Drudge has busted out the red font for the occasion, which I guess makes this officially “news.” I wonder who it’ll be. The guy who just fired his campaign manager and started laying off staffers? The guy who struggles to win among electorates that aren’t heavily evangelical and who may well end up dropping his own home state? Or the guy with a prohibitive lead in delegates, who won Rubio’s home state in a landslide, and who’s better positioned than anyone else in America right now to make him vice president of the United States?

Here’s your thread if you’re watching. Although it’s a foregone conclusion that he’s backing Romney, this is news simply because Rubio’s star shines brighter than any other young Republican’s on the national landscape. It’s a signal to grassroots conservatives that the war is over and it’s time to fall in line; I wonder, in fact, if Romney didn’t coordinate the timing of it with Bush 41’s formal endorsement in order to hand the media a meme about Republican leaders past and future crowning the Republican leader of the present. While we wait, here’s audio of the left’s Romney-related outrage du jour: He told a “humorous” story on the radio today which involves his dad having closed down an American Motors plant in Michigan and moved it to Wisconsin. Ergo, he’s “out of touch” and hates the working man and thinks it’s hysterical when a state loses jobs, etc etc etc. Serious question: Is it worth even covering these gaffes anymore? He’s the all-but-certain nominee and he does in fact have a tin ear when it comes to innocuous comments that can easily be demagogued for class warfare purposes. If Democrats are going to use it against him later, it’s newsy. It’s increasingly tiresome, though, having to endure their theatrical pearl-clutching again and again, and of course it inadvertently helps them spread their message by circulating the soundbite they want people to hear. Time for a hiatus.

Update: No surprises. Here’s the vid via BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski.