“I told the campaign manager and the governor one night over at the governor’s mansion that it was a mistake,” he told me. Greer argued that such an attack would be too nasty, and that they didn’t have enough ammo for it anyway: “I said, number one, there’s not enough there to know this was a mistress. And from my perspective, I felt, even if it is, I don’t think we need to go down this road.” He said the conversation ended with an agreement to hold off on any leaks until they further investigated the matter. The email in question never did surface publicly, and a spokesman for Crist later denied Greer’s account to me. In 2013 Greer would plead guilty to stealing $125,000 from the state party, earning an eighteen-month prison sentence—and ample reason to doubt his claims.
Nonetheless, the strategists on Rubio’s 2010 campaign became convinced that Crist and his cohorts were actively waging a whisper campaign to get the mistress rumors out—not just in Florida, but in DC, too, where they hoped to sow doubts among national party elites and opinion makers. Rubio’s team was especially irked by Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman from Florida who now co-hosted Morning Joe, the MSNBC political chat show that all of official Washington watched from their breakfast nooks and elliptical machines each morning. Scarborough, who remained plugged in to Tallahassee politics, frequently observed on air that Rubio was relatively un-vetted—and the candidate’s aides began to strongly suspect that Crist was spinning the cable host off the record in hopes of pumping gossip into the DC bloodstream.
“Crist would get on the phone late at night with his old buddy Joe Scarborough and feed him all this stuff,” one Rubio adviser later told me. “And then Scarborough would go on TV and say, ‘I don’t know about this Rubio guy. My sources in Florida say there’s more coming on him’… It pissed me off.” (Scarborough called these suspicions “completely ridiculous,” and told me his analysis of the campaign at the time was rooted in conversations with a wide range of Florida politicos. Crist, he said, “was not a source.”)
The affair rumors never managed to bubble up into the mainstream press in 2010, and even after Crist left the Republican Party to run as an Independent—turning the race into a three-way showdown—Rubio emerged victorious. On election night, the young senator-elect found himself watching from the edge of the courtyard in Miami’s Biltmore Hotel while Jeb Bush stood on a palm-flanked stage singing Rubio’s praises in front of an ecstatic crowd of Florida conservatives and scores of reporters.
“Bushes get emotional, so I’m gonna try my hardest…” Jeb said, appearing to choke back tears. “My wife told me, ‘Don’t cry, don’t cry.’ But Marco Rubio makes me cry for joy!”
As the euphoria of the win washed over Rubio, he was able for just a moment to stand still and enjoy the feeling. But the serenity would be fleeting. Rubio was headed to Washington now—and the whisper campaign against him was just getting started.
Two years later, when Rubio emerged as the most buzzed-about prospect in the 2012 Republican veepstakes, the attention placed a fresh target on his back, and journalists scrambled to find new angles on the young freshman senator. The Washington Post struck first with a report revealing that, contrary to Rubio’s claims, his “exile” parents had actually first arrived in the United States before Fidel Castro ever took power in Cuba. A few months later, I reported at BuzzFeed that Rubio had been baptized Mormon as a child, a biographical detail that he had never mentioned before—and one that prompted many pundits to question whether Mitt Romney could conceivably tap a running mate who shared his politically tricky religious background. The new revelations served to rev up the DC rumor mill, and soon the “zipper problem” rumors were resurfacing in the gossip among politicos. Taking note of the chatter, conservative columnist Marc Thiessen wrote, vaguely, that a “malevolent oracle is at work in Washington… seeking to undermine the ascent of a rising GOP star” by “suggesting that Rubio may look good on paper, but he cannot ‘pass vet’ for the vice presidential nomination.” Of course, no one in the staid, starchy DC press corps was willing to explicitly lay out the rumors dogging Rubio—but they gestured toward them all the time with broad suggestions that “another shoe” (a stiletto, perhaps?) was still waiting to drop on the Floridian.
In March 2012, Rubio charged Sullivan with the task of running his PAC, Reclaim America. Practically speaking, the strategist’s job was to lay the political groundwork for Rubio’s next move, positioning him for either a spot on the 2012 ticket or a future presidential bid of his own. Sullivan knew immediately what his first priority would be: putting an end to the incessant drip-drip of damning intel on Rubio, and figuring out exactly what skeletons might still be lodged in his closet.
