Never
before has so much reporters’ time been spent to so little effect. Even many
devoted progressive readers of The Gray Lady scratched their heads, trying to
figure out why so many column inches—including all that precious front-page
space!—were given over to a story about traffic violations.
As
Jon Stewart—hardly a right-winger hero—pointed out, Marco Rubio’s number of
speeding tickets over nearly two decades is not only well within the experience
of many Americans, but it appears downright low for Florida, a state where so
much wide-open space, so many fancy cars, and so many Miami Vice reruns of Crockett and Tubbs chasing criminals encourage
high speeds on the roadways, practically begging for state troopers to issue citations so numerous that that they will undoubtedly help fund public-safety complexes.
Now,
Mrs. Rubio—well, 13 citations do seem a tad excessive. On the other
hand, it appears that she took remedial driver classes to reduce the penalties,
the way most normal people would, and there doesn’t appear to be a whiff of a
suggestion that either Rubio tried to bribe or intimidate any officer. (If that
effort did occur, it failed dismally. Perhaps, after all, that was the reason for the Times
story—if the Senator can’t fix a little thing like a speeding ticket, then how
do you expect him to fix massively dysfunctional Washington?)
So,
unless Jeanette Rubio decides to drive her hubby to all his campaign
appearances, I doubt that their difficulties in tracking the speedometer are
going to amount to much.
Really,
you have to wonder what the deal is with the Times and traffic violations. Back in 1991, an article by Fox Butterfield and Mary Tabor considered the life of the young woman who accused William Kennedy Smith of raping her. “Woman in Florida Rape Inquiry Fought
Adversity and Sought Acceptance,” the headline proclaimed. This was a rather
upscale variation on the “facts” in the article—a string of jobs, short-lived
relationships with men (resulting in out-of-wedlock birth), and—of yes—17
traffic tickets, which, many readers felt, was meant to suggest that the accuser
(named, unlike in normal journalistic protocol in rape cases) was a no-account,
speeding tramp.
What
all those traffic tickets had to do with rape never was explained in the
article. Come to think of it, the Times
didn’t explain what those tickets had to do with Senator Rubio’s fitness for
the Presidency, either.
By
publishing such a trivial piece, the paper made readers lose sight of other
articles on Rubio with at least somewhat more substance. The following week, the Times examined the debt burden with which he has struggled. It raised real questions why someone with such problems
could saddle himself with a luxury expenditure (an $80,000 speedboat).
More
to the point, it raised legitimate questions: about how Rubio proposed to take
on an even more massive expense—a Presidential
campaign (through a South Florida auto tycoon who subsidized his job as a
college professor, then employed Jeannette Rubio at the firm) and about how he
dared to lecture America about living beyond its means when he was guilty of
all of that and more (“If you allow politicians to spend money, they’ll do it,”
he has said about the deficit—and if anyone would know about “spending money,”
we now know, it’s him).
All
of this was drowned out by the guffawing over the Times traffic study. If the paper ever hoped to knock Rubio out of
the ring with a combination of damaging stories (and honestly, can we entirely rule that
out?), the response among GOP voters should have been enough to disabuse it of
that notion.
Nearly
a year later, after Ms. Iseman had filed a libel suit against it, the paper
short-circuited further legal proceedings with the following Editor’s Note: “The
article did not state, and The Times
did not intend to conclude, that Ms. Iseman had engaged in a romantic affair
with Senator McCain or an unethical relationship on behalf of her clients in
breach of the public trust.”
Oh
no, of course the Times never
“stated” that. Of course it “did not
intend to conclude” that. It wanted its
readers to do so.
The
Times’ “interest in that story was
not in [McCain’s] private romantic life,” executive editor Bill Keller
explained some months later. “It was in his relationship with lobbyists, plural.”
Well, that was fascinating, because there weren’t pictures of lobbyists, plural, but of Ms. Iseman and the client
on whose behalf she was lobbying the Senator. Moreover, the lead in the article
was not about a bunch of fat cats getting too close to McCain but about the
fear among certain aides that the relationship with Ms. Iseman in particular had
become “romantic.”
All
of this was happening while The Times
was studiously ignoring allegations regarding another Presidential candidate:
John Edwards. By the time Edwards admitted to his own affair, Richard
Stevenson, director of the Times
campaign coverage, said the matter “hasn’t seemed to me to be a high priority
for us at this moment.” He said this at a point when, at the upcoming Democratic Convention, Edwards might still, after his lack of success in the primaries, have been seriously considered for a Cabinet post--perhaps part of the reason why, after overwhelming evidence was unearthed, Edwards, while copping to the affair, still denied that the baby involved was his, all logic to the contrary.
The
Times—no, the nation—paid a price for
its lack of judgment on McCain. The Senator, who had enjoyed his give-and-take
relationship with reporters in his unsuccessful 2000 run, now became more
suspicious of them. To GOP primary voters queasy about his conservative bona
fides, he could point to what the most prominent liberal paper had just tried
to do to him. Contributions and votes from the right wing poured in. He slanted in that direction from that point, where he has remained since.
A
similar dynamic is now at play with Rubio. GOP voters who may have been
mildly dismayed by his attempt to work out a compromise on immigration reform in the
Senate now have every reason to be enthusiastic about him. The Rubio camp
immediately jumped on the “elitist” paper for its coverage.
In its eagerness to
shoot with any weapon at hand against the Senator, the Times only cemented his
bond to the right wing—and, unfortunately, may have made it easier for more
Americans to relate to this politician who has espoused positions untenable for
the working of the government and the safety of the nation.
The
Times drove past real, substantial issues that it should have confronted Rubio
with, asking the following questions:
*“Is
it really only up to South Carolinians, not ‘outsiders,’ to decide whether to
fly the Confederate flag over the state capitol, as you have claimed?
Would you have felt the same way when it was flown when secession was declared
in 1861 and desegregation was resisted in the 1950s and 1960s?
*“How
can you continue to deny the reality of man-made climate change when
approximately 2.4 million people and 1.3 million homes, nearly half the risk
nationwide, sit within 4 feet of the high tide line in your state? How can you
ignore an issue whose moral urgency is being addressed now by the spiritual leader
of your own church?”
*“How
can voters believe in your credibility when you denied any part in the
government shutdown a year and a half ago, only two months after telling conservative
radio host Mark Levin, according to Huffington Post: “On this issue we’re willing to fight no matter what the
consequences, politically or otherwise [are]. If that issue is not Obamacare, I
can’t understand what issue it would be. You cannot say you are against
Obamacare if you are willing to vote for a law that funds it."
(The photo accompanying this post, showing
Marco Rubio addressing the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)
in National Harbor, Maryland, was taken by Gage Skidmore.)
“The establishment is telling Rubio his dropping out
would be for the good of the Republican Party. Which is why he’ll probably at
least consider it. He is a party man through and through, and since he gave up
his Senate seat to run for president, he’s going to want to come out of this
cluster-screw of a campaign with something to show for it besides the
humiliation of a crushing defeat in his home state’s primary on Tuesday. Run for
vice-president on a ticket with Cruz, the party will whisper in his ear, and
when he gets destroyed in the general election in the fall and the country
suffers through four years of socialism under a Democrat, you’ll be perfectly
positioned to be the 2020 nominee. What’s not to like about that scenario? And
why wouldn’t you trust a GOP establishment that has displayed such a sharp
political acumen this cycle that it just about handed its nomination over to a
jar of orange marmalade in a bad wig before it knew what hit it?”— Gary
Legum, “The Marco Rubio Post-Mortem: How a Supposedly Ready-Made GOP Nominee Crashed and Burned,” Salon, Mar 10, 2016
