The Wilderness

by McKay Coppins

  Rubio got started in earnest the day after the press conference, calling in to Rush Limbaugh’s show to make his case for immigration reform. It wouldn’t be an easy sell. Like most on the right, Limbaugh was dead set against any immigration plan that granted “illegals” a pathway to U.S. citizenship—something the Gang of Eight had already made clear would be part of any legislation they came up with. By and large, conservatives believed that allowing illegal immigrants to stay in the country amounted to granting “amnesty” to a bunch of criminals—and by signing on to the Senate’s effort, Rubio had already violated this core tenet. But in doing so, he had extracted a major concession from the Democrats working on the Senate bill: the legislation would require that not a single green card would be dispensed until substantial improvements were made to the nation’s border security and immigration enforcement.

  Rubio wielded that accomplishment like a weapon as he entered Limbaugh’s lion’s den, forcefully arguing that it was better for conservatives like himself to be involved in the legislative process, rather than simply boycotting it on principle. “I’m just trying to do the best I can with what’s already a tough situation,” he told Limbaugh. “I pray it works out. I can’t guarantee that it will, but we’re gonna do our best.” Rubio also displayed his characteristic optimism—and unrelenting confidence in his own persuasive abilities—by arguing that fixing the immigration system would eliminate one of the Democrats’ favorite wedge issues, and allow Republicans to start converting these eleven million new Americans to the cause of conservatism.

  “I am confident, I really am… that given a fair chance, I can convince most Americans, including Americans of Hispanic descent, that limited government and free enterprise is better for them… than big government is,” Rubio said earnestly.

  Limbaugh spent the fifteen-minute interview alternating between uncharacteristically polite pushback and effusive praise for the senator. While the host expressed skepticism that Democrats would actually negotiate in good faith, he told Rubio, “What you are doing is admirable and noteworthy.” When the senator hung up, Limbaugh lavished praise on him for taking his pitch to the right-wing airwaves: “Is that guy good or what? Here’s a guy who doesn’t fear talk radio. He embraces it!” Rubio found a similarly warm reception in interviews that week with Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, the Right’s other two biggest talk radio stars. He was getting the treatment of a beloved quarterback who had called a risky audible; some of the fans may have disagreed with the play, but they were still rooting for him. All of them were wearing the same colors.

  But while Rubio was a vocal champion of the Senate’s effort in the conservative media, he was relatively quiet inside the room where the lawmaking was getting done. In his two years in the Senate, he hadn’t yet spent much time engaging in the mechanics of crafting legislation—and he was astounded by just how thoroughly the process was governed by personality quirks and petty ego trips. Often, as he looked around the table at his colleagues, he found himself wondering how these babbling blowhards had managed to win so many elections. No wonder they can’t get anything done here, he thought.

  In one session early on, Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin raised a legislative issue by relating the experience of “a constituent of mine” (he was always delivering anecdotes about one “constituent of mine” or another). He talked about a Mexican woman who had lived in the United States illegally for many years with her husband and kids, and whose papers were in order. After her mother died, she went back home to Mexico to attend the funeral, and when she tried to return to the United States she was caught at the border and deported, separating her indefinitely from her family.

  “What about people like her?” Durbin wanted to know. Would their bill allow any relief for the recently deported who would have qualified for residency under the new law, and who had left family members living in the States?

  The story tugged at Rubio’s heartstrings, but he also knew how complicated it would get to begin allowing such people to cut the line of visa seekers. He considered the issue in silence for a moment, trying to formulate an opinion, but before he could say anything, John McCain piped up.

  “You know what?” the Arizona Republican said. “That’s a tough story, but she knew goddamn well that if she went back over that border she could get caught.”

  Rubio was startled by the senator’s harshness. McCain had long presented himself as a model of compassion in the immigration debate. So much for Mr. Touchy-Feely…

  Durbin was visibly irritated by the eruption, but Senator Chuck Schumer quickly stepped in to mediate. He acknowledged how difficult the woman’s situation was, but then added, “John has a point. We can’t legislate by anecdote.”

