OUCH: A Marco Rubio montage repeating same Obama line 5 times

The answer points to one of Marco Rubio’s biggest vulnerability-his youth and relative inexperience, which recall none other than the one-time presidential candidate Barack Obama. The latter three didn’t log the most time during the debate on Saturday, but they all delivered solid, effective turns onstage – conveying a palpable need to do well in the upcoming New Hampshire primary.

Since the Florida senator recited the same line four times, even as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie excoriated him for his reliance on soundbites, polls indicate his support cratering and donors who had been primed to go all in for him holding off just a little longer. The morning after the debate, Rubio told George Stephanopoulos of his weird repetitions, “I would pay them to keep running that [debate] clip because that’s what I believe passionately”.

“Why do you want to put me back in the closet?” he asked, a reference to Rubio’s opposition to marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples.

Amid the jokes, Matthew Yglesias at Vox highlights the potential danger for Rubio: “There’s very little distinguishing Rubio from, say, Jeb Bush except for the perception that Rubio is dynamic and charismatic whereas Bush is lame”.

Seemingly determined to prove Christie right, Rubio offered those canned denunciations of President Obama with comical regularity.

Making a strong argument focused on electability, Rubio maintains that “Hillary Clinton doesn’t want to run against me”.

“We are heading to South Carolina, Nevada and beyond”. “I know how to come from behind”, he added. Make no mistake: We are going to win this nomination. He had to move clear across the country to Las Vegas to look for work, and the job he finally found, after 20 years as a bartender who’d finally moved his way up a bit, had him starting from scratch again as a busboy.

That message changed somewhat just after the debate when he then stated he would sign restrictions with rape exceptions, saying, “I know that the majority of Americans don’t agree with me…And that’s why any law that passed will nearly certainly have exceptions. And if you disagree you should have the law changed by a legislature”, said Rubio. Friend, this is our chance to ensure that doesn’t happen. “And I’ll sign it”. It’s not about me, it’s not about this campaign, it is about this election.

“You’re number one to us, Marco!” one supporter yelled.