In his rebuttal to Pres. Obama’s State of the Union speech last night, Florida GOP Sen. Marco Rubio delivered the worst political performance on the national stage since, well, Oct. 3 — and the worst GOP rebuttal since Louisiana GOP Gov. Bobby Jindal unintentionally imitated Kenneth the Page on “30 Rock” when he delivered the rebuttal to the president’s first address to Congress in February 2009.
Jindal’s cringe-inducing performance stalled his ascendancy in national politics. Rubio’s performance last night should be doing the same right now. Viewers who may have been introduced to Florida’s junior senator last night saw a superannuated frat boy who appeared to be wearing a bigger man’s suit reading a speech that was alternately smarmy and snarky in a manner that somehow managed to be both rocky and flat.
Content-wise, Rubio, who was labeled the Republicans’ “savior” by Time Magazine on its most recent cover and who is routinely described as the umpteenth reincarnation of Ronald Reagan, offered up an address that was heavy on tired Romneyesque attacks, lies and flip-flops and devoid of Reagan’s smooth and sunny optimism. On behalf of his party, Rubio doubled down on trickle-down economics, which has been demonstrably and repeatedly discredited; lied about the Affordable Care Act; rebutted things the president hadn’t said in his speech; and flip-flopped on Medicare, praising it in one breath because it helped his parents and then endorsing the GOP plan to kill it and replace it with vouchers in the next.
The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, for one, noticed that Rubio “seemed parched, shaky and sweaty, rubbing his face and at one point lunging off-camera to grab a bottle of water.” But most of the Beltway media went soft on the front of the speech, probably in order to justify slamming him for the infamous water-bottle moment.
The production values for the rebuttal were awful. And while the brocaded draperies borrowed from Liberace’s dressing room and the spotlight aimed straight up his nostrils were not Rubio’s fault, they put a strictly-from-cable-access veneer on what was at its core an amateurish performance.
