Sen. Marco Rubio stayed on message at Saturday night’s debate. Give him that. The problem was that he left millions of Americans wondering if ABC’s broadcast was repeating.
Attempting to execute a strategy of avoiding clashing with his Republican rivals while casting himself as the candidate best positioned to challenge Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, Rubio pivoted to a prepared riff on President Obama.
“Let’s dispel once and for all with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Rubio said. “He knows exactly what he’s doing. Barack Obama is undertaking a systematic effort to change this country, to make America more like the rest of the world.”
“That’s why he passed Obamacare and the stimulus and Dodd-Frank and the deal with Iran. It is a systematic effort to change America,” Rubio said. “When I’m president of the United States, we are going to re-embrace all the things that made America the greatest nation in the world.”
Minutes later, Rubio said nearly the exact same thing. Then he said it again, and again.
The effort became surreal when New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie dismissed Rubio as an inexperienced speechmaker with a knack for repeating the same “memorized 30-second speech where you talk about how great America is at the end. It doesn’t solve one problem.”
Rubio responded briefly before pivoting back to that very soundbite.
“Here’s the bottom line,” he said. “This notion that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing is just not true. He knows exactly what he’s doing …”
“There it is,” Christie interupted to laughter from the audience. “There it is. The memorized 25-second speech. There it is, everybody.”
Rubio’s total times repeating the talking point eventually reached five. The Florida senator drew widespread mockery online, but there’s no denying he got his point across.
