An American Bridge staffer trolls Rubio at a campaign stop in Londonderry, New Hampshire.Russ Choma
Following last night’s debate, when Marco Rubio seemed to experience a malfunction as he uttered the same line four times, Democratic activists were gleefully awaiting Florida’s junior senator this morning to say “Domo origato Marco Roboto!”
Dressed in cardboard and tinfoil robot costumes, two reps from Democratic super-PAC American Bridge greeted Rubio fans at his first rally of the day, a pancake breakfast in Londonderry, New Hampshire. The two Rubio-bots handed out broken gaskets and mechanically repeated barbs about Rubio’s repetition of the line, “Let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing.” As Rubio sparred with Chris Christie during last night’s debate, the New Jersey governor finally called him out for reciting the same talking point. “There it is,” Christie bellowed. “The memorized 25-second speech.” By night’s end, the Rubio-as-robot-meme was born.
“We weren’t planning to do any stunts, but Chris Christie gave us a good idea,” said one of the bots, Kevin McAllister, deputy communications director for the super-PAC. “We could all see last night that Marco Roboto has lots of talking points but there’s not a lot of substance.”
Rubio’s staff eventually shooed the robots off, but as they left an angry Rubio fan stomped past with his own repetitious message: “Why don’t you do something positive? You’re a loser. A loser.”
