That was the end of that, at least for the evening. But the issue hasn’t gone away. On Thursday, David Catanese got his hands on the full version of a PowerPoint slideshow that Bush aides showed at their weekend retreat and regroup. One of the major takeaways from the retreat was that Bush would attack Rubio, his ascendant home-state rival, and the slideshow included this:

The same day, The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza argued the story of Rubio’s finances is “a big deal.” “Rubio is about to go through a period of much more intensive media scrutiny,” Lizza wrote. “Complaining about media bias won’t be enough to get him through it.”

I wrote in a little more detail about the various questions about Rubio’s finances in 2012, as speculation about who Mitt Romney would choose as his running mate heated up. In addition to what Quick mentioned, Rubio improperly used a Republican Party credit card for personal expenses. He was fined for campaign-finance violations. He was accused of living lavishly on donations. Perhaps most damaging is his close friendship with David Rivera, a former congressman under investigation for various improprieties, as mentioned in the slide above. (There’s more detail and links here.)

Florida Democrats were eagerly pushing out background on all of it at the time. The cryptic line in the Bush slide that “those who have looked into Marco’s background in the past have been concerned about what they have been found” is widely being interpreted as a reference to the 2012 veepstakes—so much so that a top Romney aide decided to come forward to insist Rubio passed vetting.

Questions about finances do seem to strike closer to character and how a candidate might run an administration than, for example, whether or not he’s showing up for largely inconsequential Senate votes. They can reveal either sloppiness or duplicity—traits that many voters feel matter for a president.

But none of this seems to have slowed Rubio’s rise yet. There are a few possible reasons for that. One is that even for a politician with national attention like Rubio, the media vetting for a leading presidential contender is on another level. But so far, stories like a New York Times consideration of his boat have bounced off him harmlessly. A second is that Quick approached the question as many journalists have—asking Rubio whether it was a political liability, a question he’s prepared to shut down, rather than drilling into whether he made any serious mistakes with the money.

But a third is that maybe people just don’t care. Voters haven’t hesitated to elect presidents with financial irregularities in their past before. Rubio is basically following Richard Nixon’s playbook from his famous 1952 “Checkers speech," in which he dispensed with accusations of financial improprieties by appealing to voters as a man of little means*: “We lived rather modestly. For four years we lived in an apartment in Parkfairfax, in Alexandria, Virginia. The rent was $80 a month. And we saved for the time that we could buy a house …. This will surprise you, because it is so little, I suppose, as standards generally go, of people in public life.”