Rubio’s death spiral
by digby
This is just getting embarrassing now:
Marco Rubio has found the bottom of the Republican field just two weeks after making a strong move to try to rise to the top of it.
After finishing second in South Carolina and Nevada, the Florida senator took off the gloves and directly challenged Donald Trump, first on the debate stage and then in a zinger-filled series of campaign stops in which he hammered the front-runner as a “con artist” unfit for the White House and even mocked his “spray tan.”
But Rubio failed to pick up a single delegate in Mississippi or Michigan on Tuesday, placing dead last with single digits in both states and disappointing the elite Republicans who rallied to his side as a way to block Trump from winning the nomination. He placed a distant third in Idaho and Hawaii.
The poor performance also raised doubts about whether Rubio could win his crucial home state of Florida at a time when he desperately needs to start winning. The March 15 winner-take-all contest awards 99 delegates and is one of the best chances to stop Trump from gathering the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination.
They’e going to blame it on his inexplicable decision to throw himself over a cliff and try to out-insult Trump but the truth is that he was toast after that New Hampshire debate glitch. He hadn’t been burning up the polling up until then but he’d escaped from the establishment pile-up ad could, at least, have been in Kasich’s position. But that thing he did was so weird that it permanently tarred him. It was an epic campaign moment.
Some day Rubio may overcome it. But at the moment he will be remembered for three things and two of them happened on national TV with many millions of people watching: that weird water thing after the State of the Union and the robot glitch in the debate. Unfortunately, the other one is that he made a joke about the size of Donald Trump’s “hands.”
These are not big things and certainly shouldn’t knock him out of politics. (His throwback policies should.) But they might. Sometimes a politician is just “off” and people can tell. I suspect Rubio is one of those guys.
Adios.
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