Death by one thousand cuts . . .

The End of Marco-mentum

. . . the Marco Rubio story.

"The last time I saw Marco Rubio in person, he seemed to be on the verge of inheriting the charred Republican earth. It was Feb. 22, the day before the Nevada caucuses. We were aboard Rubio’s campaign plane, flying from Reno, Nev., to Las Vegas. Rubio is 44, but he can sometimes come off like an overgrown and hyperactive boy, jiggling his leg when he is otherwise still. He seemed to be in a sunny mood.

“This was a great day for us,” said Rubio, who had not yet resorted to making pee-pee jokes about the Donald. At the time, consensus was building among the pundit geniuses (whose consensuses are, of course, always correct) that Rubio was now the preferred alternative to Donald J. Trump.

As Rubio crisscrossed Nevada with his retinue of local dignitaries — Nevada’s lieutenant governor and a former governor, a congressman and a senator — it seemed as if every hour brought another endorsement from another vintage piece of the Republican furniture: Orrin Hatch, Bob Dole, a senator from Indiana, the governor of Arkansas. The night before at a rally in North Las Vegas, Rubio strode, chest out, onto a stage crowded with validators — 17 of them in all. They included a casino’s buffet of Nevada pols, someone from a reality TV show called “Pawn Stars” and Donnie Wahlberg: once a New Kid on the Block, now a lapsed golden boy who was going all in for Marky Marco."

And every one of those endorsements was a cut, not deep mind you, but a cut. It's not the first cut or even the first 100 cuts which cause the problem, but its is the cumulative numbers. Here with America in its current state, the voters are no longer interested in more President Feckless ODither, or the next Republican Democrat Slayer. The electorate wants revenge on their own party's elite for failing to make even an attempt to implement the simplest party planks.

Rubio had life while Bush remained the Republican Establishment/Elite candidate. But after Bush took his powder, the Republican money, the power brokers, and the elite all thought Rubio might be their last great hope, and so jumped to his ship, surely sinking it.

The voters want blood, elite Republican blood, and to the extent Rubio appears associated with the elite, the voters will willingly accept his blood. 

By my calculation he is about at cut 997, and yet he persists. By Tuesday there seems no doubt he will finally run into number 1000.