It's been a while since we checked in with politickin' at the presidential level, mostly because it's vapid and it makes us cringe to hear someone like Hillary Clinton, Chicago-born and Ivy League-educated, speak in a surprise Southern accent.
So, yeah, American politics has apparently been reduced to grotesquely underestimating the intelligence of one's audience. (Oh, wait, that's right; people only vote for candidates that look and speak like them. We've got a fun 17 months ahead of us).
But occasionally we like to take a look at what the candidates have been up to, especially when there's a common thread among a few of the candidates. This time around, that common ground rests in a couple of stories detailing aspects of candidates' histories.
But before we do that, we'd like to note that a St. Leo University poll out today shows U.S. Senator Marco Rubio leading Jeb Bush by eight points (head-to-head — Rubio trails Jeb by a narrow margin when all candidates are factored in) among Floridians. More Floridians also said Rubio was their first or second choice in a presidential primary.
"The surge for Senator Rubio is significant and is easily the most interesting finding in our recent politics poll," said Frank Orlando, instructor of political science at Saint Leo University, in a media release. "Bush is still holding off Rubio in Florida, but the only factor keeping Rubio from the lead is the large number of conservative candidates who have siphoned his support. That is evidenced by how many respondents like Rubio as their second choice."
(See the rest of that poll's results, which cover a lot of ground, here.)
Even so, it's only June. Of 2015. So we have another year or so before the GOP nominee is actually crowned, and a lot can happen between now and then.
Polls will inevitably fluctuate; media will see to that by diligently unearthing (and sometimes sensationalizing) what-have-yous from each candidate's past, as they're already doing.
There was that New York Times story over the weekend that highlighted U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio and his wife's penchant for racking up traffic citations — 17 in all since 1997, 13 of which were for his wife, Jeanette. The campaign seemed to brush the story off; after all, they lived in Miami. Everyone there drives like an asshole. Fact.
But then NYT (we don't want to get our Times-es mixed up, do we?) did a story about Rubio's financial struggles, some of which we already sorta knew about ($145 haircut, anyone?).
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.”
The paper also mentioned the Rubios were trying to pay down their debts with help from an $800,000 book deal, but also bought a "luxury speedboat" within that timeframe. Politico's Marc Caputo later pointed out that it was actually a fishing boat.
While his campaign probably didn't particularly welcome the news, there is a bit of a silver lining here, in that, in a sea of thoroughbred, utterly plastic presidential hopefuls, Rubio looks somewhat human and even relatable.
“The New York Times today attacked Marco because he could not afford to pay for college, arrogantly describing his student loan debt as ‘a deep financial hole of his own making.’ The attack from The Times is just the latest in their continued hits against Marco and his family,” Rubio Communications Director Alex Conant told Florida Politics.
Another Florida Republican that recently announced that he will be announcing an announcement about running for president, former governor Jeb Bush, also had some weird stuff come out about him recently. Namely, a couple of pages from a book he wrote 20 years ago are raising eyebrows.
The former governor (before he became governor), after all, wrote that when it comes to preventing out-of-wedlock pregnancies, the one thing missing is "shame." As in, women who get pregnant by their boyfriends ought to be ridiculed in public for their sins. (Although in 2003 he did repeal the 2001 "Scarlett Letter" bill, which required pregnant women who didn't know the identity of the father to publish their sexual history in a newspaper before legally being able to give the baby up for adoption. So, kudos, Jeb.)
Bush also sought to tie corporal punishment in Walton County to a lack of school shootings there. Statistics don't lie, y'all.
This article appears in Jun 4-10, 2015.