To do the job, he sought out a Sacramento-based firm named MB Public Affairs, known in campaign circles for its “political vulnerability research” and tight-lipped discretion. Sullivan pulled more than $40,000 out of the PAC’s bank account to cover the company’s fee, but before setting the researchers loose, Rubio’s top aides had a frank talk with the senator. They warned that the process they were about to undertake would be about as invasive and unpleasant as a prostate exam—but just as necessary to his political health. Rubio concurred. Though the senator had taken issue with the way the Post handled the story about his parents, the truth was that the paper’s findings had genuinely surprised him: he had never heard the full story from his mom and dad. He realized now just how much damage could be wrought by a single, seemingly benign secret—even one that wasn’t his own.
The political rectal probe started right away, with the firm’s researchers eventually digging through Rubio’s messy personal finances and rounding up every piece of paper that had passed through his office in Tallahassee. Field operatives fanned out across the country, descending on the tiny Missouri town where his now-defunct former college once stood, and showing up on distant relatives’ doorsteps, from Miami to Las Vegas. Their mission was to dig up any and all dirt that political opponents might try to use against Rubio—especially anything likely to turn up in the vice presidential vetting process. That included quietly dispatching a private investigator to Florida to fully suss the extent of the infidelity rumors.
By now the senator’s longest-serving aides had an encyclopedic knowledge of their boss’s rumored dalliances, flings, and affairs—and though most of the stories contained all the verisimilitude of Fifty Shades of Grey fan fiction, the aides knew that a couple of rumors were particularly persistent in political circles. One dealt with a Tallahassee politico who had supposedly been impregnated by Rubio, and then went on to have an abortion. Reporters in Florida had attempted to run the story down over the years, and none had succeeded. But when Rubio’s credit card statements were leaked, they included references to multiple airline tickets purchased on her behalf, and even though she had worked with the then-Speaker on matters that included out-of-state travel together, liberal blogs were buzzing with speculation that he had raided GOP coffers to finance an alleged rendezvous with his paramour. Another, even more pervasive rumor on their radar held that Rubio was hiding a secret second family somewhere, and sending regular cash installments to support them (and keep them quiet). The details of this story varied substantially from one telling to another: sometimes the mother was a former Dolphins cheerleader; other times she wasn’t. Sometimes there was one kid living with his mom in New York; other times there were two kids and they lived in Florida. In one version, the entire relationship had taken place before Rubio ever met his wife; in another, the love child was the result of an extramarital affair that he was now desperately trying to keep quiet.
Rubio’s operatives found these stories impossible to reconcile with the devoted family man and conscientious careerist they knew and admired. But they also knew that smoke routinely preceded fire in political sex scandals, and they needed to find out for sure if there was a “bimbo eruption” looming on the horizon. Acting on explicit instructions, the research firm investigated the rumors and determined that they lacked co
ncrete evidence, which was enough to give Rubio’s advisers peace of mind. But along the way, the firm encountered enough dishy Miami-Dade politicos hocking titillating gossip to fill the entire newsroom of a supermarket tabloid. The firm concluded that, in many cases, the rumors were being fanned by the same South Florida Republicans who claimed to be Rubio’s supporters.
And unfortunately for him, many of those Miami gossips would, come 2015, join the cutthroat ranks of the Jeb Bush juggernaut.
Marco Rubio’s Rancho Mirage resurgence did not go unnoticed by Jeb’s lieutenants. The rave reviews from donors began surfacing from the desert almost immediately, and they confirmed what some in Jeb’s circle had already come to believe: Marquito was a threat, and he needed to be neutralized.
Despite the young senator’s second tier status in most 2016 polls, they believed there was ample reason to take him seriously. The private polling data that Romney had waved in Jeb’s face—rather pathetically, he’d thought at the time—contained evidence that Rubio would be perfectly poised to break out if he chose to run. He still wasn’t many voters’ first choice, but he had the personal favorability ratings of a puppy dog, and he was broadly well liked across the spectrum of primary voters. Plus, his Florida roots, fluent Spanish, and compassionate record on immigration meant that he appealed most directly to the same swath of the electorate that Jeb needed to dominate. The last thing they wanted in 2016 was a younger, handsomer, less white version of Jeb shaking hands and kissing babies on the Bushes’ turf.
