Buzzfeed’s Mary Coppins has an article on Marco Rubio that is utterly damning because it’ll come up in every debate he’s in moving forward and be used by his opponents in this Presidential race, or if he runs again. You can explain his catastrophic performance in Saturday Night’s Republican Presidential debate in New Hampshire by the fact that he is known to panic under pressure:

Millions of people watched Marco Rubio’s televised tailspin in the opening minutes of last weekend’s Republican presidential debate — but what, exactly, they saw depended on the viewer.
To rivals, Rubio’s reflexive retreat to the same snippet of well-rehearsed rhetoric — over and over, and over, and over again — was proof of the freshman senator’s status as a lightweight. To supporters, the wobbly display was a forgivable fluke, one bad moment blown wildly out of proportion by a bloodthirsty press corps.
But to those who have known him longest, Rubio’s flustered performance Saturday night fit perfectly with an all-too-familiar strain of his personality, 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.
This jittery restlessness has manifested itself throughout Rubio’s life, from high school football games in Miami to high-profile policy fights in Washington — and in some ways, it’s been the driving force in his rapid political rise.

And:

“He just lets these little things get to him, and he worries too much,” a Miami Republican complained after spending close to an hour sitting next to Rubio on a flight as he fretted over a mildly critical process story about him in the National Journal. “I’m just like, ‘Marco, calm down.’”

And:

He scraped, clawed, toiled, shoved, and scrambled for every inch of his political rise — and if he is extra protective of the success he’s achieved, it’s not difficult to understand why.
These days, as he faces a multimillion-dollar bombardment of attack ads and a gaggle of governors bent on taking him down, Rubio’s allies say he is consciously training himself to take setbacks in stride, and to not fuss over every bothersome bit of trivia that appears in the press. He has even developed a mantra of sorts that he repeats whenever one of his aides informs him of a problem: “I’m not worried, man.”
The problem is that voters will be (rightfully) worried that the person who’s finger is on the nuclear trigger could panic. The Persidency is a job of crisis management and unbearable weights, having to make decisions that could have far-reaching consequences.

Repeating a phrase over and over could prove to the least of Rubio’s problems.

His biggest problem could be getting a reputation as someone who doesn’t do well under pressure, can’t think clear enough to get himself out of stress mode, and and who could say (or do) something he might not otherwise do if he was not under pressure and could think clearly.

This Buzzfeed piece won’t influence today’s vote. But you can bet he’ll face questions about this article in future debates — or have one of his opponents cite the story.

What’s sad about this week’s turn of events, is that Rubio had Marcomentum going into New Hampshire — before the debate and after Iowa. Additionally, I’ve met a very large number of people over the past year who are independents or centerist Democrats not in love with Bernie Sanders or who feel Hillary Clinton has a lot of baggage. They all would tell me Rubio is one of the few Republicans seeking the nomination that they could vote for. (Most of them by the way didn’t like how Republicans have exiled moderates and turned “moderate” into a dirty word — a process now going on in the Democratic Party as well where the word “moderate” is emerging as the word to hurl at an opponent.)

Rubio’s problem: one there is a new and old media narrative, comedy writers and comedians writers get ahold of it and it defines the person.
Hot Air’s Allahpundit:

I never, ever would have guessed that Rubio sweats setbacks. More than anyone else, he’s anointed by his fans as the chosen one; he was all of 39 years old when he knocked off a sitting governor in a landslide for a U.S. Senate seat. The impression I’ve always had of him is that he never doubts his ultimate victory because he’s able to talk his way out of anything, including the supposedly career-killing Gang of Eight disaster. He’d be in trouble if voters got a different impression of him, but like I say, how’s that going to happen barring him going into the fetal position during one of the remaining debates? If his team has projected an image of serene confidence as well as they have to this point, there’s no reason to think they’ll fail now.

Mother Jones’ Kevin Drumm:

Excellent! Rubio sounds like a great primary opponent to me. It should take the Clinton machine about 10 seconds to figure out how to turn him into a puddle of mush on the campaign trail. I think I might start rooting for him to get the nomination after all.

JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief

Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.

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