The Wilderness

by McKay Coppins

  The stakes were high, and they had taken preparations for the event seriously. Whereas Cruz and Rand had accepted the Kochs’ invitation practically on the spot, Rubio had tasked Sullivan with negotiating the terms of the event, and the operative proceeded to spend days peppering the organizers with logistical questions: Will they be standing or sitting? Where will he be on the stage? Who will be the moderator? Will the footage be live-streamed, or posted online later? Does the event violate the RNC’s rules?

  That last point was an especially sticky one. Just that month, the Republican National Committee had announced a sweeping overhaul of the party’s primary debate program. Looking to avoid the free-for-all savagery of the 2012 cycle—during which GOP candidates appeared in nearly two dozen debates to beat one another up on national TV—party officials now said there would be only nine sanctioned debates, and that candidates who took part in unapproved events would be barred. “While I can’t always control everyone’s mouth,” RNC chairman Reince Priebus had said, “I can control how long we have to kill each other.”

  In truth, the Rubio camp—which believed its candidate’s unparalleled skill as a communicator would make him shine onstage—wasn’t wild about the party’s crackdown. Sullivan, a swaggering, salty-tongued South Carolinian who didn’t mince words, had frankly told Priebus it was a bad idea.

  “Look, I’m for it until I’m against it,” Sullivan told him. “The second my guy needs another debate to stay alive, I’m going to denounce the RNC as backroom power brokers trying to silence the grassroots activists. I’m telling you, there’s gonna be a hashtag.”

  But for now, Rubio wanted to play by the rules, and so they had dragged the Koch organizers into a protracted negotiation with the RNC over how to keep the forum kosher. Sullivan had also pestered a concession out of the organizers to allow him to accompany Rubio into the closed-door event so he could be on hand to assist with the senator’s donor schmoozing—something neither Cruz nor Rand had even thought to ask about. By the time Rubio and his entourage finally arrived on Sunday, it was all the Kochs’ fed-up organizers could do to refrain from strangling Sullivan and dumping his body in a shallow desert grave.

  But if the past few years had taught Rubio and his team anything, it was that even with his natural charisma and uncommon talent as a speaker, the freshman senator could get only so far on the strength of personality alone. In the year and a half since his immigration flameout, Rubio had retreated from the celebrity-style media coverage that had once thrilled him. He did fewer TV hits, and his press team, led by Alex Conant, routinely turned down pitches from editors who came dangling promises of glossy magazine covers. In the Senate, Rubio channeled his energy and ambition toward policy, drafting serious proposals for welfare reform and boning up on international issues as a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. He began to distinguish himself as one of the party’s most energetic and articulate critics of President Obama’s Latin American policy, delivering forceful, detailed speeches from the Senate floor with scant notes and railing against the administration for not taking a harder line against communist dictators in Cuba and Venezuela. At a time when Rand was winning headlines and media buzz for his iconoclastic assault on the party’s hawks, Rubio fully embedded himself in the GOP’s foreign policy establishment, seeking counsel and winning praise from leading neoconservative thinkers and veterans of the Bush and Reagan White Houses.

  On a personal level, Rubio was training himself not to agonize over every bothersome bit of trivia that appeared in the press, and he was generally more even-keeled about the political speed bumps he encountered. He developed a mantra of sorts that he repeated every time one of his staffers informed him of a problem. “I’m not worried, man,” he would say with the laid-back lilt of a beach bum.

  Rubio’s advisers, meanwhile, knew it was their job to worry—to scout out the arena and work the refs before sending him into a game. He had always had enough raw skill to outplay everyone on the field; what he’d lacked was a good game plan. Not anymore.