Rubio, it was decided, needed to go.
For this new mission, Jeb’s team adopted a new code name: “Homeland security.” Few of Jeb’s lieutenants believed they would need to subject Rubio to the same sort of browbeating they had Romney in order to sideline him, and their commander agreed. After all, the kid’s entire Florida political network—the fund-raisers, the consultants, the well-placed allies—existed only because of the magnanimity of a certain former governor. All Rubio needed was a gentle reminder of his place in the pecking order, and he would prudently get back in line to wait his turn. And so the word went out to Jeb’s army of foot soldiers: Carry the message.
Over the next several weeks, Jeb’s messengers rallied his vast matrix of Florida allies in an effort to lock down support in his home state. They set up conference call pep rallies with hundreds of self-proclaimed “alumni” of the Bush gubernatorial administration (including many Rubio supporters) and ginned up excitement about getting the band back together. They moved swiftly to extract endorsements from state lawmakers—wooing them over brown liquor and red meat at the exclusive Governors Club near the capitol, and then encouraging them to make their allegiances publicly known.
When the Republican Party of Florida found itself in need of an interim executive director, Jeb’s supporters inside the organization made sure to install David Johnson, a reliable Bush loyalist who was not afraid to use his influential perch to voice his preferences. Speaking with a New York Times journalist in Tallahassee to report on how Rubio’s entrance into the race could force a Sunshine State showdown, Johnson said bluntly, “I hope that is not going to happen. It’s going to cause a lot of problems in the state of Florida.”
Meanwhile, Jeb’s ever-expanding political operation made a big show of its fund-raising supremacy, particularly in Florida. At an event hosted by his political action committee in Tallahassee, his team branded the donors like cattle, with large red stickers exclaiming “Jeb!”—and then they invited reporters into the formerly private meeting so they could ooh and ahh and tweet about the impressive herd of millionaires. And with all that cash, Jeb’s team began actively buying up every worthwhile Republican consultant in the state—especially those in whom Rubio was showing an interest.
Nine hundred miles away at the Capitol Hill offices of Rubio’s Reclaim America PAC, the message came through loud and clear.
Rubio’s advisers had hoped to stay off Jeb’s radar entirely, quietly raising money and assembling a lean and nimble staff while the juggernaut blasted away at bigger targets and boasted about its gargantuan fund-raising hauls. The loudmouth lieutenants on Jeb’s finance team were already bragging to reporters that they had set a $100 million goal for the first quarter of 2015—an astronomical sum that would shatter any and all fund-raising records if achieved. By contrast, when Rubio had assembled his top donors in Miami Beach at the end of January, his advisers explicitly asked that they resist, for now, any urge to hype their contributions in the media.
“Don’t try to steal Jeb’s thunder,” one Rubio adviser instructed them. “It’s like a pendulum. Let them pound their chest and build themselves up, and when they don’t hit their goal, it’s gonna come crashing back [in] the other direction.” In the meantime, they would go about their business without Jeb’s interference, and when the fund-raising totals were made public in April, Rubio’s haul would far exceed the low expectations.
But it was not to be. The Bush brigade had Florida on full, threat-level-red lockdown, and with the exception of a few loyal backers, Rubio wasn’t getting anywhere in his home state. His triumph at the Koch summit had created meaningful buzz in donor circles, but as he hustled around the country in search of money, he knew meeting his goal would be an uphill battle.
Rubio soon found that one of his most effective selling points with donors was his 2013 foray into the immigration debate. While the experience was still a black mark on his transcript as far as conservative activists were concerned, the wealthy contributors who made up the GOP’s business wing overwhelmingly supported more lenient immigration laws, for reasons both ideological and financial. In private meetings, Rubio often won donors’ praise and admiration by showing off his battle scars from the immigration fight. In public, of course, he continued to stay far away from the issue—but his advisers were increasingly optimistic that conservative voters would eventually absolve him of his legislative transgression. Sullivan had been using his “redneck” friends back home in South Carolina as a sounding board on the issue, and they generally chalked up Rubio’s lapse in judgment to good intentions and a sense of ethnic solidarity. As Sullivan put it to his one of his colleagues, “They say, ‘Look, immigration was his one problem, and he did it because he was brown, so he gets a pass.’” In the meantime, the Rubio camp was happy to cash the checks.
