What was Marco Rubio thinking Saturday night in Manchester, New Hampshire? Why would he repeat the same canned talking point four times, even after Chris Christie accused him of constantly repeating his canned talking points? And if he had to repeat a canned talking point during a Republican debate, why on earth would he choose one about how Barack Obama knows what he’s doing?

The knows-what-he’s-doing debacle felt like Rubio’s political Fredericksburg, a futile repetitive charge into overwhelming enemy fire. Christie’s brutal mockery of Rubio’s “memorized 25-second speech” evoked the fictional President Bartlet’s “What are the next 10 words of your answer?” smackdown of an opponent’s 10-word debate answers on “The West Wing.” But there was an actual point that Rubio was trying to make, even if his embarrassing inability to deviate from his political script overshadowed his political argument.


To understand the point, it helps to remember that Rubio was initially responding to the notion that he was too inexperienced to be president. “Gov. Christie warned voters here in New Hampshire against voting for another first-term senator, as America did with Barack Obama in 2008,” said moderator David Muir. Rubio quipped that if experience were all that mattered, Joe Biden ought to be the next president, since “he’s been around 1,000 years.” It was then that Rubio went to the well for the first time: “And let’s dispel once and for all with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing.”

Why would he dissent from the Republican Party line that Obama is a clueless incompetent? Obviously, he wasn’t suggesting that Obama has been a good president, since his entire campaign has been dedicated to the proposition that Obama is a disaster. He was suggesting that Obama, despite his relative pre-White House inexperience, has been effective at getting his way. “Barack Obama is undertaking a systematic effort to change this country,” Rubio said. Then he listed some of the ways the president has succeeded in doing that: Obamacare, the $800 billion stimulus, the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill and the nuclear deal with Iran.

What Rubio emphasized, and then emphasized three more times, is that Obama has been catastrophic for America, for Americans, and for the notion of American exceptionalism. “All this damage that he’s done to America is deliberate,” Rubio said. “This is a president who’s trying to redefine this country.” What Rubio did not quite say, but certainly implied, is that Obama’s status as a first-term senator has not prevented him from achieving what he set out to achieve.

Incidentally, Donald Trump was the only candidate who challenged Rubio’s premise, dismissing Obama as a rank incompetent. But whether or not you like what Obama has done, and none of the Republican candidates do, Rubio is correct that he has done an awful lot, transforming U.S. policy not only on health care, economics, financial regulation and Iran, but also on energy, education, taxation, gay rights, Iraq, Cuba and much more. Rubio’s opponents have dismissed him as a Republican version of Obama — charismatic and inspiring but ultimately too young and inexperienced for the job. Rubio was essentially implying, but not quite daring to say out loud, that Republicans need their own version of Obama to reverse what he’s done.

Of course, one thing Obama has done is win two national elections. Rubio’s candidacy has benefited from a widespread belief that he would be the most electable Republican, a Cuban-American from humble roots, a natural politician with a stirring personal story who would look like tomorrow against Hillary Clinton’s yesterday. But that aura of electability took a big hit Saturday night when he started to sound like a broken record and look like an empty suit. He certainly didn’t seem like someone who knew what he was doing.



Rubio goes into repeat mode Marco Rubio went into repetition mode during Saturday night's debate