Last week it was Marco Rubio’s traffic violations that were on the mind of the New York Times’s crack researchers, who sized up the Florida senator’s qualifications to run a country. As I noted at the time, the paper of record was far less critical of the parking citations racked up by a previous fledgling candidate, Barack Obama, who warranted zero column inches in 2007 despite revelations that he had incurred 21 violations — five times as many as Rubio.
This morning it’s another of the Hispanic candidate’s foibles:
For years, Senator Marco Rubio struggled under the weight of student debt, mortgages and an extra loan against the value of his home totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. But in 2012, financial salvation seemed to have arrived: A publisher paid him $800,000 to write a book about growing up as the son of Cuban immigrants.
So what did Rubio do with his windfall? First, he paid off his law school loans, which anyone, even the Times writers, would agree is commendable. But that’s not all he did with his new-found wealth:
[H]e splurged on an extravagant purchase: $80,000 for a luxury speedboat, state records show. At the time, Mr. Rubio confided to a friend that it was a potentially inadvisable outlay that he could not resist. The 24-foot boat, he said, fulfilled a dream.
Oh, the humanity! But there’s more:
A review of the Rubio family’s finances — including many new documents — reveals a series of decisions over the past 15 years that experts called imprudent: significant debts; a penchant to spend heavily on luxury items like the boat and the lease of a $50,000 2015 Audi Q7; a strikingly low savings rate, even when Mr. Rubio was earning large sums; and inattentive accounting that led to years of unpaid local government fees.
There is nothing wrong with the Times expending its energies on exposing the profligate spending of a man with ambitions to control the purse strings of the U.S. economy. There is something amiss, however, when the same paper omits entirely from its news pages Hillary Clinton’s claim of being “dead broke” around the time she had signed a lucrative book contract of her own. As far as extravagant living goes, when will the Times get around to covering a purchase the Clintons were seriously contemplating in 2010 that dwarfs 137 times over the cost of Rubio’s boat?
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