Years ahead of a Presidential election season, major news organizations run articles about the futures of the parties, those candidates who may someday be king because of a demographic trend or quirk of history. It’s almost always a fool’s errand because predicting politics so many news cycles away usually makes a mockery of the messenger. And you never know how someone, no matter how good they look in a mirror or on paper, will respond to the trail, a bruising, unforgiving thing–a microscope, a cudgel. For every Barack Obama, there are many Fred Thompsons, Chris Christies and Bobby Jindals.

The New York Times Magazine, which has played this handicapping game–Mark Warner, anyone?–assigned the great writer Mark Leibovich the task of penning the postmortem of the latest can’t-miss prospect who did just that, Marco Rubio, the “choirboy rebel” whose progress (and regress) he’s followed for six years. A Republican Party looking to make inroads with Hispanic voters was supposed to embrace the Great Not-Exactly-White Hope with the conservative bona fides, but while Mom and Dad just adored him, the other kids clearly did not. The piece was published a couple of days before the Florida primary, but by then the sun had gone down.

The opening:

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 theNevada 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.

Suddenly the plane hit a patch of nasty turbulence. It started bouncing and shaking, as if we were flying through a blender.•