It's pretty clear with hindsight that if not for his flop in the debate against Christie, he would've pulled off "3-2-1" and gone on to fairly comfortably win the nomination. People are forgetting how strong the campaign was prior to Super Tuesday -- after Iowa, Rubio was taking votes directly from Trump and holding Trump under 30 in national polling, and after his defeat in New Hampshire he still recovered enough to come in second and within single-digits in South Carolina. It's quite clear that if not for Christie, only Trump, Rubio, and Cruz (in that order) would've crossed the delegate threshold in New Hampshire, Bush and Kasich would both have left, Cruz would've seemed weaker due to the presence of a clearly stronger alternative, and Rubio would've had a decent shot at >40 in SC.
I'd go so far as to say that when this primary season started, the only two candidates who were capable of winning the nomination outright, at a non-contested convention, were Rubio and Trump. So I would say the amount of attention he received was totally deserved.
So you're saying that if nobody had noticed that he's an empty suit, he would have won?
Yes, and I'm saying he came much closer to pulling it off than this thread seems to realize. In the sense that, of all of his opponents, only Christie seemed to notice, and even then he only managed to demonstrate it at the very last moment.
It's pretty clear with hindsight that if not for his flop in the debate against Christie, he would've pulled off "3-2-1" and gone on to fairly comfortably win the nomination. People are forgetting how strong the campaign was prior to Super Tuesday -- after Iowa, Rubio was taking votes directly from Trump and holding Trump under 30 in national polling, and after his defeat in New Hampshire he still recovered enough to come in second and within single-digits in South Carolina. It's quite clear that if not for Christie, only Trump, Rubio, and Cruz (in that order) would've crossed the delegate threshold in New Hampshire, Bush and Kasich would both have left, Cruz would've seemed weaker due to the presence of a clearly stronger alternative, and Rubio would've had a decent shot at >40 in SC.
I'd go so far as to say that when this primary season started, the only two candidates who were capable of winning the nomination outright, at a non-contested convention, were Rubio and Trump. So I would say the amount of attention he received was totally deserved.
But they were still in the tank for him long before "3-2-1" was ever a thing and even after he imploded in the debate and in NH. In fact, they were in the tank for him since the day he announced his campaign even when he was irrelevant and polling at 3%. Watching all the pundits salivate over him and metaphorically give him fellatio was nauseating. They literally said he won like every debate, besides the NH one. I never really had a gripe with Rubio, at least no more than I had gripes with any other generic right wing senator, but the media's outright shilling and fawning made me despise him. I mean, I voted for Obama and think he's been a good president, but even to this day I cringe whenever I read some pundit talking about how he's the best thing since sliced bread. Must be PTSD from being a 2008 Hillary supporter. 
I don't know that I noticed much Rubio fawning before the fall of 2015, by which point it was clear that the candidate in the race with the largest personal following was Donald Trump; that Trump's path to victory lay through a divided field; and that the only semi-competent candidate in the race who was capable of uniting the very disparate elements in the GOP opposed to Trump (someone who could win Manhattan Island
and southwest Missouri) was Marco Rubio. So a lot of the fawning made sense.
I think the fact that Rubio ran at all in 2016 might've been a hint at some of the problems with his candidacy. No path to victory for him existed at all before the entrance of Donald Trump, which neither he nor his team nor anyone else predicted. Rubio did not represent any geographic area (Bush was the Floridian candidate until quite late in the game), nor any particular ideology or cause until anti-Trumpism became a thing.
As for the Time cover from 2013, it made decent sense. Rubio had been on the VP shortlist in 2012 after just 2 years in the Senate and it was very clear that he was going to run for President eventually, even if 2016 was way too early for him.
Rubio was the establishments choice.
The establishment have some level of control over the media.
The discomfort that Trump caused both parties is very attractive to Americans who are looking for a clean slate.
Rubio had a horrible spoilt private school boy persona which was attractive to no one.
But Jeb was the initial establishment choice, and the media savagely ripped him apart like a pack of rabid hyenas and loved every second of it, so was that really much of a factor?
Not a very big payday for his $120 M investment in the media then.
Jeb's pre-Trump path to victory was in fact the same as Trump's -- to keep the field divided as long as possible and rack up first-places with under 40% of the vote; the field was so splintered before Trump that "voters who remember the Bush legacy fondly" were in fact the single largest group. Trump tore his campaign off the rails and there was no longer any path to victory for Jeb.
