On Feb. 6, Marco Rubio was embarrassed in a presidential debate in New Hampshire when Chris Christie pointed out that Rubio often repeated canned lines—a point that Rubio compounded by immediately then repeating a canned line. (“Let’s dispel once and for all with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing,” it started.)
It was bad. But tonight, ol’ Marco scored big at the Republican debate in Houston by pointing out—fairly!—that Donald Trump doesn’t seem to know much about any particular issue and tends to repeat the same applause lines over and over. The specific subject being discussed was the idea of increasing competition and (presumably) lowering prices by allowing health insurance companies to sell plans across state lines:
The transcript:
TRUMP: I watched him melt down two weeks ago with Chris Christie, I’ve got to tell you, the biggest problem he’s got is he really don’t know about the lines. The biggest thing we’ve got and the reason we have no competition is because we have lines around the state and you have—
RUBIO: You already mentioned that as part of my plan. I know what that is. What else is part of your plan? The only thing is to get rid of the lines around the states? What else is part of your health care plan?
TRUMP: What the lines around the state means—and it was almost done. Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me.
RUBIO: What’s your plan?
TRUMP: That brings in competition. When you get rid of the lines, it brings in competition. So instead of having one insurance company taking care of New York or Texas, you’ll have many. They’ll compete. And it will be a beautiful thing.
RUBIO: Right and what—so that’s the only part of the plan? Just the lines. The interstate competition?
TRUMP: The nice part about—you have many different plans. You’ll have competition. You’ll have so many different plans.
RUBIO: Now he’s repeating himself. [Ed. note: MEGA-ZING]
TRUMP: No, I’m not—no, no, no, no. No, no, no. I don’t repeat myself. I don’t repeat myself.
The audience cheered and, as illustrated by the picture at the top of this post, Rubio seemed very pleased.
