As Marco Rubio has emerged as the smart-money favorite (or at least co-favorite, along with Ted Cruz) for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, there’s been a nagging suspicion in enemy camps and the mainstream media that the Florida senator’s history of sloppy personal finances could be used by a rival with bad intent to take him down a notch or two. It’s hardly a new story. Rubio’s use of a state GOP credit card to make personal purchases when he was Speaker of the Florida House may well have been the first time many alert national-news consumers ever heard of the man. New York Times reporters did an extensive analysis of Rubio’s financial problems just last June; the news hook was the discovery that he cashed out a retirement account in 2014, presumably to meet current obligations.
Each time the issue has arisen, Rubio and his allies have essayed a political jiujitsu move, citing his financial struggles as an example of the experience he has in common with middle-class Americans everywhere — you know, in contrast to scions like 2012 nominee Mitt Romney and current rivals Jeb Bush and Donald Trump. Since the whole son-of-a-bartender-and-a-maid meme has been central to Rubio’s political identity from the beginning, offering some protection from the charge that his policy proposals would engorge the wealth of the already-rich, making financial missteps part of his biography was indeed clever. But it hasn’t shaken the bloodhounds entirely.
Today National Journal’s S.V. Date recapitulates Rubio’s financial history from a not-very-flattering perspective: as the self-inflicted problems of a man whose political connections gave him a rapidly growing income exceeded by an outsize appetite for personal and real-estate acquisitions:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/12/rubios-messy-finances-may-be-his-downfall-yet.html
