(Newser)
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Marco Rubio got a taste of what it's like to live in the klieg light of national politics this week. Ever since the Washington Post published a story accusing him of fudging the truth about his Cuban family history, Rubio has been on a media blitz to rebut the story. It includes interviews with the Miami Herald and the New York Times and his own op-ed in Politico. Rubio has acknowledged that his Senate bio mistakenly said his parents arrived in the US after Fidel Castro took power. In fact, they arrived a few years before that.
Rubio maintains, however, that "the Post story misses the point completely" about his background. “The pain of my parents’ permanent separation from the nation of their birth, their inability to visit there and move there, was a major part of our upbringing,” he says. "They were immigrants, and they were also exiles. That is the essence of my story.” Politico notes that a birther blogger first noted the incorrect date in his official bio months ago, but it wasn't until Rubio's name surfaced as a VP contender that it got picked up, first by the St. Petersburg Times and then, with much greater prominence, by the Post. The Atlantic Wire has a look at how the story has played out in the media, with a focus on how Herald reporter Marc Caputo has challenged the Post story.
