All hail Marco Rubio, fudger of numbers

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 yesterday.

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 while Bush outraised Rubio more than two to one, Marco has more campaign cash-on-hand for the primary battle than Jeb.

This, 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 October 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 this number to the unsuspecting public. A week later, when Jeb Bush released the news of his $13,380,000 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, last night about 7:30 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 this to 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 press 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.