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Marco Rubio was battling the flu, his sheen not quite right, occasional splutters interrupting the delivery of his text. Something was off with his microphone, causing the volume to go down when he turned to one side.

Rather than following his speech with a friendly game of softball, as Ted Cruz did the previous day in a question-and-answer session with Fox News's Sean Hannity, he was subjected to a relatively hard-hitting interview by CNN's Dana Bash.

The saving grace for the first-term Florida Senator, during his appearance on Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), was that there were lots of his supporters among the annual convention's thousands of delegates. So his address, consisting largely of thinly veiled shots at Donald Trump for offering populist anger in place of principled conservatism, drew loud cheers in the right places. Considering circumstances otherwise seemed to be conspiring against him, he did fine.

But fine, at this point, is not good enough – not when Mr. Rubio's chances of becoming the Republican presidential nominee are in free fall. The same day he spoke at CPAC, four states held a presidential primary or caucus, and Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz smoked him in each one; Puerto Rico, on Sunday, offered just his second win in 20 tries. Polls show him trailing in his home state, which votes next week. He needs to change minds about his appeal as a candidate, not just preach to the choir, as he acknowledged in his speech he was doing.

But to watch Mr. Rubio is to get some sense why, despite the youthfulness and second-generation immigrant success story and other attributes supposed to make him a contender, Republican voters are having such a hard time warming to him even as the party's establishment implores them to do so.

There is, for starters, the scriptedness. If Mr. Trump has proven anything this year, it's that many voters are looking for someone who can purport to tell it like it is without sounding like a typical politician. Mr. Cruz came a little closer to that during his CPAC speech, delivering ad libs as he paced the stage, stumping in his preacher's cadence. It could not have been clearer that Mr. Rubio, who reportedly once stopped a major speech mid-sentence when he realized a page of his prepared notes was missing, had rehearsed virtually every word.

Beyond that, there is something more substantive. In a race that has become about traditional Republicans being under siege from extremist outsiders, Mr. Rubio is caught betwixt and between, offering little cause for anyone out in the real world to rally around him.

If you want something akin to the (now) relatively moderate conservative of recent Republican nominees – or for that matter even Ronald Reagan, whose legacy will be inaccurately invoked by the presidential candidates even more than usual following Nancy Reagan's death on Sunday – Mr. Rubio is not the man for you.

He is, in current form, not substantively more liberal on immigration than Mr. Trump; he is at least as socially conservative as Mr. Cruz on matters such as same-sex rights and abortion. He is the most hawkish of the candidates on foreign policy. Asked by Ms. Bash on Saturday about Mr. Trump's pledge to use worse forms of torture than waterboarding, his only criticism was that the government shouldn't telegraph in advance to terror suspects what it intends to do to them.

But if you want something radical and angry, in reaction to the alleged sins of Barack Obama or the Republican establishment or the plight of struggling middle-class Americans, Mr. Rubio apparently isn't your guy either. Some of that is the slickness of his presentation. A lot of it seems to be about his past flirtation with amnesty for illegal immigrants. The embrace of the party establishment, once Jeb Bush flopped as a candidate, has probably done him more harm than good, encouraging talk-radio hosts to spend a lot of time lately ripping into him.

His immigrant roots and intermittent openness on immigration were once supposed to attract Hispanic support, but he appears to have joined the rest of the field in more or less giving up on that demographic. Back when he got to Washington he was supposed to be a smiling front-man for the Tea Party, but Mr. Cruz's Tea Party credentials are more impeccable and that crowd isn't really too hung up on an affable demeanour.

Civility was his calling-card through much of this campaign, relative to the boorish Mr. Trump and the aggressively antagonistic Mr. Cruz, but he tossed that away with desperation attacks on Mr. Trump that included implying he has a small penis. His main offer relative to his opponents is reduced to looking more presidential, and giving the vague impression that if elected he would conform more to the norms and traditions of the Oval Office.

That last bit might be enough, given the other choices, for a certain type of Republican overrepresented at CPAC. Whereas casually dressed or elaborately costumed delegates from small-town middle America or the South tended to be behind Mr. Cruz, there was a certain type of clean-cut young conservative – predominantly from big cities or college campuses, sometimes interning for a conservative think tank or magazine – who could be counted upon to dutifully express support for Mr. Rubio.

Such people were enough to help give the illusion during his CPAC speech that his message is finding a receptive audience, and to get him to a decent second-place showing in the convention's annual straw poll. In Louisiana and Maine and Kansas and Kentucky, where the votes that day actually mattered, it was a different story. The sorts of people who don't travel across the country to attend political conferences, who need some inspiration to get out the door and vote for a candidate, weren't listening.

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