Want to know a dirty little secret about political journalists? A lot of the time, we don't pay attention to the speeches of the politicians we cover. If you don't believe me, just go to a campaign rally—especially one toward the end of the day—and check out the press area in the back of the room. (Admittedly, this might be easier if you live in New Hampshire, Nevada, or South Carolina.) There you'll typically see my colleagues (and, yes, sometimes me) typing away on our laptops, scanning our Twitter feeds, or whispering into our phones—basically doing everything but listening to the man or woman prattling on at the front of the room.

There's a good reason for our disinterest. Campaign speeches tend to be very, very repetitive, and unlike, say, a good album, they don't exactly reward multiple listens. Once you've heard it the first time, you usually don't need to hear it again. Part of this is because politicians rely on talking points. (A particularly rich example of such a reliance—or overreliance—can be viewed here c/o @davidfrum.) But it's also because politicians simply have to talk so much. At the height of a campaign, many pols are giving four, five, or six speeches a day. It's only human that they'd start to repeat themselves.

Occasionally, though, the rare politician comes along who's so repetitive, so on-message, so married to his talking points that he's not human. In fact, he calls to mind nothing so much as a robot. In the current presidential campaign, that's Marco Rubio. The Florida senator has, for all intents and purposes, been giving the exact same speech for the last four years, ever since he unveiled it at the 2012 Republican National Convention. There's the bit about his father the hotel-banquet bartender and his mother the Kmart clerk. And how America doesn't owe Rubio anything but how, because America changed the course of his family's history, Rubio has a debt to America. Even Rubio's jokes are canned. And Rubio doesn't merely confine these lines to his stump speech. They unerringly show up in debates and his answers to voters' questions, as well. In fact, when The New York Times recently published a story about Rubio's supposedly "intimate—and increasingly improvised—glimpses" into his life in response to voters' questions, at least two of the examples buttressing this dubious claim were well-worn passages from his stump speech. Having heard these lines a couple—much less a hundred times—it's little wonder political reporters tune them out. At a Rubio event in South Carolina last fall, I spied a journalist colleague doing a crossword puzzle.

Last week, on the campaign trail in New Hampshire, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie began trying to make an issue out of this. He attacked Rubio as "the boy in the bubble" and belittled him for staging campaign events that were just "40 minutes on a little stage telling everybody his canned speech that he's memorized." When Rubio returned fire, Christie just got more vicious. "Even when he's leveling his insults at me," Christie said, “he has to read them from a piece of paper.”

The attacks were great fun for political reporters—there's no more entertaining version of Chris Christie than the pissed-off, belittling Chris Christie—but it was hard to imagine them striking a chord with voters. After all, as an article in The Weekly Standard (which tends to cover Rubio the way Tiger Beat once covered Kirk Cameron; in other words, gushingly) noted: While journalists may have heard the same Rubio speech piece a thousand times, "[n]ormal people—political professionals call them 'voters'—have not."