Hillary Clinton’s financial partners and ideological supporters in the media certainly aren’t being subtle about battlespace preparation for her campaign, and it’s clear the Republican they think they need to freeze, personalize, and polarize early is Senator Marco Rubio.
This produces the absolutely astounding spectacle of the press suddenly deciding that being in touch with the struggles of ordinary Americans is bad, while what America really needs right now is a filthy-rich, hopelessly out-of-touch elitist who knows how to milk her political connections for big bucks.
The New York Times – fresh from cravenly dodging questions about the divine miracle of its reporters coincidentally pulling the driving records for Rubio and his wife just days after Clinton’s hatchet men, apparently leaving no official trace of their record request in the process – is back with another Rubio hit, this time making hay about his student loans and home mortgage.
Well, at least this one isn’t just a steaming pile of Democrat oppo research presented to Times readers as fresh, incisive investigative reporting, right? It’s probably another of those remarkable journalistic coincidences that the financial adviser quoted in the piece is an Obama donor, a fact the Paper of Record decided not to disclose.
Look, we’re all men and women of the world here in the land of alternative media. There are no scales upon our eyes. We know Democrat hacks and left-wing ideologues can get just about anything they want published in the mainstream press, just by making a few phone calls. It’s a bit insulting when no effort is made by the “impartial media” to cover those connections, but that’s not the worst insult freedom-loving Americans are going to take from Democrats and their media pals in this campaign.
But isn’t it amazing to watch these people try to rewrite the entire Obama/Romney 2012 cultural narrative and reverse it for a prospective Clinton/Rubio matchup in 2016? The Obamas had all sorts of money problems when they were younger. In fact, they, and the media, touted those struggles as badges of pride, signs that the Obamas were a hard-working middle-class couple, not a pair of lifelong political operators who benefited handsomely from their political connections and swiftly achieved lifestyles of wealth and luxury.
Meanwhile, Mitt Romney – who earned his money, and donated staggering amounts of it to charity – was portrayed as a callous out-of-touch Daddy Warbucks type, a job-devouring venture capital vampire.
Now the Clinton media is trying to flip that script and tell us, fairly explicitly, that Hillary’s vast fortune – accumulated with zero actual work or entrepreneurial risk, based entirely on cashing in on her political connections, selling favors, running a bogus “charity” operation, and working mightily to conceal her income stream from the public – is a positive qualification for office, while Rubio’s efforts to get an education, provide a nice but hardly extravagant home for his family, and put his kids through school demonstrate he lacks the financial acumen to serve as President of the bloated debt-fueled government Democrats worship.
It’s pretty rich to watch Democrat media drag out an Obama-donor financial analyst to critique the Rubio family budget. At least the Rubios have a budget, which is more than congressional Democrats can say. Let me know when Senator and Mrs. Rubio start using continuing resolutions and “cromnibus” techniques to buy stuff, with a vague plan to force their neighbors to pay all the bills when they find it impossible to rack up more debt.
It seems to have eluded Democrat campaign operatives that the running theme in these Rubio hit pieces is that he doesn’t cash in on his political connections or throw his weight around to erase inconvenient laws, as the Clintons routinely do. In the unlikely event Hillary Clinton decided to tell her chauffeurs and personal assistants to take the night off, slip behind the wheel, and take one of her fleet of cars out for a spin, if she happened to violate one of Washington, D.C.s many traffic or parking laws, what do you think would happen to the poor badge-toting peasant who dared to write her a citation?
Likewise, Marco Rubio apparently doesn’t have a friend like the Obama’s good pal Tony Rezko to work out a fishy real estate deal and set him up with a million-dollar estate dirt cheap. (Rezko isn’t in a position to help anybody out with real-estate deals at the moment, mind you, because like so many Obama and Clinton associates, he had to serve time in the slammer for corruption and fraud. As of last month, bankruptcy trustees said he has repaid $1.1 million of the $58.8 million he owes creditors. But that house he set the Obamas up with sure was a swell pad!)
Evidently Senator Rubio didn’t think to pull strings and get his wife a no-show job for some $300,000 a year, like the one Mrs. Obama had. Think he’ll be able to swing a $600,000 no-show job with a major media organization for one of his kids, like the Clintons did? The supposedly awful mortgage on Rubio’s house is less than Bill Clinton has pulled down for a single speech. Other Clinton-approved means of paying off that house quickly would include profiteering on reconstruction efforts in Haiti, selling America’s uranium supply to Vladimir Putin, and working out a suspiciously generous advance deal for a book purchased by few and read by even fewer.
Coming hard on the heels of the shattering revelation that the Rubios actually drive themselves around – something Hillary Clinton hasn’t done since before many 2016 voters were born – this slam at Rubio’s personal finances is a weird, and probably counter-productive, tactic. It feels like a long, slow pitch over Rubio’s home plate, setting up some great opportunities for him to talk about the sickening levels of corruption Democrats have infused into our political system.
It’s also a golden opportunity for Rubio to talk about what’s happened to student loans since Obama looted the system to finance his health-care boondoggle. (“Yes, I had to accumulate a lot of student loan debt to finance my education, and it was hard work paying it all off. But let me tell you why students today face even greater financial challenges than I did, and let me tell you who’s responsible…”)
This level of panic over Rubio, so early in the game, is highly instructive. Granted, the Clinton media would have to undertake this ridiculous project to make money-grubbing elitism and political corruption look cool, no matter who the Republicans run against her, assuming she doesn’t sink under the weight of her scandals and repulsive campaign performance before the Democrat primary season is over.
It’ll be funny watching them slam on the brakes and spin the narrative around in a one-eighty if Clinton completes her implosion, and a Democrat of more modest means ends up being the candidate. Heck, if that comes to pass, I would urge Mitt Romney to at least make some noise about jumping into the race, just to watch that narrative come off the ramp, grab some air, and perform a few extreme-sports twists and flips.
Update: One of the things the New York Times hit Rubio for “splurging” on was an $80,000 “luxury speedboat.” Anyone who knows anything about boats – a category apparently excluding the entire staff of the New York Times – knows that eighty grand isn’t going to buy a boat with either “luxury” or “speed.”
In fact, as the Rubio campaign explained to Dylan Byers of Politico – who has been the outlet of choice for several clumsy NYT damage-control efforts over its shoddy Rubio hit pieces – the Senator’s boat is a very modest EdgeWater 245CC Deep-V Center Console:
Such incredible “luxury!” Why, that boat must be fully twice the size of the lifeboat on Secretary of State and onetime Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry’s yacht, the S.S. Tax Evasion.
As colorfully recalled by blogger Ace of Spades, in the previous New York Times hit piece on Rubio, his pickup truck was misrepresented as a luxury sport-utility vehicle. If there’s still an ombudsman or any sort of responsible editor at the Times, they need to yank the Rubio hit squad into the bullpen for a little chat, pronto. Or maybe just hang up the phone the next time Sid Blumenthal calls from his posh Clinton Foundation-funded digs with the latest hot scoop from Hillary Clinton’s war room.