Quote:I’m more conflicted about whether I overestimated Rubio’s political talent. It’s possible that I exaggerated that talent because I was early to notice it. Back in June 2009, when Rubio was running 30 points behind then-Republican Governor Charlie Crist in his long-shot race for Senate, I followed him on the campaign trail in Florida and wrote a story about how “he electrified the crowds with eloquent arguments for tea-party principles.” It was clear the GOP base loved him as much as it hated mushy-moderate Crist. 

That’s why I thought Rubio made so much sense for the GOP in 2016; he was the quintessential modern Republican. He stood for almost everything Mitt Romney stood for—massive tax cuts, muscular foreign policy, social conservatism—but while Romney, a former Massachusetts moderate, spoke Republican as a second language, Rubio was fluent.

I still believe that in the kind of primary that most of us expected, Rubio would have been a formidable candidate, a tea partier who would have been acceptable to the establishment as a house-trained alternative to Ted Cruz. Even in the crazy-town primary that actually happened, Rubio drubbed Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Rick Perry, Chris Christie, and other would-be Republican saviors. Sure, immigration would have been a problem for him in the primary no matter what, but not an insurmountable problem; Romney was the father of Obamacare, and he still became the nominee. And Rubio’s immigration flirtation could have helped him in the general; even Tuesday, polls showed he could have beaten Hillary Clinton.

Rubio’s debate malfunction happened right before the New Hampshire primary, and it might have dropped him from second to fifth. If he had finished second, he might have emerged as the dominant alternative to Trump and Cruz, knocking out Bush and John Kasich before South Carolina. And then, well, who knows? It’s not crazy to think that he could have united the party. Politicians always look hapless after they lose, and their campaigns are inevitably portrayed as hopelessly misguided exercises in dysfunction, but 16 of the 17 Republican candidates had to lose, and Rubio almost didn’t.

Quote:It’s not unusual for people to get extensions on filing their federal income taxes; millions do it each year. Yet the IRS requires that they pay their annual taxes -- or a reasonable estimate of them -- by the normal deadline in mid-April or face penalties and interest on any overdue amounts. Rubio has paid such penalties in six of the last seven years, totaling more than $23,000, according to his partial tax returns. The penalty and interest for 2012 represent almost half that total.

Quote:Republican presidential hopeful Marco Rubio, whose chances of winning the GOP nomination may rest on a contested convention, repeatedly said he opposed such a measure during the 2012 race, CNN is reporting. "The primary's over, I mean, by the admission of the candidates who have admitted they can't win the primary," Rubio said in an interview in 2012. "They've said the only way they can win is at a floor fight in Tampa. And I think that a floor fight in Tampa would be the worst possible thing we can do in terms of winning in November."

Quote:MSNBC's Chris Matthews accuses the Marco Rubio campaign of putting plants in the CNN Republican debate audience to "squeal" and clap enthusiastically "every single time" Rubio said anything. Matthews called it the "most unnatural, phony thing in the world." "I hope people when they watch this know this was all choreographed. It was all part of a P.R. operation," Matthews said Thursday night.