny bottle and then ducking to put it back. He quickly returned to his speech, and spun out the final few minutes. But, by then, those eyes had turned faintly sad; while continuing to perform the words, Rubio looked as though he knew he’d made a mistake, and that all anyone would remember in the morning would be the image of him stooped to the edge of the frame, sheepishly grasping for the smallest plastic bottle of water in the District of Columbia.

It was a defensible act, and perhaps several minutes overdue, but physically clumsy to such a magnificent degree that it smudged out the actual meaning of everything he had said before and everything he would say after. That such a thing could happen, that Rubio’s very human need for water in a time of stress could become the defining moment of a fourteen-minute policy speech, will be cited by many contrarians as further evidence of the shallowness and vapidity of the media class and of the public at large. Well, fine, but that’s scoring easy points—and no one will suggest that what Rubio said about the housing crisis, government spending, or which party cares more about solving the immigration crisis is somehow not important or worth discussing. But it is significant, too, that the people watching the speech, people who are at once an audience to entertainment and participants in the civic enterprise, found it so transfixing. Twitter, which gives quick voice to the American cultural id, was the venue for a flood of mocking and gleeful gut responses. (The best, for my money, came later, from the flop-sweat extraordinaire Albert Brooks: “I didn’t see Marco Rubio’s speech but I just got a residual check.”) Yet the flexing cleverness may have obscured a deeper feeling that we, as seasoned viewers of bland and staged political theatre, had just made an uncomfortable personal connection that we were not expecting, and did not enjoy.

Of course, Rubio has been wronged by the Web before, rather cosmically so, when his featured speech at the Republican National Convention was obliterated by the Clint Eastwood empty-chair act that preceded it. Last night, Rubio showed all the signs of humility and good nature that we hope for in our politicians when he tweeted out a photo of the offending water bottle, with the hashtag #GOPResponse. The moment mattered, by this point, because even Rubio said that it did.

This morning, speaking to George Stephanopoulos, he even managed to turn it into a charming homily: “I needed water—what am I going to do? You know, it happens. God has a funny way of reminding us we’re human.” He smiled as he said this, accepting the role of light foolishness. Making speeches is hard, he had reminded us. Meanwhile, Obama had just made it look easy—again. It’s a good sign when someone can make fun of himself, but I doubt that Rubio went into the night thinking he’d be accepting this diminished pose.

Yet, maybe he did. The official response is always a losing hand. Cutting from the full House chamber, with its pomp and theatrics, to some darker, emptier place sets an also-ran tone that even a perfect speech can rarely overcome. It gives the entire performance a sodden, basement atmosphere, and makes the speaker seem not simply like the opposition politician kept in the wings to respond but like someone who didn’t score an invite to the party, and so stayed at home to record a YouTube confessional. Rubio’s aides and supporters must have been nodding along through the early moments of the speech; despite the onset of dry mouth, Rubio seemed calm and composed and sensible in a way that the Republicans haven’t for at least one election cycle. Though talk has already turned to where Rubio’s moment belongs in the pantheon of State of the Union-response dishonor, it likely won’t manage to unseat Bobby Jindal’s woeful performance, in 2009. Rubio’s speech can be edited in a way that frames his best remarks; Jindal’s, meanwhile, was a stilted and alarming wash from the moment he bounced into the room. At the very least, Rubio has given the political world a teaching moment: position a tall, clear glass of water on an easily accessible flat surface near the politician. Remind said politician to drink from it, if absolutely necessary, in a calm and resolute manner.

Watching the video for a second time this morning, with the full knowledge of what is to come, the entire thing takes on added drama and weight, which suggests that it may linger not merely as a “Nixon moment” in political history but as a durable Web artifact. Rubio’s body seems locked in a struggle that we know he is sure to lose. If the video makes it across the threshold of a few news cycles of late-night mockery, it will be because of those eyes, which give us, in just a few minutes, a full narrative arc of dread, desperation, decision, and regret.