Is Marco Rubio looking to add “comedian” to his resume? Rubio, the media darling who has been endlessly touted in a stream of fluff pieces about how he is going to catch fire with voters any minute now, how his second- and third-place finishes were victories, how he was absolutely gaining steam this time, is blaming the media for Donald Trump’s success:
The media’s pumping him up as some sort of unstoppable force. Donald Trump has portrayed himself now consistently as fighting for the working people. And he has a record of sticking it to working people for 35 years. If any other candidate in this race had his record, there would be nonstop reporting on it. Unfortunately he’s being pumped up because many in the media with a bias know that he’ll be easy to beat in a general election.
Let’s talk about the media. We’ve watched the media grant a Rubio adviser anonymity to talk about what an amazing Christian he is. We’ve watched him repeatedly paint third place as a victory with the media’s cooperation. We’ve read story after story about how he was starting to surge. Yes, Donald Trump has gotten an absurd amount of media coverage—but there, the reason is clear. Trump is good for ratings. And the media hasn’t been propping him up consistently as they have been Rubio. There have been any number of points, from his comments last summer about John McCain to the last debate, when the media narrative was that Trump was in trouble.
Meanwhile, until Thursday night, Rubio’s big plan to deal with Trump was to ignore him and hope he imploded on his own. But now it’s the media’s fault?
As Greg Sargent points out:
Making this more absurd still, both Rubio and Cruz had explicitly deflected the pressure on them to shelve their Trump avoidance strategy and get serious about engaging Trump by…blaming the media. The other day, after Trump won big in Nevada and the pressure on Rubio to get tougher on him intensified, Rubio dismissed the chatter as nothing more than a “craving in the media for people to attack each other.” Now that Rubio has decided that a Trump win is a genuine possibility, probably due in part to his own reluctance to go after him earlier, he’s trying to blame this failing on the media while simultaneously calling in the media cavalry to help with the rescue operation.
But it’s Marco Rubio. Can the media quit propping him up, even as he blames them for his own abundant shortcomings? We’ll see.
