In 2012, Jeb Bush wanted Marco Rubio to be one heartbeat away from the presidency, but Bush’s campaign is now suggesting that there are troubling things in Rubio’s past that would make him a “risky bet” as a presidential candidate. On Thursday night, David Catanese of U.S. News and World Report published a document from the Bush campaign that lays out the case against Rubio (emphasis added):
When Rubio was a state lawmaker, he used the state party credit card for personal expenses, a decision he later called a mistake. In 2005, he and Rivera jointly purchased a home that later faced foreclosure.
Another bullet point says Rubio’s “closeness with Norman Braman, who doubles as personal benefactor[,] raises major ethical questions.”
Braman, a billionaire auto dealer, is expected to pour $10 million into Rubio’s White House endeavor, The New York Times reports. He’s also paid Rubio’s wife to oversee his charitable work.
The Bush team also mocks Rubio’s “tomorrow versus yesterday” argument as one that would be “widely ridiculed by media” should he run against the first potential female president.
The most cryptic slight is left for last: “Those who have looked into Marco’s background in the past have been concerned with what they have found.”
A Bush aide says that line refers to concerns Mitt Romney’s team unearthed when they vetted Rubio for vice president in 2012.
But Beth Myers, the Romney adviser who oversaw the vetting of potential 2012 vice presidential candidates, says that Rubio passed the campaign’s vetting.
“As the senior Romney advisor who handled VP vetting and had access to all the vetting documents, I can say that Senator Rubio ‘passed’ our vetting and we found nothing that disqualified him from serving as VP,” Myers wrote in an email to Politico‘s Alex Isenstadt. “The Bush aide referred to in this article is simply wrong.” Politico notes that Myers currently backs Jeb Bush in the GOP primary.
So what does that cryptic line in the Bush campaign document mean? It’s not at all clear. But it doesn’t appear to refer to Rubio’s use of the Florida GOP’s credit card to repair his minivan. Nor does it appear to be a reference to Rubio’s relationship with Congressman David Rivera or his backer Norman Braman. All of these legitimate but already well-known issues were mentioned under separate bullet points earlier in the Bush campaign document. (In 2012, Steve Hayes took a thorough look at Rubio’s relationship with Rivera, and the New York Times published its investigation of Rubio’s relationship with Braman earlier this year. The Times revealed that Rubio, as state legislator, secured taxpayer funding “for cancer research at a Miami institute for which Mr. Braman is a major donor.”)
Bush aides have not responded to requests to explain their vague attack on Rubio, so we are left wondering what it is supposed to mean. But we do know that during Rubio’s 2010 Senate campaign he was vetted by Democrats and by those working for Charlie Crist, the sitting governor of Florida who fled the Republican party to run for Senate as an independent once it became clear Rubio would win the primary election. If there’s some devastating information about Rubio’s past, it was missed by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Charlie Crist campaign, and Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.
As it stands, Jeb Bush and his campaign look quite cowardly for launching a cryptic attack about Rubio’s past and then refusing to explain their allegations.