  Rubio would come to appreciate Schumer, a long-serving New York Democrat, for his pragmatism and love of deal making. Whereas McCain seemed constantly preoccupied with controlling as much of the process as possible inside the room and hoarding credit outside the room, Schumer seemed genuinely motivated by a desire to get something done. Rubio had bonded with the New Yorker over their shared disdain for the perpetually dissatisfied immigration activists who kept showing up at both senators’ public events to wave signs and shout things at them because they had not perfectly conformed to their agenda. In private, Schumer would often boast mischievously about how he used the term “illegal immigrants”—over the strong objections of progressives, who preferred softer adjectives like “undocumented”—just because he knew it made the activists upset.

  After Schumer resolved the dispute between McCain and Durbin, the issue was dropped and everyone agreed to move on—until Bob Menendez arrived. The New Jersey Democrat often missed these sessions, or showed up late to them, and his colleagues knew why. Conservative news sites had been antagonizing Menendez for months with vaguely sourced reports that he had cavorted with underage prostitutes during trips to the Dominican Republic—and he was often frazzled and preoccupied with efforts to debunk the claims, which he firmly denied. (Evidence would later emerge that the Cuban government was spreading the rumors in an effort to smear one of the most vocally anti-Castro members of the Senate.) When Menendez learned of Durbin’s constituent, he was outraged that his colleagues were unwilling to make room for her situation in the bill, and he threatened, dramatically, to blow up the negotiations over it. This, too, would become a habit of his—something Rubio found endlessly frustrating (though occasionally amusing).

  Though Rubio tended to stay quiet during these meetings, he often made a point of reiterating to his colleagues in the room that whatever reluctant restraint the conservative movement was exercising at the moment when it came to immigration, their surrender shouldn’t be taken for granted.

  “If you guys think they’re going to go along with a bad bill just because they’re scared of losing the Latino vote, you’re crazy,” he told the senators at one point.

  Rubio said this mostly as a way of keeping the Democrats’ political bravado in check—but he didn’t entirely buy it himself. As he scanned the political landscape of 2013, he saw a Republican Party that was downright desperate to win back Hispanic voters, and getting a deal done on immigration was crucial. After all, there was a reason, Rubio thought, that he had been given such substantial leeway in the conservative press at the outset of this effort. Even if they weren’t willing to say it out loud, the Limbaughs of the world could recognize reality… Couldn’t they?

  Rubio got his answer in April, when the Gang of Eight finally introduced their 844-page bill—and all hell broke loose. Now several months removed from their stinging 2012 defeat, Republicans had rediscovered their passion for blocking Obama’s agenda and no longer felt the need to acquiesce to Democrats’ demands. The right-wing noise machine cranked up the volume with combative conservative websites like Breitbart waging a full-blown campaign of misinformation against the bill. The site immediately began publishing shocked-and-appalled stories about a provision in the legislation that would supply rural, border-dwell
ing Americans with cell phones so that they could more easily report illegal crossings to law enforcement. Breitbart dubbed them “Marcophones” and suggested that the bill was actually angling to give free cell phones to undocumented immigrants. The claim was patently false, but the story spread rapidly throughout certain nativist quarters of the online Right.

  Feeling cornered for the first time since he’d arrived in Washington, Rubio instructed his Senate office to push back aggressively against the false information. His aides spent the following days and weeks releasing detailed statements that vigorously debunked “myths” about the bill and called out certain conservative reporters by name for perpetuating them.

  Suddenly, Rubio no longer seemed like a team player to the Tea Party, but rather an enemy—someone to be reflexively distrusted. When, during a Spanish-language interview with Univision, Rubio misspoke in a way that made it sound as though the security measures of the bill were softer than they appeared, the conservative talk radio crowd exploded with outrage. Glenn Beck called Rubio a “dirtbag” and accused him of adopting the tactics of Hezbollah. “They say one thing in Arabic and then another in English!” he exclaimed, urging listeners to get off the “Marco Rubio bandwagon” once and for all. Meanwhile, conservatives were flooding the senator’s office with angry phone calls, emails, and letters accusing him of betraying the movement.

