But now the Florida senator is taking a sharply different approach. His answer to the often-asked question about how he would be any different from the president is: He wouldn’t, really…

“A liberal Democrat would say Barack Obama has been a pretty influential president,” Mr. Rubio told a crowd of several hundred people finishing a pancake breakfast here. “He got Dodd-Frank, the stimulus, the deal with Iran. All these things that they were able to get done, they’d look at it and say, ‘This guy’s been pretty consequential.’”…

Initially, Mr. Rubio, 44, would respond that he had plenty of experience for someone his age. But political experience in today’s Republican Party, where even the insiders are running like outsiders, is not exactly an asset. So he adjusted the answer to emphasize that Mr. Obama’s experience is not why he became a bad president, but that his bad policies were the problem.

Now, Mr. Rubio has added a new twist to his answer: He damns Mr. Obama with faint praise for his accomplishments like the Affordable Care Act and the financial regulations in the Dodd-Frank legislation.