  Rubio spent his couple of hours of downtime on Sunday before the event watching a football game in his room, and when the time came, he put on a neatly pressed navy suit and a dark purple tie before descending to the site of the forum. Even after weeks of back-and-forth with the organizers, Sullivan, watching Rubio take his seat, kicked himself for the stuff he had missed. The lighting on Marco on the end is terrible… Those chairs suck… I should have been able to advance the stage…

  But the worried nitpicking subsided almost as soon as his boss opened his mouth. It was clear right off the bat that Rubio had a greater command of the issues than his two colleagues, holding forth confidently on everything from Iranian nuclear negotiations, to the ISIS terrorist threat, to China. He was, by turns, passionate, funny, and authoritative—righteously railing against President Obama’s foreign policy one moment and deftly disarming a loaded question from ABC News journalist Jonathan Karl the next.

  At one point, Karl cited a speech delivered at the summit the night before by Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, who had argued that the Republican Party’s standard-bearer needed to be a governor with executive experience outside Washington. Rubio had learned of Walker’s comment earlier and found it preposterous. He had heard that the Koch organizers had tried to get the governor to join them in this forum, and that his chief handler, Rick Wiley, had pointedly refused, later telling a mutual acquaintance, “I’m not putting my guy onstage. That’s bullshit.” Yeah, Rubio thought. Because your guy doesn’t know anything about foreign policy.

  Responding, indirectly, to Walker’s remark, Rubio talked about the importance of having foreign policy experience. “It is important for the next president of the United States to understand the diversity of these challenges, to have a global strategic vision and an understanding of what the U.S.’s role in it is,” he said. “Now, does that mean that a governor can’t acquire that? Of course they could. But I would also say that taking a trip to some foreign city for two days doesn’t make you Henry Kissinger either.”

  The room erupted in laughter, and Karl again tried pressing him to respond head-on to Walker’s comments. Rubio’s lips curled into a sly half smile, and he said, “Well, if I was the governor, I’d say the same thing.”

  As the forum went on, it became almost embarrassingly obvious to Rubio’s advisers—those who were watching live in the ballroom and from home on a remote feed—that the event’s other two participants had not come to play. Cruz was doing fine, but his shtick seemed a bit tired as he acted out his characteristic drama, at one point issuing a dire warning that Iran might soon launch a nuclear strike in “Tel Aviv, New York, or Los Angeles.” Rand’s performance, meanwhile, was bizarrely ineffectual, especially given that he was speaking to perhaps the only roomful of Republican megadonors in the country that held sympathies for his libertarian-tinged foreign policy views.

  A few days earlier, Cruz and Rubio had been talking about the upcoming event, and both had predicted that Rand would try to use the setting to pick a fight with them.

  Sure enough, the Kentucky senator repeatedly tried needling his colleagues with his trademark brand of trolling—but rather than reduce his targets to indignant sputtering, Rand’s provocations were continually smacked down by Rubio. When the topic of defense spending came up, Rand tried to accuse his more hawkish rivals of recklessly dumping taxpayer dollars into the Pentagon at the expense of sound fiscal policy.

  “I’m not for a blank check,” Rand declared, arguing that running up the federal deficit to finance the defense department’s lavish spending habits was holding down economic growth.

  But Rubio stood firm: “Try economic growth while you’re under attack.”

  One Rubio adviser would later joke of Rand, “You almost wanted to pull the fire alarm for the guy.”

  As soon as the forum ended, Rand slipped off the stage and made a beeline for the exit, while Cruz got a glass of wine and struck up a conversation with a few
audience members. Rubio, meanwhile, was mobbed by multimillionaires who lined up to shake his hand, pile on praise, and offer to help him raise money. For the next hour, Sullivan stood just behind his boss, frantically texting names and phone numbers to their finance director up in her hotel room. Even David Koch himself returned multiple times to congratulate Rubio on his impressive showing and crack jokes about how the senator had pushed around poor Karl all night.

  The next day, the Republican pollster Frank Luntz conducted a straw poll of the summit’s attendees and asked them which of the weekend’s guests of honor was most impressive. Rubio won in a landslide.

