In the process of writing a shamefully petty hit piece on Marco Rubio, the New York Times has actually done Marco Rubio a great service, by painting him in a great light especially as compared to Hillary Clinton. You see, in the course of breathlessly reporting that Marco Rubio has had 4 traffic tickets over the last 18 years, the NYT inadvertently revealed at least two ways that Rubio conducts himself more like an ordinary American than Hillary Clinton does:

According to a search of the Miami-Dade and Duval County court dockets, the Rubios have been cited for numerous infractions over the years for incidents that included speeding, driving through red lights and careless driving. A review of records dating back to 1997 shows that the couple had a combined 17 citations: Mr. Rubio with four and his wife with 13. On four separate occasions they agreed to attend remedial driving school after a violation.

Mr. Rubio’s troubles behind the wheel predate his days in politics. In 1997, when he was cited for careless driving by a Florida Highway Patrol officer, he was fined and took voluntary driving classes. A dozen years later, in 2009, he was ticketed for speeding on a highway in Duval County and found himself back in driver improvement school.

Things got more complicated in 2011 when Mr. Rubio was alerted to the fact that his license was facing suspension after a traffic camera caught him failing to stop at a red light in his beige Buick. His lawyer, Alex Hanna, paid a $16 fee to delay the suspension and eventually it was dismissed.

“[mc_name name=’Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’R000595′ ]’s license has always been in good standing,” Mr. Hanna said in a statement provided by Mr. Rubio’s campaign. “This matter was resolved by the court system and at no point was the license suspended by the D.M.V.”

This kind of naked yellow journalism makes you think that the NYT was transported somehow back to 1935 or some other era where people might have possibly given a crap about the scandal of a politician getting ordinary traffic tickets. The sensational dragging of Rubio’s wife into the story really ratchets up the sleaze factor about a billion notches. I cannot fathom the thought processes that allowed this article to go to print, even at the New York Times.

It also goes without saying that you would never read a story like this about the Hillary Clinton in the media – however, not JUST because of the partisan slant of the media. In the first place, it’s almost impossible to imagine the Clintons schlepping themselves around in their own cars inbetween outings in which they were paid roughly a million dollars an hour to give bad speeches. The jetsettingest people on the globe over the last 20 years probably do not have traffic tickets because they don’t drive themselves places.

Second, though, imagine a world in which the Clintons actually did live like the rest of us cake-eating folks and drove their cars around and occasionally got tickets. Is there any doubt in anyone’s mind that they wouldn’t use whatever influence they had to just make the tickets go away? Unless your name is David Brock, there isn’t.

Here’s how I know with 100% certainty that the Clintons would have abused their power to get out of traffic tickets: They abused their power in order to get the IRS to audit their enemies when Bill was in office. When the Lewinsky scandal threatened to blow up, they used their influence to try to quietly shunt Monica off to a cushy job at Revlon. We now know that donors to the Clinton foundation got preferential treatment from the State Department.

To the Clintons, there is no point in even having power if you’re not going to abuse it for your own personal gain.

Which is why it’s impossible to imagine that they would have tolerated something as pedestrian as paying a traffic ticket, even though by now they are worth gazillions of dollars and can doubtless afford it. Pettiness is and has ever been the Clinton hallmark.

Now, as a person who has been important in Florida politics for a long time, Marco Rubio could have doubtless made some strategic phone calls and made these traffic tickets disappear. Instead, however, he appears to have pretty much paid them. For his wife, he made the shocking change of strategy, reported with equal breathlessness by the NYT, of… hiring a lawyer. Cue the spooky music and include the lawyer’s ad, which (shockingly) reports that he specializes in defending traffic tickets.

Yet another reminder that there is literally no one on the Republican side who is even half as disconnected from the lives of ordinary people as Hillary Clinton. For as much as the Republicans were criticized for running an out-of-touch Mitt Romney in 2012, the Democrats seem ready to do worse in 2016. And unlike Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton doesn’t even have a record of running anything successfully at all.