The Rubio story was barely noticeable when it first emerged. We had a Cuban-American conservative poster boy in a heated Senate Republican primary running against Florida Governor Charlie Crist. The headline to the early stories was that Rubio had charged more than $100,000 on his GOP American Express card. Republican leaders were quietly upset that the new face for ultra-conservative politics had used GOP money to pay for bottles of liquor, groceries, personal travel, family car repair and $130-haircuts. GOP critics complained that donors who gave money to the party did not anticipate that one-hundred thousand dollars worth of their contributions would be used as mad money by Rubio.
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