Marco Rubio suspended his campaign Tuesday night after a humiliating loss in his home state of Florida. Rubio’s concession speech—notable because Rubio has become known for “victory” addresses after losing primaries and caucuses—was an uncomfortable mix of everything that was wrong in his campaign, which is now thankfully over.
Rubio declared recently that his goal was to stop Trump from becoming the nominee at all costs, but his presence in the race for the past two weeks, well after it was clear that he could not win, surely did nothing except boost Trump’s margins in the other contests tonight. It was typical of a campaign that could never do anything right. From the moment Rubio decided to make immigration his signature issue, enraging much of his base, through the moment that he backtracked from his own bill, proving to the last doubter that he was nothing more than a young man in a hurry, Rubio was never able to strike the right tone.
In his speech Tuesday night he made clear that Donald Trump’s negativity and thuggishness did not represent his preferred approach to his party’s future. But he also committed every sin that he has been accused of committing over the past several months: He was rehearsed, overly polished in his very practiced anger, and laughably dishonest. Ranting about elites in Washington—the same elites who heroically and unsuccessfully kept his campaign on life support for these last few weeks—Rubio once again proved that he could never convincingly play the outsider in an election where GOP voters were craving one.
And the rest of the speech, full as it was of complaints about, say, ungrateful foreigners refusing to credit all of America’s generous good deeds, was a reminder that Rubio’s campaign was a moral failure as well as a political one. The man who criticized Obama for visiting a mosque and used Trumpian fearmongering throughout was not only unable to beat a more authentically angry candidate; he also was unable to bow out with the sort of dignity that losing campaigns sometimes muster. Rubio may have a political future in Florida or in the United States, but he is unlikely to ever be the bright shining political star that so many Republicans thought (and Democrats feared) he could be.
