An American Son: A Memoir

by Marco Rubio

  I kept a punishing schedule of speaking events, interviews and fund-raisers. I traveled every day but Sunday. My days began early in the morning and ran late into the evening. We did everything we could to keep our burn rate low. We often drove instead of flying, and we avoided renting cars. As often as possible, I stayed in my supporters’ guest rooms rather than in hotels. Many mornings it would take me a few seconds to remember the city I was in and whose guest room I inhabited. I was often hoarse from speaking. I spent so much time talking on my cell phone I developed a sore on my ear. Everyone on the campaign worked to the point of exhaustion.

  I began to believe that we would meet our goal. It would all depend on the New York event. On the morning of September 23, Jeanette and I boarded a flight for LaGuardia Airport. We had lunch with Mark Gerson that afternoon, and I made a few more fund-raising calls before we left for the Fanjuls’ apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The event was well attended, and while it didn’t appear that many people had brought checks, the total raised that night exceeded our goal. The next day I flew to Washington for a couple of interviews and a meeting with Senator Tom Coburn. Then we returned home to Florida, and I went back out on the road.

  More good news arrived on September 25, when conservative columnist George Will wrote a very flattering and encouraging account of our campaign. On a Sunday morning a month later, I was making breakfast for the kids when I thought I heard Will mention my name on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos. I turned up the television in the kitchen in time to hear him predict I would win the primary. Jeanette came into the room and I excitedly told her the news. “That’s nice,” she said, then handed me a bag of garbage and asked me to take it outside.

  I worked sixteen to eighteen hours virtually every day. I did Lincoln Day speeches, more interviews, more little fund-raisers. I missed my family. I wanted to wake up in my own bed every morning and have dinner with my wife and kids every night. But whenever I started to feel sorry for myself, I thought of my grandfather and my parents, and the years of thankless toil they had endured. How tired had they been? How often were they discouraged?

  In the long and hard days of the summer of 2009, I found the strength to go on by remembering where I had come from. I had done the best I could. With the support of my wife and friends, I had overcome my fears and was fighting for what I believed. Would it be enough to make a difference? I didn’t know, but I would find out soon enough.

  CHAPTER 28

  Winner of the Year

  PAT SHORTRIDGE CALLED ME WITH THE NEWS EARLY ON the morning of October 3. They hadn’t finished counting yet, but he was confident we had raised over a million dollars for the quarter. When we announced the total on October 6, the impact was immediate.

  In his daily blog “The Fix,” Washington Post reporter Chris Cillizza wrote, “What Rubio did with his fundraising showing over the past three months is ensure that the race he had hoped for will happen. That race? A choice between himself, a conservative, and Crist, a moderate, with national implications for the future of the Republican Party.”

  Adam Smith of the St. Petersburg Times reported, “Charlie Crist has a real race on his hands. . . . The hefty fundraising quarter establishes Rubio’s viability and is likely to spur more interest in the 38 year-old Cuban-American from Miami.” The executive director of the Club for Growth told Smith, “We’re certainly going to take a closer look at getting involved in this race.” A few days later, they would announce their endorsement of my campaign.

  To borrow a phrase used too often in politics, our million-dollar quarter was a game changer.

  The Crist campaign released its total two days later. He had raised $2.4 million, with now more than $6 million on hand. He still held a significant advantage, but we had every reason to be optimistic. Our strong quarter ensured we would continue to receive media attention. It would be months before we raised enough money to buy television spots to introduce me to voters. In the meantime, we had to rely on earned media, the free press, to get out our message. If I had had another poor quarter, the press would have ignored me, concluding I wasn’t a legitimate challenger.

  We encouraged people who liked me but were worried about getting involved in the race. Time and again, I met with prospective donors and conservative leaders who expressed their frustration with Crist. But a consultant or lobbyist had whispered in their ear that I couldn’t win. Now there was a glimmer of hope that I might.

