The Rubio Story, from Birther Blog to Mainstream Media

WASHINGTON & SANTA FE, NM (By Keach Hagey, Politico) October 23, 2011 ― On May 27th, Charles Kerchner, a retired Navy commander in Pennsylvania who runs a birther blog mostly aimed at President Barack Obama, posted a monster scoop about Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, the GOP’s rising star.

According to naturalization documents that he had obtained, Rubio’s parents had come to the U.S. from Cuba in 1956, not after Fidel Castro took power in 1959, as Rubio’s Senate biography claimed.

“Thus Senator Marco Rubio is not telling the truth when he says in his Senate biography that his parents came to the USA after Castro’s takeover of Cuba,” he wrote. “They were not Cuban refugees escaping communist Cuba as he has said in embellishing his life story in so many of his election campaigns.”

It was a potentially explosive story, one that could call into question the credibility and the essential life story of someone the Republican establishment has rallied around with the kind of high hopes not seen since Ronald Reagan.

And no one noticed. For almost five months.

It was not until buzz that Rubio was the establishment favorite to be the GOP’s vice presidential nominee reached a fevered pitch that St. Petersburg Times reporter Alex Leary reached out to Kerchner and wrote a story on Wednesday about his and other birthers’ concerns that Rubio might not be eligible for higher office because his parents were not citizens when he was born.

The story mentioned the potentially explosive nugget about the true date of his parents’ arrival – but in the 25th paragraph.

The next day, the Washington Post’s Manuel Roig-Franzia reported the same essential information but in a much more dramatic context that suggested Rubio had been misrepresenting his own life story for political gain.

It hit the internet like a bomb, prompting a wave of ferocious pushback from Rubio’s staff and then Rubio himself, who slammed the Post in a long op-ed in POLITICO. And before Roig-Franzia’s story had even appeared in the print version of the Post, Miami Herald political reporter Marc Caputo took to a blog to attack the Post, charging that the story did not present any evidence of Rubio making the false claim in his own words.

“The top of the story suggests Rubio himself has given this ‘dramatic account’: that ‘he was the son of exiles, he told audiences, Cuban Americans forced off their beloved island after ‘a thug,’ Fidel Castro, took power,” Caputo wrote, adding, “However, the story doesn’t cite one speech where Rubio actually said that.”

By midday Friday, Rubio’s press office was blasting out emails rounding up a chorus of blogs and other commentators concluding that the Post has overreached.

“Our story was the product of meticulous reporting and research,” Kevin Merida, the Post’s national editor, told POLITICO. “We believe it was was fair, and important to the developing narrative of a rising political star. We included the comments of Rubio himself, whom Manuel interviewed, as well as further explanation that his office provided in the form of a statement.

Merida said that Roig-Franzia, a former Post Miami bureau chief who is on book leave writing a book about Rubio, had been working on the Rubio story long before the St. Petersburg Times story ran.


“Manuel had been reviewing documents and pursuing the subject of Senator Rubio’s family history for weeks as part of his book project,” he said. “He came to us early this week with what he had learned and proceeded to work on the story we published online Thursday and in Friday’s newspaper. Our process was in motion before the St. Pete Times’s story appeared.”

Alex Conant, Rubio’s spokesman, said Roig-Franzia first contacted the senator’s office around 1 p.m. on Thursday, saying he was on a deadline. Conant said he invited Roig-Franzia to come review Rubio’s parents’ passports in the senator’s office, and set up an interview with Rubio for the story, then was surprised to see that the Post posted its story that afternoon without quotes from the interview.

Merida said the Post reached out to Rubio’s office “after the story was developed to our satisfaction and a decision to publish it had been made,” and was initially told that Rubio was too busy for an interview.

The original version of the story included a statement from Rubio’s office. Subsequent online versions - and the one that appeared in the paper - had a comment from Rubio after he did in fact talk to the Post.

“The essential facts have not been challenged,” said Merida. “As our story notes, the biography on Rubio’s Senate web site mentions in the second sentence that his parents “came to America following Fidel Castro’s takeover.”

That assertion on Rubio’s web site turns out not to be correct, which Rubio’s office acknowledges. But the Post story went much further than simply alleging that Rubio had an error on his Senate website. Roig-Franzia wrote that “the supposed flight of Rubio’s parents has been at the core of the young senator’s identity.”

Caputo argued that the story doesn’t back up this claim and presents a 2006 speech Rubio gave about the plight of the Cuban exile community in general as if it were evidence that he were tying his own story to theirs – words that do not appear in the story.

“He doesn’t say that his parents fled Cuba,” Caputo wrote. “Instead, he was talking about ‘a community of exiles.’ That is: He was talking about all the Cubans who live in Miami.”

In a longer news story, Caputo doubled down on his criticism of the Post story, quoting a Cuban-American Democrat, Andy Gomez, assistant provost and senior fellow at the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, who challenged Roig-Franzia’s claim that “In Florida, being connected to the post-revolution exile community gives a politician cachet that could never be achieved by someone identified with the pre-Castro exodus, a group viewed with suspicion.”

Gomez said that’s not true.

“The Washington Post seems to have very little understanding of the Cuban exile experience and what it means to be an exile. Marco Rubio’s family was forced to stay in America because they refused to live under a communist system. That makes them exiles. It makes no difference what year you first arrived.”

The defense was strong enough to merit its own email from Rubio’s press shop, and an item in The Atlantic Wire titled, “Miami Herald is Better at Marco Rubio Damage Control than Rubio.”

Some of these criticisms were apparently taken to heart.

Since Caputo’s piece ran criticizing the Post’s use of the word “dramatic,” that word has disappeared from the on-line version. And early Friday afternoon, the Post did a Q&A with Roig-Franzia in which he laid out the “smoking gun” quote that was missing from the original story – a Fox News interview in which Rubio talked about “the exceptional nation that my parents found when they came here from Cuba in 1959.”

In his article in POLITICO, Rubio owns up to botching some dates, but fiercely defends his parents’ claim to the exile identity, saying “my understanding of my parents’ journey has always been based on what they told me about events that took place more than 50 years ago – more than a decade before I was born. What they described was not a timeline, or specific dates.”

But this week’s stories shouldn’t have been Rubio’s office’s first encounter with questions about Rubio’s origins.

Kerchner said he began to dig up Rubio’s parents’ naturalization documents after he and other volunteers had pestered Rubio’s office, unsuccessfully, for months with questions about when his parents became citizens.

“I’m a hobby genealogist, and for almost a year, I and other people contacted Rubio’s office with questions about the citizenship of his parents,” he said. “The staff was always evasive, saying, ‘Gee, nobody ever asked that question. We’ll get back to you.’ And then never did. After a year, I decided there must be something hidden.”

Asked about these charges, Conant replied, “We have not paid any attention to the birthers.”

Kerchner said he was a fan of Rubio’s politics until he uncovered the document.

“Given Marco Rubio was being evasive to me and my volunteers, who were trying to get factual information about when his parents became citizens, I said, ‘Wow, he is being more than evasive on that fact. He’s been less than truthful on the other facts.’ I said, ‘This guy is looking more and more like a traditional politician.’”