Rubio’s Boots on the Ground

Is the New York Times obsessed with Marco Rubio’s boots? That’s the conclusion of the Florida senator’s presidential campaign spokesman Alex Conant, who tweeted this image of the Gray Lady’s top online political stories:

The discussion over Rubio’s heeled boots began earlier this week after a Times reporter, Michael Barbaro, tweeted out a photograph of the Republican’s shoes, calling them “seriously fashionable”:

What followed was a superstorm of coverage, not only at the Times, about Rubio’s choice of footwear. Rival campaigns got in on the act, too. The communications director for Ted Cruz said voting for Rubio was voting for “men’s high-heeled booties” while Rand Paul tweeted out a video of himself gently mocking Rubio’s “cute new boots.”

Rubio himself has been indignant about the focus on his boots, going off at a recent event in Iowa over the media’s coverage of it at the expense of more substantive, serious issues. “Let me get this right. ISIS is cutting people’s heads off, setting people on fire in cages, Saudi Arabia and Iran on the verge of a war, the Chinese are landing airplanes on islands that they built and say belong to them and what are international waters and in some ways territorial waters, our economy is flat-lined, the stock market is falling apart, but boy are we getting a lot of coverage about a pair of boots,” he said Thursday, according to Politico. “This is craziness. Have people lost their minds?”

The Rubio campaign, meanwhile, has not responded to a request for comment about who purchased the offending boots. That’s in keeping with the campaign’s apparent desire to cast the topic as trivial and unworthy of discussion during a serious presidential race.

Which is why the latest TV ad from Rubio features the Florida senator talking about football.