Senator Marco Rubio had a big night on Tuesday, but he’s gotten a whole lot more buzz for grabbing a sip of water than for anything else he said in his official Republican rebuttal to the president’s State of the Union address.
The sip lit up twitter, bringing in 92,000 tweets a minute, and the hashtags “watergate” and “Poland Spring” started trending.
Rubio gets credit for joining the joke instead of fighting it, via twitter:
#GOPResponse #SOTU #gop #tcot twitter.com/marcorubio/sta…
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 13, 2013
By Wednesday afternoon, he was bragging about all the new followers it got him.
Picked up over 13,000 new followers on #twitter since last night! Im going to start drinking #water in the middle of all of my speeches!
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 13, 2013
Rev. Al Sharpton took a moment out of Wednesday’s show to poke a little fun at what many are now calling Rubio’s “watergate,” grabbing his own over-sized water bottle to wash down the story.
But as Sharpton said last night, Rubio’s performance belonged at the Apollo’s famous amateur hour, and not just because of the swig of Poland Spring. On the week he’s being heralded by Time magazine as a Republican Savior, Rubio delivered a speech with a lackluster, recycled agenda.
The man who’s been called the anti-Mitt Romney gave a speech chock-full of phrases we heard from Romney,everything from “Rising taxes won’t create jobs” to “more government won’t help.”
Ultimately, the number of issues he failed to address is longer than the list of those he did address. That’s why we’re calling this one, a swig and a miss.
Morgan Whitaker