The inevitable skit about Marco Rubio on this week’s episode of Saturday Night Live practically writes itself. It will undoubtedly go something like this:
The freshman Republican Senator from Florida, charged with responding on behalf of his party to President Barack Obama’s state of the union address, is really nervous before the cameras go on.
Once the hot lights pop and the cameras start rolling, he gets thirstier and thirstier. This results in a slapstick pastiche of increasingly bizarre nervous ticks and dry mouth antics. A series of escalating water grabs follow: the awkward reach for an off-camera bottle of water; pouring said bottle of water down his gullet; pouring another bottle or two over his head; dunking his head in a bucket of water; perhaps finishing his speech from a shower stall, greedily gulping all the water he can as he gurgles to the audience, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!”
Or something like that. Because Rubio’s “meltdown” on national television last night was instantly iconic.
His incessant cotton mouthing behavior, culminating in his desperate off-camera grab for a bottle of water, followed by a heaving gulp of H2O, is already remembered far more than anything he said during his response to President Obama?
Is that fair? Is that right?
Well, it depends on how you look at these things.
We like to think of our government as being an open and transparent democracy. But of course it’s not. At least not as much as we might think it is or would like it to be. For starters, it’s a republic, not a democracy. Which means the people decide very little beyond having a say in who their rulers are.
That’s the premise of a republic: citizens get to vote for their rulers.
So the actual work of government, the writing of legislation, the formulation of executive policy, even judicial deliberations, all take place behind closed doors. Transparency often comes after the fact, at the signing of a bill or the reading of a verdict and handing down of a sentence.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise then to find that politicians have become very good at separating their public actions from their private actions. The backroom dealing? That’s not for you. But whenever a politician steps in front of a camera? That absolutely is for you.
Government operations largely take place beyond the reach of public purview. What happens in front of microphones and cameras? Those are mostly government presentations. And while the two are certainly related and even overlap, they’re not the same thing.
Politicians frequently present themselves to the voters as a way of building their public image. They take photo ops. They talk about the things they want to do or would never do. They misrepresent what others have done. They share their vision of abstract concepts like “America” and “liberty.”
These forms of presentation are very important to them of course, because many, perhaps most voters do not vote for politicians based on their political records. Rather, they vote for politicians based on more ephemeral feelings.
People often vote for a particular politician because they like him or her more than the other politicians, or because they just hate the other politicians more. 
And those likes and hates generally develop not from largely invisible political activities, but from more general presentations like party affiliation and individual personality.
Politicians both encourage and manipulate the emphasis on presentation over operation. That’s partly because it frees them to take political action away from prying eyes, and because it helps insulate them for criticism about those actions. But it’s also partly because presentation has become so critical to electoral success that politicians have no choice but to play along.
So Marco Rubio is now the butt of countless jokes. Hell, even Marco Rubio’s joking about Marco Rubio. And so we’ll all remember his gaffe far more than anything he said last night during his response to President Obama.
And we could certainly get self-righteous about this, complaining about how superficial it all is. But Rubio’s stumble is merely an opportunity to observe in sharp relief something that is actually Standard Operating Procedure for American politics.
And part of the proof is that the the exact same thing is true of President Obama’s state of the union address.
Think about it. What did the president actually say last night? Most people will remember only a few fragments. They turned off the TV and decided they liked Obama a little bit more than they did before, because his presentation was very well executed, although some people of course will like him less because they don’t like most or any of his presentations, including that one.
But few people are standing around the water cooler this morning debating the various and vague policy proposals the president laid out last night about immigration reform or easing restrictions on gas and oil drilling.
Just like very few people will remember Rubio’s call to lower taxes and reduce the federal deficit.
For both men, last night was not about government operation. It was about political presentation. President Obama did it well, Senator Rubio flubbed it, and that’s what sticks in the short term.
And so complaining that the press and the public have screwed up priorities for focusing on superficial performance instead of substantive policy statements, at least to 
some degree, misses the point.
Politicians don’t want events like last night to be about substantive policy statements. They want it to be about manipulative performance.
It’s fine to say people should demand more. And of course they should. We would have a healthier political system if they did. But don’t blame them for reacting to what politicians serve up.
Demand more of the actors before complaining about the audience.