By Charles P. Pierce

Let us now speak of the women of the House of Representatives. Madame Speaker is a demonstrably brilliant legislative leader and a thoroughgoing badass. I mean, we have video. Let’s just take all that as a given and move on to some of her colleagues who were in the news this week.

Have you ever seen a broken man? Have you ever seen the personification of gloom and doom and grim metaphorical death? Have you ever seen anyone leave the debate stage in an emotional body bag? Let me introduce you to Sen. Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida.

On Tuesday night, he got tangled up with Rep. Val Demings, his Democratic opponent, and Demings fed him into a wood chipper. Time and again, she brought the righteous fire, and time and again Rubio just stood there, caught in a kind of vacant sadness in which he seemed to be flashing back to the night in 2012 when he came to Tampa and delivered a well-received keynote address at what may turn out to be the last marginally sane Republican National Convention. That was enough to mark him as The Future—or, as Time put it on the cover, \"The Republican Savior\"....

So here was Demings, cranking the blades up to 11 and summoning all the old monsters of memory, including a clear view of the ruins of his once-promising career. Small wonder Rubio looked throughout as though he was attending his own sentencing hearing. He still may win. In fact, that’s the way to bet at the moment. But his politics have become bitter, soulless, and, yes, small. There’s no coming back from that.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a41712603/val-demings-marco-rubio-debate/