Peter Schorsch: Team Marco conjures fundraising win via news release hocus-pocus

On one level – the level of the conniving campaign operative who will do anything to score a great headline during a news cycle – one has to admire the chutzpah and financial misdirection that Team Marco pulled off last week.

Relying on the mad alchemy of misstatement and perfect timing, Rubio fed the press-inflated campaign fundraising numbers for Q3 and then released real numbers after the press hit the Happy Hour bar.

As a result, many major news outlets are reporting that although Bush out-raised Rubio more than 2 to 1, Marco has more campaign cash-on-hand for the primary battle than Jeb.

That, however, is false. In fact, it’s not just false, it’s a remarkably shortsighted and cynical tactic given that it plays into the larger narrative that Rubio, on both a personal and professional level, sucks when it comes to understanding finances and managing money.

We all know about Rubio’s financial foibles in his personal life. Despite lucrative book deals and a cushy university teaching job, Rubio has a miniscule net worth but impulsively buys an expensive fishing boat and cashes out his $70,000 retirement account to acquire a $3,000 refrigerator.

(Q: What does Marco’s net worth and his refrigerator have in common? A: They’re both Sub-Zero.)

Even though he was making $90,000 a year he was forced to live in his mother-in-law’s house. He flirted with foreclosure when he co-owned a Tallahassee home with David Rivera that was ultimately sold at a loss.

Remarkably, he has turned this type of reckless fiscal misadventure into a campaign positive, showing that he is in touch with the common man who also presumably lives paycheck-to-paycheck and buys cool powerboats instead of funding boring IRAs. His tribal-level pitch goes something like this: Bro, like you I suck at managing money, so given that we have that common bond please elect me to run a $16.7 trillion economy.

Apparently, Rubio has extended his grasp of financial principles to his campaign.

On Oct. 9, his campaign let slip at a donor retreat in Las Vegas that Rubio would raise $6 million for his campaign in Q3, and the press dutifully trumpeted the number to the unsuspecting public. A week later, when Jeb Bush released the news of his $13.38 million Q3 take, Team Marco quickly sought to deflate the Bush numbers and followed up by emphasizing it had more campaign cash on hand than Bush.

But, at about 7:30 Thursday night when Marco actually filed his campaign finance report (you know, the one that makes it a crime to lie about the numbers) the real accounting showed that Marco had raised $5,721,028 – not $6 million – and that the cash on hand he can use in the primary is $9,749,305.

Compare that with Bush’s primary cash on hand of $10,001,000 – about a $250,000 advantage for Bush — and you begin to get a sense of how willing Marco was to fudge the numbers to create the myth that his lean and mean campaign machine has more primary cash than Bush.

In a news release, Rubio’s team attributed its alleged cash advantage to “smart budgeting and fiscal discipline,” but in the end it was a lot more about the bald-faced willingness to fudge the numbers for gullible and lazy pundits.

Peter Schorsch is a new media publisher and political consultant based in St. Petersburg, Florida. Column courtesy of Context Florida.   

Peter Schorsch

Peter Schorsch is the President of Extensive Enterprises and is the publisher of some of Florida’s most influential new media websites, including Florida Politics and Sunburn, the morning read of what’s hot in Florida politics. Schorsch is also the publisher of INFLUENCE Magazine. For several years, Peter's blog was ranked by the Washington Post as the best state-based blog in Florida. In addition to his publishing efforts, Peter is a political consultant to several of the state’s largest governmental affairs and public relations firms. Peter lives in St. Petersburg with his wife, Michelle, and their daughter, Ella.



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