NY Times (Clinton Opposition Research?) Goes After Rubio's Personal Finances

Team Hillary must be petrified of the Senator from Florida, because the Clinton attack machine is using the New York Times to attack Marco Rubio for the second time in four days. " This time they are going after his family finances. The issue:

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.

Except for the book part, the description of the "struggle" could be made about millions of Americans (including me).

Here comes the first charge, when he got the $800k Marco Rubio not only paid off his debts, but bought himself something he always wanted...a $80K speedboat. Putting aside for a moment the old saying is the second happiest day of a boat owner' life is the day they bought a boat, the happiest day is the day they sell the boat, what exactly is wrong about when (if) one falls into unexpected money, spending ten percent of the total on a gift for oneself.  When I was a salesman part of my annual commission check always went to a gift for myself.

These were not isolated incidents. 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.

Mr. Rubio has acknowledged missteps: using personal credit cards to pay for his campaigns (a bad idea, he said); appointing his wife, Jeanette, as a treasurer of a political action committee (ill advised, he said); and using the party money for the reunion trip (an accident, he said). Mr. Rubio, in his 2012 memoir, “An American Son,” confessed a “lack of bookkeeping skills” and an “imperfect accounting system.”

 Anybody remember what Hillary Clinton Said to Diane Sawyer?

Well, if you -- you have no reason to remember, but we came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt. We had no money when we got there and we struggled to, you know, piece together the resources for mortgages for houses, for Chelsea's education, you know, it was not easy.

How different is Rubio? Especially when one considers that both the Clintons and Rubio used money from book deals to pull them out of debt.

The Times goes on to publish an itemized account of Rubio's horrors, like emptying his IRA to fund his campaign, or when his family was cash-strapped he sold one of his cars...what a bad, bad, man.

Actually the Democratic Party paper of record describes someone just like most of us, someone who probably understands what the rest of us are going through, someone who to this day is not rich like the Clintons.

The NY Times piece smells like something leaked from the Clinton hit team, the same team which created the "birther" issue about Barack Obama, and more recently the Rubio traffic ticket story. The only thing truly scandalous about this story is that the NY Times would publish it as news.