(REUTERS/Carlo Allegri)
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) struggled to fend off attacks from a Republican field that largely aimed its fire at the senator during the final Republican presidential debate ahead of Tuesday's New Hampshire primaries.
Rubio has been surging in New Hampshire following a stronger-than-expected third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses. But the full spectrum of political opinions appeared to agree afterward that Rubio had a rough night during the ABC-hosted affair.
The left-leaning Huffington Post blared on its front page: "MARCOBOT MALFUNCTIONS," a reference to his supposedly "canned," talking-point answers. Bill Kristol, the conservative editor of The Weekly Standard, said on the network that the debate "damaged him."
James Fallows, The Atlantic's national correspondent, proclaimed Rubio's debate performance the "most self-destructive" in decades. The right-leaning Drudge Report declared that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) "knock[ed] Rubio off balance."
That was a reference to Rubio's first perceived stumble of the night. It came during an early, five-minute exchange with Christie, who seemed eager to get days' worth of campaign-trail feuding out into the open. Rubio tripped up by pivoting four times to a rehearsed line about President Barack Obama, a moment that quickly went viral.
Christie, making perhaps a do-or-die stand in New Hampshire, reamed the freshman senator as inexperienced. He suggested Rubio presented many of the same potential problems as Obama, who was also a first-term senator upon his election in 2008.
After Rubio was pressed to name his accomplishments in the US Senate, Christie pounced.
"You have not been involved in a consequential decision where you had to be held accountable. You just simply haven't," Christie told Rubio.
"I like Marco Rubio. And he's a smart person and a good guy. But he simply doesn't have the experience to be president of the United States," he added.
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Rubio and Christie.
The two candidates proceeded to exchange barbs over each other's records and political character. But Christie seemed to notice the common element in Rubio's responses when he argued that Obama, despite his inexperience, knows "exactly what he's doing."
"Let's dispel with his fiction that Barack Obama doesn't know what he's doing," Rubio said. "He knows exactly what he's doing. He is trying to change this country."
In his response, Christie began pointing at Rubio and accusing him of rehearsed, scripted lines.
"You see everybody, I want the people at home to think about this," he said. "That's what Washington, DC, does: The drive-by shot at the beginning with incorrect and incomplete information. And then the memorized, 25-second speech that is exactly what his advisers gave him."