  Rubio was distraught by the intensity of the reaction. He continued trying to defend the immigration bill to the Right, but he became testy during radio interviews and obsessed with correcting the record at the expense of all else. On June 26, the day before the legislation was set for a vote, Rubio stood on the Senate floor and went through several of the ill-informed criticisms coming from conservatives, and begged them to fully educate themselves about the bill before making up their minds.

  “To hear the worry, anxiety, and growing anger in the voices of so many people who helped me get elected to the Senate, who I agree with on virtually every other issue, has been a real trial for me,” he admitted.

  The next day, the bill soared through the Senate on a sixty-eight to thirty-two vote. It was a tremendous legislative feat: the most significant overhaul of U.S. immigration policy in a generation had just earned the support of a huge bipartisan majority of lawmakers. But for Rubio, the victory was hollow. The right-wing backlash had created a climate that ensured the Republican-controlled House would never pass the bill—and the process had led to an epic collapse of support for Rubio on the right. That same week, a Rasmussen poll had landed with a thud in the senator’s inbox, reporting that his favorability rating among Republicans had dropped from 73 percent in January to 58 percent now—a fifteen-point swing that could only be attributed to his high-profile advocacy for the immigration bill. The poll numbers fed a new narrative in the national news media about conservative disenchantment with Rubio, and the same reporters who had only months earlier been writing about his rising star were now writing him off.

  As his advisers watched him grapple with the fallout, Rubio seemed to cycle through the stages of grief with the destinationless speed of a spin class instructor. Denial, then anger, then bargaining, then depression—and then right back to denial again. He felt like he was mourning the death of his career (or at least his White House dreams).

  In the coming months, as it became increasingly clear that the Senate’s bill had no chance of becoming law, a resigned Rubio began distancing himself from the legislation. He returned to his earlier support for a “piecemeal approach” to immigration reform that would enact small policy changes over time (something everyone knew Democrats would never go along with). And by October, he had fully withdrawn his support for his own bill, instructing his staff to put word out that he no longer believed the House should even vote on it.

  They broke the news of Rubio’s one-eighty by giving the “exclusive” to Breitbart.

  Jeb Bush’s entry into the national immigration debate that spring was a whole different kind of disaster. His book, Immigration Wars, was released in March and trumpeted as a bold manifesto by a man who had long been a leading voice for immigration reform in his party. But the timing turned out to be terrible. He and his coauthor had written the book during the 2012 presidential race, as Mitt Romney was stomping around swing states spewing hard-line rhetoric about “self-deportation” that drew approving cheers from conservative audiences everywhere he went. In that context, Jeb had made the calculated decision to scale back his vision, and use the book to call for only a pathway to temporary residency—not full citizenship—for undocumented immigrants. He had figured that going any further would make his proposals dead on arrival, immediately dismissed by most of his party as “amnesty.”

  But by the time the book actually came out, the Senate was in the midst of drafting a dramatically more ambitious bill that would, among other things, move to transition eleven million immigrants toward full citizenship. What’s more, these suddenly emboldened senators had somehow gotten Marco Rubio—hand-wringing, fence-sitting, anxiety-ridden Marquito!—to become the fresh, bold face of the effort. In an unwelcome role reversal, Rubio was suddenly the courageous man of principle leading with his chin—while Jeb looked like the overly ambitious politician making weaselly concessions to the Right for the sake of his future presidential bid.

  This was not supposed to happen. As a husband who had fled Texas decades ago in part to spare his wife the indignities of casual racism, and as a father whose blood had boiled when hecklers called his son a “spic” on the baseball diamond, Jeb despised the nativist wing of his party, and couldn’t stand the thought of being seen as someone who pandered to them.