  The senator felt exhilarated, finally on the verge of the comeback he had been impatiently awaiting for the past year and a half. What he didn’t yet realize was that Jeb Bush’s “messengers” were gunning for him next—and that they had been stockpiling their deadliest ammunition for years.

  On December 31, 2009, the campaign manager for Rubio’s fledgling U.S. Senate bid wrote a memo ominously warning staff and supporters of an imminent smear campaign that would soon be unleashed on their candidate.

  “[A] lot of wild punches. And negative advertising. And mudslinging mail. And anonymous websites. All repeated ad nauseam,” he wrote in the staccato state-of-the-race note. “So be forewarned. It’s coming. Very, very soon.”

  Rubio’s decision to enter the Senate race earlier that year had been a head-scratcher even for many of his most loyal fans. Florida’s moderate Republican governor, Charlie Crist, had already declared his intention to run, and with Crist’s high approval ratings and the support of the national party, he was all but guaranteed to glide through the election. Rubio’s bid was seen initially as foolhardy, and he had started the race a whopping fifty points behind Crist, with anemic fund-raising and a local press corps that treated him like a joke. But fortunately for Rubio, he was running in an election cycle with broad, built-in themes—an intra-GOP clash between outsiders and insiders, conservatives and centrists—that had the power to turn every race into a national story. Rubio’s small band of consultants had savvily seized on this dynamic by pitching their campaign to national conservative media outlets and Tea Party activist groups as a battle for the soul of the party. With the help of a glowing, well-timed National Review cover story—and the surge of national media interest that it prompted—Rubio was now galloping toward 2010 with momentum. Fund-raising had taken off, and polls showed the race to be a dead heat.

  But many in Rubio’s inner circle were nervous. In December, the Crist campaign had taken their first direct shot at their newly ascendant primary rival, claiming that as House Speaker, Rubio had “tucked away” $800,000 in the state budget for new Astroturf on the Miami-Dade fields where he played football. It was a relatively gentle jab as far as campaign combat went, and after a denial from the Rubio camp, the story fizzled. But it was clear now that Crist—and the GOP establishment that he marshaled—was churning its smear machine into gear, as the governor’s operatives frantically scavenged the state, from Miami to Tallahassee, in search of dirt on their opponent.

  Rubio’s team had heard plenty of rumors about their candidate’s past—but their shoestring budget hadn’t allowed them to undergo the “self-vetting” process that serious campaigns often relied on to sort out fact from fiction. Now, with Crist and co. digging for skeletons, a single question was consuming many in the Rubio campaign’s high command: What were they going to find?

  Making the situation more precarious was the fact that their candidate seemed to need a fainting couch every time he faced even mild criticism from political rivals or the press. In campaign politics, allegations of pork barrel spending are as common as navy suits and dimpled neckties—but Rubio had been positively wounded when Crist accused him of misusing state funds.

  How can they say that? he had mewed to his aides. They can really just make stuff up about me?

  For all his experience in state politics, Rubio had yet to endure the kind of character assaults that often define high-stakes, high-profile races like the one he was in. “I had never been in political combat like this, and [Crist’s] attacks stung me.… It takes a while to get accustomed to [it],” Rubio would later write. As the race continued to intensify, Rubio objected heatedly—and often emotionally—to each and every attack line unleashed by the Crist camp.

  When a state senator who was backing the governor referred to Rubio as a “slick package from Miami,” he was aghast and ordered his aides to cry foul.

  Dog whistle! Anti-Cuban! Racist!

  When opponents accused Rubio of steering state funds toward Florida International University in exchange for a faculty job after he left office, he worked himself into a furious tizzy.

  Outrageous! Slander!

  On the stump, Rubio continued to exude the vigor and optimism of an idealistic ideologue—but inside, the accusations were tearing him up. “Because they were hurting me personally, I was certain these attacks were hurting our campaign,” he later recalled in his memoir. “I was sure they would blunt our momentum.” But for all the agony they caused Rubio, the attacks were so far doing little to hold down his steadily rising poll numbers.

