Jophiel wrote:
Well, ****, it was at the top of a Google search so
here's a cite for Gbaji to pick apart and say it doesn't count and no one ever thought of Rubio as inexperienced and unready until mean ole' Christie picked on poor little Rubio...
You are seriously moving the goalposts here. I was specifically stating that prior to Christie setting this up in the week or so prior to the NH debate, no one was claiming that Rubio was someone who just repeated empty memorized rhetoric and could not speak extemporaneously about a number of political topics. That was the attack on Rubio in the debate, and the attack I was arguing was not true.
That you can find other sources saying that Rubio is inexperienced isn't a surprise at all. But that does not support the specific thing that Christie used to attack Rubio (that he just mindlessly repeats talking points without understanding them). As I've already stated, a couple times even, Rubio's biggest problem going into this race wasn't his ability to speak about issues intelligently, but that he had trouble doing so in a way that sounded polished and professional (or even inspirational) when in a speech or debate setting. Put him in front of an interviewer and he would do very very well. Recall that the biggest hit he suffered prior to this wasn't what he was saying in an interview, but his ill timed gulp of water during the interview. That's not about substance. That's not about being an empty suit. It's about polish.
That was his biggest problem. The irony of which is that he presumably has spent a lot of effort (and coaching) working on his polish, his timing, his delivery, and has become really really good at it. So Christie attacked him for that instead. Which, again, for anyone following Rubio over the last few years, was an absurd attack, but one that works on people who only see him in the debate (or see the clips from the debate played on their TV). It's about attacking the perception of the candidate, and not the reality. Which is what I've been saying all along.
Your citation does not say that Rubio can't speak without a memorized sound bite. Does it? No. I don't think so. Because that's not really a problem for Rubio. Christie just managed to set him up in a debate to make it look that way. Bad on Rubio for not sussing it out ahead of time, but it absolutely does not make Christies attack "true" by any means. Recall that I was responding to a poster who claimed that Rubio was "an empty suit". That's simply not true at all. Call him inexperienced at politics, and especially some of the dirty tricks that politics may involve. But you can't say he doesn't understand the political issues he talks about. An empty suit is someone who just parrots what others have told him to say. That's definitely not Rubio. As I've also said a few times, that's much more something you could level at Cruz. That guy's a walking rhetoric factory.
Edited, Feb 16th 2016 5:40pm by gbaji