Marco Rubio can campaign for president in 2016 certain of at least one thing: nobody will mistake him, financially speaking, for Mitt Romney.
The first-term Republican senator from Florida, who grew up middle-class, is one of the least wealthy White House prospects to come along "in years,"
the Wall Street Journal Washington Wire blog reports.
Rubio had assets of between $300,000 and $840,000 in 2014, according to a personal financial disclosure statement he filed with the Federal Election Commission on Friday, the Journal reports.
Rubio's $174,000 annual salary as a senator made up about of his household's total 2014 income, with he and his wife bringing in at least $339,000 last year, according to his FEC statement.
That's not nothing — it places the Rubios in the top 2 percent of U.S. earners — but it's a long way from the $9.3 million in income, and $190 million to $250 million in assets, that the former Massachusetts governor, Romney, reported in 2010 as a GOP candidate for president.
"Mr. Romney’s finances were featured prominently in that election, as Democrats sought to paint him as an out-of-touch millionaire," writes the Journal's Rebecca Ballhaus, adding, "In 2016, Mr. Rubio is unlikely to be the focus of such attacks."
But any candidate's financial history is a target for dirt-digging journalists, and Rubio's
is no exception as the campaign gets under way.
On the Democratic side, early favorite Hillary Clinton has yet to file a disclosure form, even as
questions swirl about her finances and those of the monied foundation bearing her family name.
In 2012, the last year for which she reported while still in government, as secretary of state, Clinton estimated her net worth at between $5 and $25 million,
The Washington Post reported in 2014.
Out of office, she became a star of the lecture circuit, commanding six figures for appearances, and wrote a best-selling memoir — memorably saying at one point during the book's publicity tour that she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, left the White House in 2001 "dead broke."
Rubio's single largest source of income in 2014 was not his Senate salary but his memoir,
"American Dreams," with royalties estimated at between $100,000 and $1 million, the Journal reports.
Rubio also reported two home mortgages totaling between $350,000 and $750,000, and a small salary of $22,114 for his work as a senior fellow at Florida International University.
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