  But here he was, now forced to promote a book that positioned him to the right of Sean Hannity on immigration. Caught flat-footed, Jeb stutter-stepped his way through an awkward, unimpressive book tour during which he seemed to reverse his position on citizenship multiple times, before finally offering, “I’m not smart enough to figure out every aspect of a really complex law.”

  Except, of course, that a central feature of Jeb’s appeal had always been that he was smart enough. He was the guy who thought hard, figured it out, tinkered with it until it worked. Everybody knew this. The Biltmore politicos, and the RNC coroners, and the Bush family loyalists, and the entire Republican establishment knew this. Throwing up his hands in resignation on an issue about which he cared deeply was antithetical to the Legend of Jeb—and rather un-Bush-like to boot.

  By the time he completed his miserable promotional tour—which, to top it all off, only managed to move about five thousand copies of his book—Jeb was ready to return to Coral Gables and lie low for a while. He was still leaving the door open to a 2016 bid, but he saw no sense in inserting himself into every intraparty squabble and national shoutfest over the next two years. That game was for the prospective candidates who didn’t have a stalwart, two-term record of conservative governing and a political family network that would spring into action with a snap of the fingers. It was for the lean and hungry.

  Both Jeb and Rubio had come to the cause of immigration reform from years spent striving and thriving in Miami’s fiercely competitive, one-of-a-kind, polyglot political scene. But their experiences couldn’t have been more different—and the lessons they took away would shape their distinct approaches to politics for decades to come.

  It was January 1, 1981, when Jeb and his young family first touched down on the tarmac at Miami International Airport, emerged from a commercial jetliner, and squinted out over the muggy, sun-drenched terrain they were now to call home.

  Columba viewed the new scenery through the eyes of a refugee. She had spent the past few years in Houston being subjected to a humiliating parade of prejudices at the hands of the Bushes’ wealthy, conservative cohorts, many of whom were suspicious of this Mexican girl who had managed to wriggle her way into the Texas aristocracy. There were racist jokes slurred by liquored-up oilmen, and judgmental remarks whispered among primped ladies in pearls, and dis
approving glares stretched across the all-white faces that always surrounded her, and finally one day she’d had enough.

  She gave her husband a choice: they could move to Mexico, or they could relocate to Miami, where her mother and sister had recently settled. Whatever they did, she would not raise their brown-skinned, bilingual children in that miserable place called Texas.

  Jeb, for his part, had greeted the ultimatum as an opportunity, and as he surveyed their new surroundings, he did so with the zeal of a conquering commander consumed by manifest destiny. In nineteen days, his father would be sworn in as vice president of the United States, and Jeb, now twenty-seven years old, no longer harbored any ambivalence about the family dynasty: he wanted in.

  Jeb knew that in order to prove his mettle, he would have to leave Texas. “There was an uncertainty about living in Houston, with my dad being from there and being vice president,” he would later explain. “I felt comfortable being someplace else and starting out on my own.” And in Miami—with its booming economy; its brash, vibrant multiculturalism; its noisy, Cuban-infused politics—Jeb had found the perfect place to establish his own distinct fiefdom in the Bush kingdom: he couldn’t have conjured a city more fully removed from his father’s genteel world of Texas blue bloods. “Miami is wide-open,” he marveled. “It’s a frontier town… It doesn’t have a lot of people with roman numerals behind their names.”

  Jeb and his family settled in a place called Pinewood Estates, a gated suburban subdivision covered in manicured lawns and swimming pools, and then he got to work. His first order of business was to make himself into a millionaire. He had always been taught that Bushes don’t run for political office until after they’ve made their fortunes, so as to avoid any suggestion that they might be bought or bribed. Jeb was blunt about his financial ambitions from the outset. “I’d like to be very wealthy,” he told the Miami News in 1983. “And I’ll be glad to let you know when I think I’ve reached my goal.”