Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Tangled Web

Marco Rubio drives like an idiot and he has trouble balancing a checkbook.  So of course he’s the perfect GOP candidate to tell everyone else how to drive and handle the economy.

Among the serious contenders for the presidency, Mr. Rubio stands out for his youth, for his meteoric political rise — and for the persistent doubts about his financial management, to the point that Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign flagged the issue when vetting Mr. Rubio as a possible running mate in 2012, interviews show.

Many of those troubles have played out in an unusually public way, leading even some of his supporters to worry. As he rose in politics, he sometimes intermingled personal and political money — using a state Republican Party credit card years ago to pay for a paving project at his home and for travel to a family reunion, and putting his relatives on campaign payrolls.

This is old news for people who have been paying mild attention to Mr. Rubio’s career here in Florida, but it’s interesting to see how it’s playing out on the national stage.

The usual suspects are leaping to Mr. Rubio’s defense, claiming the story is Democratic oppo research spoon-fed to the New York Times.  But facts are facts, history is history, and the story about using the Florida Republicans’ Amex card was news in 2010 when he was running for the Senate.

Hey, everyone gets it that people can have financial difficulties even if you have a sweet book deal, a $176,000 annual salary, and a multimillionaire sugar daddy.  But even if you have a lot of income, you’re still up the creek if you can’t control yourself from spending $80,000 on a speedboat because you always wanted one.

In the next Republican administration, he can be the Secretary of the Treasury.