Try as he might, Florida Senator Marco Rubio is going to have a tough time persuading voters he’s an average guy. So says Chris Cillizza, who writes in today’s Washington Post:
The issue … is that Rubio has worked to sell the “average guy with debt” storyline even while doing things that average folks don’t do — like buy a boat. (Whether it was a fishing boat, as Rubio’s allies argue, or a “luxury speed boat” as the Times described it, is sort of beside the point.)
Rubio is not a regular guy…. He got an $800,000 advance for his book, which, as someone who has written a book, I can tell you, is not average.
Cillizza is right that not everyone who publishes a book gets an $800,000 advance, but his implication that this onetime cash windfall puts Rubio in rarefied company inside the Beltway is pretty far off the mark. According to Business Insider:
In a Congress where most lawmakers are millionaires, Rubio’s income is fairly low. According to his financial disclosure form, in 2014 Rubio made $174,000 from his Senate salary and $52,000 from book royalties and his adjunct professorship at Florida International University.
As Cillizza’s own paper acknowledges, Rubio is one of the poorer members of Congress, ranking 456 out of 538 in Roll Call’s list of federal lawmakers ranked by wealth.
In the final analysis, if the argument comes down to which candidate is least in touch with the average shlub, the loser has to be Hillary Clinton, who, the Daily Mail reports, spent $200,000 per month* on a 6-bedroom beachfront rental in the Hamptons last summer.
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* An earlier draft of this post reported the rental fee on this property at $200,000 per day, but a previous Daily Mail article listed the fee as monthly, which sounds more reasonable.
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