Until last night I’d not bothered to watch any of the televised presidential campaign “debates” from either party. I just haven’t cared enough to listen to what I know will be repeated thousands of times between now and November. Besides, I’m an independent in a caucus state. I’ll have no say on the candidates until then.
But last night, tired of the wall-to-wall Super Bowl coverage we’re getting here in Denver, I had the Republican debate on in the background while working on my laptop. And because I wasn’t paying close attention, I thought at first I’d missed something when I heard Marco Rubio repeat himself. Once? Twice? Maybe it was a replay or something …
Nope. Rubio did repeat himself, virtually verbatim, four different times in the course of the evening. (Actually that would be an initial statement with three repetitions.)
Until now I’d mostly thought of Rubio as that glib young Republican who reached so awkwardly for a water bottle during his response to Obama’s State of the Union address in 2013. Couldn’t get that image out of my head. Well, it’s gone now. It’s been replaced by Mr. Roboto.