President Obama must really like Marco Rubio ... praising him on immigration like that!

If you were a sitting president and wanted to help put a nail in the coffin of a GOP presidential hopeful, which issue would you pick to saddle them with? Immigration, perhaps?

Here's President Obama speaking Wednesday to L.A. Times White House correspondent Christi Parsons about the 2013 immigration reform effort: 

I stayed out of it so that I would not be polarizing. You had Republicans over in the Senate working with Democrats to negotiate something -- Dick Durbin was involved with this; a young man named Marco Rubio was deeply involved in it -- they get a bipartisan bill, it passed by a bipartisan vote, but then this reaction from the base that had been stirred up kills it. And that's when we start taking executive action.

Nice! Rubio, of course, ran away from that bill as fast as he could once he got a whiff of the conservative backlash headed his way. Immigration advocates despise him for it. But when it comes to the GOP’s right-wing base, no time like the present to wax nostalgic about Rubio’s “bipartisan” immigration effort.