RUTHFULLY YOURS

Marco Rubio’s recent habit of missing votes in the Senate is suddenly an issue in his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination.

The kerfuffle started with a question from CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla, one of the moderators running last Wednesday’s third Republican primary debate. Quintanilla asked Rubio about a Florida Sun-Sentinel editorial that sternly criticized Rubio’s lack of attendance in the Senate as he runs for president, and called on him to resign his seat. Rubio turned his answer into a complaint about “the bias that exists in the American media today,” which won the audience to his side — and allowed him to beat back the ill-advised attack that followed from rival Jeb Bush.

“Jeb, I don’t remember . . . you ever complaining about John McCain’s vote record,” Rubio said, to more applause. “The only reason why you’re doing it now is because we’re running for the same position, and someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.”

If you’re going to call on Marco Rubio to resign his Senate seat, you’ll have to do better than that.

Yes, Rubio has missed a lot of votes this year — 99 out of 294, to be exact. But running for president requires an intense travel schedule, and there’s no indication that Rubio regularly missed votes before launching his campaign. Prior to this year, Rubio had missed only 77 of 1143 votes — 6 percent of them — as a senator. Even with this year’s spotty attendance record, Rubio’s overall attendance rate remains high — he’s only missed 176 of 1,437 votes in almost five years in the Senate.

At last week’s debate, Rubio accurately pointed out that numerous Democratic senators missed votes during their presidential campaigns — in several cases, at a much higher rate than he has this year — and no one complained about them.

#share#In 2007 and 2008, Barack Obama missed 303 of 655 votes — 46 percent. From January 2007 until she suspended her campaign in June 2008, Hillary Clinton missed 201 of 604 votes — 33 percent.

From January to September of 1987, immediately before and during his first run for president, Joe Biden missed 144 of 293 Senate votes, or just over 49 percent. During Biden’s more recent presidential campaign, in 2007, he missed 173 of 442 votes, or about 39 percent.

From July 2003 to December 2004, John Kerry missed 362 of 413 votes — 87 percent. He missed all 42 Senate votes from July to September of 2004, in the stretch run of the general election.

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The only difference is that Illinois, New York, Delaware, and Massachusetts are reliably Democratic states, with sympathetic local editorial boards unlikely to complain that their favorite like-minded senators are putting personal ambition before constituents.

It’s true that not every senator who runs for president finds himself missing a lot of votes. While Ted Cruz has missed 70 votes this year and Lindsey Graham has missed 79, Rand Paul has only missed 14, and Bernie Sanders has only missed ten.

In a perfect world, presidential candidates would not attempt to balance the duties of their current office with the enormously time-consuming act of running for president. If your governor or senator runs for president, they’re going to be spending a lot less time in the office and a lot more time shaking hands in Iowa diners and New Hampshire town halls. That’s a basic fact of political life. It seems extraordinarily selective to attack Rubio for missing votes when plenty of other national candidates have done the same.

There are plenty of defensible reasons to knock Rubio, from his support for the “Gang of Eight” immigration-reform bill to his lack of executive experience beyond running the Florida State House. But the votes he’s missed as a presidential candidate are not one of them.

— Jim Geraghty is the senior political correspondent for National Review and author of Heavy Lifting.