Jophiel wrote:
It's not a "debate trick" that Rubio couldn't think on his feet and break loose from his talking points. The first time maybe is a "gotcha" -- the next two unforced errors are just sloppy amateurish mistakes. Christie didn't make Rubio keep repeating the same lines verbatim; he just pointed it out.
Well, yeah. He kinda did. All candidates have memorized responses to different questions or challenges. It's part of the debate prep, and generally makes the difference between a politician who looks polished and one who's standing at the podium stammering "uh... Ah..." while trying to form the words for an answer. This is normally not an issue because usually the same question or challenge does not come up more than once or twice in a debate. Someone asks a question or call you out on something, you give your prepared answer, and the debate moves on. Usually, what you're trying to do in a debate is cover as much ground as possible so as to find something that the other guy hasn't prepped on, so you can make him do the "um... ah..." thing.
What Christie did is ask the same question 5 times (technically, made the same allegation that Rubio isn't a good choice because he is just a first term Senator, and Obama was, and look how that worked out). Rubio's answer was to that specific allegation. What he didn't catch, which is totally on him, is that Christie would repeat the same allegation several times, to which Rubio gave the same response, not realizing that this was the "trick" Christie was playing.
What Rubio should have done on repetition 3, when Christie made the point that Rubio was repeating the same canned response, was that he is giving the same response because Christie keeps repeating the same false allegation. Perhaps follow it up with speculation as to why Christie might do this. Maybe he didn't hear or understand the response the first 2 times, but I'll give it to you again, and if you ask the same question again, well... What do we say about people who keep doing the same thing and expecting different results? This points the audience's attention at Christie repeating the same question, and away from Rubio repeating the same answer, and at that point forward, if Christie does it again, you just deflect by pointing out that *he's* "doing it again".
His inexperience was not realizing what Christie was doing and turning it around. That's bad on him. But that does not change the fact that what Christie did was basically single Rubio out for doing something that every other candidate does. They all have canned statements that they make. Over and over. These are phrases and paragraphs that they put into their stump speeches. They modify these over time based on crowd response. It's part of polishing your message. Everyone does it. Any reporter could play a loop of stump speeches and hang this on any candidate in the race if they wanted to.
But yes, perception is reality, and that's what Rubio got wrong. Again, doesn't change that Christie was playing a bit dirty with that one, and frankly he didn't help himself. He just hurt Rubio and further muddled the race.
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Rubio was supposed to use the momentum from this state to push to win S. Carolina with the mainstream GOP backing him. He flubbed that and faceplanted, pretty much ruining his immediate chances. People were cautious about backing him before and no one is going to rush to do it now.
Yup. This was Christie pulling another Sandy. Doing something that he thought was good for him, but ultimately is bad for the party. Eh... Again though, this is probably a lesson that Rubio needs to learn. Then again, it's quite possible that had Christie done this to anyone in the field, they might have fallen for it too. Hard to say. Bush? Maybe not. Cruz? Almost certainly. That man's a walking bumper sticker. Trump? Probably not, since he mostly just fires from the hip anyway. Carson? Absolutely. Kasich? Probably. Point being that this was an attack that likely would have worked on anyone it's used on. Once. And Christie chose to use it at the moment that would most result in further stretching out the process of the GOP support flowing to a mainstream candidate, and probably increasing significantly the odds that Trump becomes the nominee.
And along the way, he didn't help himself at all. So... dumb move.
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The bigger concern is Trump. New Hampshire was supposed to show him to be a paper tiger when his real support was far under his polling support. Instead, he's cleaning everyone's clocks at the polls.
Eh. It's New Hampshire though. Yes, I know that conventionally it's pretty accurate at determining eventual nominees, but that's when the field consists of folks all within some range of "mainstream". I suspect that there's a fair amount of nutty independent voters there that will leap to someone outside that mainstream if it comes along. They just don't normally get the chance to do that. I don't think the same works in SC, or NV, or most of the states coming up. At least, I hope to god not.
Well see though. What is that old saying/curse? "May you live in interesting times".