‘Morning Joe’: Rubio’s Debate Line About Obama Made Him Appear ‘Robotic’

RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
SCARBOROUGH: "Well, let me ask you, Mark. Why did he keep repeating the same lines over and over again."
HALPERIN: "That’s a line from his stump speech. It’s a line he relies on to frame the election but I’ve never seen anything like in the my career to repeat the line and Chris Christie, who planned for weeks to hit him that night, he couldn’t have possibly imagined that it would work out as well as it did."
SCARBOROUGH: "Couldn’t have asked for a better night. Christie accused Marco Rubio making the same speech, I’m in the front of the room, my father is in the back of the room, for six years, he’s been saying that for like a decade. Frank luntz and they focused Marco Rubio while he was running for speaker. The Florida state party gave luntz $45,000, it’s in the public records, and he created this narrative and Marco Rubio has been repeating the same thing, John Heilemann, for ten years, you would just expect not to repeat the same lines from the same ten-year-old speech four times in a debate."
HEILEMANN: "Well, there’s two things about this. Someone that that’s obviously an intensely focused group line. They think that line works. So that’s why he uses it. Why he used it four times in that debate, it’s a little baffling, as mark said. But I think the problem that arises from it is that I reinforces the suspicions of native caricatures that are out there about Marco Rubio. Some people think he’s programmed, robotic, that he’s --"
BRZEZINSKI: "It’s kind of all you could see all night."
HEILEMANN: "So the worst kind of mistake you can make is the mistake that reinforces the existing caricature."
SCARBOROUGH: "Well, you know, I mean, Mike, that’s what we’ve been saying or at least I’ve been saying more aggressively on this show about six months is that he’s robotic, programmatic, and the Rubio campaign has been whining about that and trying to spread stories around to reporters saying “He doesn’t like us.” I said he looks at times like he’s running for president and he certainly did that night and it wasn’t personal. But what I said for six months —"
BRZEZINSKI: "Well, you’re being accused of —"
SCARBOROUGH: "-- was exposed during this debate."
BARNICLE: "He proved those themes Saturday night. I’m with mark on this. I never seen an event, never mind a debate, a rally up here, I’ve never seen one where one incident, that exchange between Christie and Rubio is the incident, froze the race and defined one of the candidate, Marco Rubio. John and I were with Chris Christie yesterday afternoon in New Hampshire and we were talking to him about the night before and he said something, he said, you know, like Mike Tyson said, everybody has a plan until they get hit in the face."
SCARBOROUGH: "Until they get hit in the face."