After surveying Marco Rubio's mass of truly dreadful domestic policies and white-knuckle foreign policy fantasies, Matthew Yglesias delivers a most quotable summation, after quoting BuzzFeed's McKay Coppins's reporting:
"To those who have known him longest, Rubio’s flustered performance Saturday night fit perfectly with an all-too-familiar strain of his personality," [writes Coppins], "one that his handlers and image-makers have labored for years to keep out of public view. Though generally seen as cool-headed and quick on his feet, Rubio is known to friends, allies, and advisers for a kind of incurable anxiousness — and an occasional propensity to panic in moments of crisis, both real and imagined."
I sympathize with this a lot. Two or three days before the launch of Vox.com, I succumbed to my personal occasional propensity to panic and was insisting that we had to delay or cancel the debut of the site. The good news is that more levelheaded voices prevailed.
The even better news is that it is extremely unlikely that I am going to become president of the United States. And I like to think that if the possibility did present itself, my friends, allies, and advisers would have the good sense to politely suggest that a "propensity to panic in moments of crisis, both real and imagined" is not a great quality in a chief executive, and that addressing the substantive concern would be a more valuable contribution to the nation than laboring to keep it from public view.
The fortunate upside to all this is that Marco's propensity for terror-stricken panic is perceptible to more than just his let's-keep-this-under-the-carpet friends, allies and advisers. When one watches him in any debate or any interview one shifts uncomfortably in one's chair as he prattles, sweats, muddles, dodges and befogs. Hillary may frequently come across as "inauthentic," but Marco always comes across as a bundle of rattled nerves — as a man who suspects that the next question thrust at him and his half-assed parried response will finally unmask him as a pasted-together prince of ineptitude.
Marco's reputation as a supremely agile politician has always escaped me. Completely. I think I do pretty well in giving political credit where political credit is due, even to the vilest of foes. But Marco's agility? I just don't see it. If any political journalist were to question Marco as Marco should be questioned, the latter would melt into a pool of palsied embarrassment.