This morning's St. Petersburg Times report by Alex Leary and Adam Smith on Marco Rubio's "questionable spending and sloppy accounting" is just the latest in a series of stories that have been published all year long that should make voters question the sincerity of Rubio's message of fiscal discipline if elected to represent Florida in the U.S. Senate in Washington.
This story, along with Zac Anderson's in the Sarasota Herald Tribune last month, as well as Beth Reinhard in the Miami Herald back in January, and surely others that I can't recall, have startlingly received little follow through in the the national media that has been focused like a laser on this election, or at least the personalities.
Leary and Smith also report that Rubio's lifestyle after serving in the Florida House has flourished :
He landed an unadvertised $69,000 teaching job at Florida International University when the school was slashing staff because of budget cuts. (His salary came out of privately raised funds.)
• Also in 2008, he got a job as a political analyst for the Spanish-language TV station Univision, which paid a second dividend: keeping his image in circulation as he pondered his next run for office.
• In June 2008, Rubio formed two businesses, his own law firm and Rubio Consulting, whose clients included Univision and Marin & Sons, a Miami consulting firm headed by a Tallahassee lobbyist. On his financial disclosure form, Rubio wrote "Marin & Sons retains Rubio Consulting to introduce their clients to potential business partners in the community. Rubio Consulting does not lobby before any governmental entity."
• He joined another consulting partnership called Florida Strategic Consultants that scored big contracts with Miami Children's and Jackson Memorial hospitals. Rubio said he was providing advice and access to a network of contacts he culled as House speaker. "I'm not a lobbyist," he insisted then. "It's not my forte."
This article appears in Oct 21-27, 2010.