Marco Rubio Defends Repeated Attack of President Obama During Republican Debate
“It's what I believe," the GOP presidential candidate said on "This Week."
— -- Florida Sen. Marco Rubio defended repeating an attack he made against President Obama during Saturday's Republican presidential debate, in which he said on four separate occasions that he wanted to dispel the notion the president doesn't know what he's doing.
“It's what I believe and it's what I'm going to continue to say, because it happens to be one of the main reasons why I am running,” Rubio said in an exclusive interview on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos” the morning after the debate.
At Saturday’s debate hosted by ABC News, Rubio said, "And let's dispel once and for all with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn't know what he's doing. He knows exactly what he's doing.”
“Let's dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn't know what he's doing. He knows exactly what he's doing,” Rubio said a second time.
The line drew the ire of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who called it the "memorized, 25-second speech" as Rubio began the remark a third time. Rubio later made a similar remark a fourth time during the debate.
Shown a video of his repeated remarks produced by the Clinton super PAC "Correct the Record," Rubio said he “would pay them to keep running that clip."
“That’s what I believe passionately,” he said. “It's one of the reasons why I'm not running for re-election to the Senate and I'm running for president. This notion and this idea that somehow all this is an accident -- Obamacare was not an accident, Dodd Frank was not an accident, the deal with Iran was not an accident.”
Rubio added his campaign raised more money in the first hour of the debate than he has at previous debates.