In March, they bagged their first whale in the fund-raising hunt. Billionaire Miami auto dealer Norman Braman committed to spend as much as $10 million to get Rubio elected president if he ran, a coup that was promptly leaked to the press. “I don’t pay any attention to that other distinguished Floridian,” Braman told the Washington Post when the paper called. “I respect Jeb Bush, but I think we need someone who represents the next generation.”
But even as Rubio’s team grew increasingly confident that they would surpass their fund-raising goal, they began to notice a curious pattern among the Republican donors who were turning them down. Many of them seemed to like Rubio’s ideas and message, but when they explained their doubts about his 2016 prospects, they often used the same vague, coded language: concerns about the wealth of “oppo” that could drag him down, or the “talk coming out of Tallahassee,” or the importance of nominating a “fully vetted” candidate. This, of course, was nothing new for Rubio—he had been trailed by such innuendo in the political class for years. But it seemed oddly top of mind all of a sudden in certain quarters of the GOP money world.
Eventually, word got back to the senator’s camp that Jeb’s close allies in Florida were working to revive the “zipper problem” meme in a last-ditch effort to freeze Rubio out of the race; they were circulating the rumors anew among donors and politicos and cautioning them to exercise due diligence before signing on with his campaign. From the scraps of intel Rubio’s team was getting from donors, it was difficult to tell how widespread or organized the whisper campaign might be, but some on Rubio’s staff believed they’d identified at least two of the culprits. The first was Ann Herberger, a Miami-b
ased political fund-raiser now on Jeb’s payroll whom Rubio had axed from his Senate campaign for failing to bring in donors. “Marco fired her and now she’s bitter,” a Rubio strategist told me.
The second culprit they’d identified was Ana Navarro. Few people inspired more acrimony among Rubio’s aides these days than the First Lady of the Biltmore, who they regarded as a flighty and spiteful socialite masquerading as a political strategist for TV. They resented how she had allowed reporters to quote her as a “confidante” or “adviser” to Rubio for years, only to bolt to Jeb the second he decided to run for president. They now regularly heard about her dissing Rubio to the important power brokers and politicos who filtered in and out of her boyfriend’s hotel, and at least one of the senator’s advisers was convinced that she was fanning the infidelity rumors. “That woman couldn’t say nice things about her mother,” said the adviser. “She’s just gonna say acerbic things for the sake of saying them.” (Both Herberger and Navarro denied spreading rumors about Rubio.)
Meanwhile, in a series of off-the-record conversations, Jeb’s “messengers” tried to convince a number of influential figures in political media that they had the goods on Rubio. Among these was Joe Scarborough, who by now counted himself skeptical whenever somebody told him Rubio still had an explosive career-ending secret lurking in his past. “Everybody who runs against him says he has girlfriends, or financial problems. They throw a lot of shit at the wall,” Scarborough told me. “It’s the same thing from the Jeb Bush camp. They keep telling me, ‘Oh, we’ve got the thing that’s going to take him down.’ But nobody’s ever produced anything that we all haven’t read in the Tallahassee Democrat.”
To many in Rubio’s orbit, the most maddening part of the unkillable zipper meme was not the thousands of dollars they’d already spent trying to debunk it, or even the fact that Jeb’s people seemed so dead set against a competitive primary that they’d resorted to shameless gossipmongering: it was the double standard at work. After all, Jeb had faced his own rumors of adultery in his day. In one of the more enduringly bizarre episodes of his governorship, a reporter had confronted him at a bill-signing ceremony about rumors that he was having an affair with a former model who had worked closely with his administration. Jeb had indignantly, and emotionally, denied the “hurtful” gossip, but the incident gave a Vanity Fair writer who profiled him shortly thereafter license to detail the other unsubstantiated Jeb rumors swirling around Tallahassee. And yet no one in the GOP establishment seemed to be wringing their hands over Jeb’s “zipper problem.”
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