There’s no doubt The New York Times is showing an aggression in covering Marco Rubio that they did not show for Obama eight years ago. After the alleged “scoop” of Rubio’s four parking tickets over 18 years last Friday (and in Saturday’s paper), the Times on Tuesday ran a big piece on how Rubio is supposedly a disaster when it comes to his own personal finances: “a series of decisions over the past 15 years that experts called imprudent,” the Times duo of Steve Eder and Michael Barbaro wrote. The headline was "Rubio's Career Bedeviled by Financial Struggles." (Or he's "bedeviled" by liberal journalists.)
The Washington Free Beacon reported quickly that Harold Evensky, the key financial advisor quoted in the Times story as saying Rubio’s debt accumulation was “staggering” and "this was someone that was living financially dangerously” — is an Obama donor.
Evensky, who reviewed Rubio’s public financial disclosures at the newspaper’s request, donated $500 to Obama in 2007 according to online records, but the Times didn’t disclose it.
Rubio, they wrote, struggled under student loan debt until he managed to make money with a 2012 book (“financial salvation” the Times called it). Rubio also liquidated a retirement account, incurring taxes and penalties. And he sold a house at a loss.
Eight years ago, an investigation would have shown that the Obamas struggled under huge student loan debt until his books became best-sellers (Dreams From My Father originally came out in 1995). Obama received 15 outstanding parking tickets from 1988 to 1991 when he was at Harvard — tickets he didn’t even pay until January 2007, a couple of weeks before he announced his presidential campaign.
But a Nexis search shows the Times didn’t write about the Obamas’ student loan troubles in 2007, or Barack Obama’s parking tickets at Harvard, when Obama was in the same position as Rubio, a freshman Senator running for his party’s nomination. (The Washington Post noticed, at least enough to run an AP dispatch.)
But for the Times, only Rubio was displaying “troubles behind the wheel.”
The Free Beacon also revealed that the Rubio traffic records were obtained first by Democrat opposition researchers at American Bridge PAC. The Times lamely claimed that they obtained the records independently....at almost the same time for the same exact time frame.