  Then, in March, a bombshell: the Miami Herald had gotten hold of statements for the Republican Party of Florida’s American Express card that Rubio had used while serving in state leadership, and the paper published a damning front-page exposé detailing his spending habits while in office. The funds were supposed to be reserved for official party business, but the statements featured page after page of expenditures that seemed to shamelessly disregard such rules. They included everything from $10.50 at an AMC movie theater, to $68 at a wine shop near Rubio’s house, to $765 at Apple’s online store. Rubio’s chief of staff had once charged more than $6,000 to cover food and lodging for his boss’s family reunion at a plantation resort in Georgia. And Rubio had used the party’s Amex to pay for $1,000 in repairs to his family minivan. The single item that got the most attention was a $134 charge to a hair salon, which prompted Crist to go on TV and speculate that Rubio had used the money to pay for an expensive back wax.

  Rubio claimed that he had personally reviewed the credit card statements every month when he was Speaker and reimbursed the party for all nonofficial expenses—but his defense did little to quell the coverage of the scandal. With the headlines mounting, he wailed that the press was recklessly hyping an untrue story without giving him a chance to disprove their narrative. Humiliated and depressed, Rubio shrouded himself in a veil of martyrdom. Once again, he was convinced that his candidacy was on the verge of a complete meltdown. That’s it, he thought. I’m finished.

  His aides spent the next couple of days playing what Rubio called “whack-a-mole” with the Florida press, scrambling to issue denials, demand retractions, and discredit allegations with whatever scraps of evidence they could round up. After surviving the first forty-eight hours with the candidate’s internal tracking numbers still intact, Rubio’s senior advisers concluded that the credit card story wouldn’t be a deathblow. But they were now more anxious than ever.

  Even though the Herald was staying mum about how it had obtained the credit card statements, it was obvious to any politico with a pulse that they had been leaked by Jim Greer, the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida and a loyal Crist ally. Such a flagrant violation of decorum—let alone the law—set off alarm bells at Rubio HQ because it signaled that Crist was panicked and playing dirty now. With the corruption charges failing to stick, they knew there was only one arrow left in Crist’s quiver: Rubio’s widely whispered-about “zipper problem.”

  Ever since he began to make a name for himself in Tallahassee, Rubio had been trailed by a persistent series of unsubstantiated rumors about his sex life. Jilted mistresses, sordid affairs, secret love children—Rubio’s team had heard it all, and the more seasoned strategists among them knew that such tittle-tattle was commonplace in every state capitol. But even as Rubio indignantly denied any suggestion of infid
elity, the unconfirmed gossip had proved difficult for him to shake, popping up frequently on local political blogs and via the endless behind-the-scenes speculation of his loose-lipped legislative colleagues.

  Some on his team were convinced that it was only a matter of time before Crist persuaded a reporter to write about the rumors. Though Rubio’s advisers found the claims to be ludicrous, they had such little regard for their rival that they had no problem believing that he would stoop to the level of gossipmonger. “You just knew he was out there floating this bullshit about philandering,” one senior Rubio adviser recalled to me. “We were bracing for it.”

  Greer would later tell me that the Crist campaign thought that it had, in fact, dug up potential evidence of adultery on Rubio’s part. He recounted a meeting with the governor’s staff in which their campaign opposition researcher briefed them on a trove of Rubio’s emails that they had recently obtained. “They had come across an email from a woman who had worked in his office for years, and who had ultimately gone on to a job at Florida International University,” Greer said. “The email said something like, ‘I can’t take this anymore. Why won’t you return my phone calls? Why are you doing this to me?’” According to Greer, Crist and his staffers were elated by the discovery, convinced that the email was written by an ex-lover that Rubio was now trying to cast aside. The governor proposed leaking it to the Miami Herald, but Greer pumped the brakes.