Rubio Is Robotic, but Not Out of It

(New York Times) - Don’t blame message discipline for Marco Rubio’s lightning-fast collapse from triumphant in Iowa to disappointed in New Hampshire. Even his opponents chalked up the I, Robot routine in Saturday’s debate to message discipline. But that’s a smear against one of the most effective tools any candidate has in his campaign arsenal. Mr. Rubio stumbled because he took the practice to an absurd extreme.

I was a White House communications director to President George W. Bush and a communications adviser to Senator John McCain in his 2008 campaign. I was often cast as the Message Enforcer. A strong message delivered with conviction by a credible messenger can instantly shift a politician from defense to offense. President Bush was an extremely effective messenger against Senator John Kerry in 2004. He spoke with clarity, and he stuck to a belief system that he repeated often enough that he was understood by voters who agreed with him — and even those who did not. That was a strategic advantage over Mr. Kerry’s verbose explanations for his votes in the Senate and positions on foreign policy.

Master communicators such as Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy and Tony Blair were able to move from a challenge to a strong defense of their point of view in a way that was dynamic and convincing. If you go back and watch some of their public addresses and debate performances, it never feels like you’re watching someone pull a memory file from his brain and recite it on auto repeat as Mr. Rubio appeared to do last weekend.

But it wasn’t just the disastrous debate that doomed Mr. Rubio’s chances for finishing close behind Donald J. Trump in New Hampshire. Between Saturday’s debate and Primary Day Tuesday, he doubled down on the performance, defending his repetition and one-liners. “I would pay for them to keep running that clip, because that’s what I believe passionately,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”

This was Mr. Rubio’s second mistake. Voters punish politicians more harshly for refusing to acknowledge a mistake than they do for the original gaffe. People need to know that you understand how bad things look. They’re more likely to let it go if you simply agree with a universal verdict that something didn’t go as planned. Mr. Rubio’s failure to do this cost him credibility with the voters and wasted valuable time in the days before the New Hampshire vote.

But the most serious of his self-inflicted wounds over the past 72 hours is that his performance furthered the charge from his opponents that he lacks the depth and knowledge to win in November. This is the weakness with the greatest chance of derailing the senator from Florida’s candidacy. It’s the criticism most often leveled at him in private and, increasingly, in public.

Mr. Rubio can recover. Read more.