  We had always expected our fund-raising would trail Crist’s. We just wanted to have enough money on hand near the end of the campaign to finance a last-minute surge that could overtake him. And we didn’t expect my poll numbers to improve until we raised enough to buy advertising. We were wrong. Two weeks after we announced our fund-raising numbers, two polls showed we had made significant gains on Crist without spending a cent on television. In August a Quinnipiac poll had Crist beating me by almost 30 percent. Quinnipiac’s most recent survey showed his lead cut in half. A Rasmussen poll released the same day gave Crist a fourteen-point lead, down from twenty points in August.

  Alex Burgos, my press secretary, released a statement that summed up my mind-set perfectly.

  We’re not breaking out champagne. We expect to remain behind for some time. We understand that with Marco Rubio’s growing momentum, the target on his candidacy will only get bigger.

  We had turned a corner. Twelve weeks earlier, I feared I couldn’t mount a credible challenge to Crist and had to be talked out of quitting the race to avoid embarrassment. There was still a long fight ahead of us, but we were clearly in the game.

  I was enjoying our recent success, but I still had to work three times harder than Crist to raise a fraction of what he raised. I had to meet with more voters than he did. I had to give more speeches, and give them well, day after day. It was starting to take a physical and emotional toll. I wasn’t sleeping enough. I didn’t get any exercise. I wasn’t eating properly. Dinner was usually something that came on a cardboard plate, eaten in the car as we drove from one event to the next. I usually went to bed after midnight and woke up before six the next morning for the first call of the day.

  But we were moving. I had buzz, and I didn’t want to lose it. Our improved poll numbers and fund-raising were attracting interest from the national press and from others. Mitt Romney called me just to check in, he said. He wasn’t ready to endorse me, and I didn’t ask him to. But I knew he was reaching out because he thought he might soon want to endorse me. National cable interview requests started to increase. Even the BBC covered a campaign swing through the Panhandle. Everywhere we went local TV crews were waiting. Local newspaper reporters followed us to every event. My higher profile made it easier to schedule more fund-raisers and attract more people to them.

  By the middle of November conventional wisdom believed the race had been transformed. Whispers were now heard from the Crist world that they realized they had waited too long to take the threat seriously and were now in free fall. They had hoped to score an early knockout, and almost had. Now they found themselves in a proxy fight for the soul of the Republican Party. They were confident their financial advantage would overwhelm me. Now they accepted I would have enough money to compete to the end. They decided they couldn’t wait any longer. It was time to attack.

  On November 17, the National Journal blog “Hotline On Call” reported the Crist decision.

  Buffeted by weeks of negative press and a newly threatening rival from the right, FL Gov. Charlie Crist’s (R) campaign will step up direct engagements with his opponent, insiders tell On Call. Crist will attack former FL House Speaker Marco Rubio (R), citing his rival’s failure to advance some conservative causes while leading the State House, for spending excessively while in the Speaker’s office and for dragging his feet on immigration legislation that many Republicans favored.

  Thanksgiving couldn’t come soon enough. I was exhausted, physically and mentally, and needed the four-day weekend to rest. The first vo
lley of Crist’s attack would launch just after the holiday.

  Moments before I took the stage on December 2 for a speech to Florida TaxWatch, an organization of fiscal conservatives, Crist’s communications director released a statement accusing me of hiding my real record of supporting “the largest tax increase in Florida history” and squandering “hundreds of thousands . . . in taxpayer dollars” and implying I had “tucked away” in the state budget $800,000 “for artificial turfs on Miami-Dade fields where he played flag football.”

  I had never been in political combat like this, and his attacks stung me. But my campaign did a good job of pushing back and discrediting them. The largest tax increase the Crist release criticized was the consumption tax I had proposed to replace property taxes as part of our property tax reform. It was a false charge because the plan would have reduced taxes overall. I had nothing to do with the artificial turf earmark—by their own admission, two other legislators had put it in the budget. Crist’s spokeswoman had also alleged I had presided over a banquet of pork for Miami when I was speaker. But as Florida’s most populous county, Miami-Dade always receives the largest share of the state budget. It has the biggest delegation in the Florida House and Senate, and many of the appropriations were sought by other members of the delegation, not me. State spending for Miami didn’t increase appreciably when I was speaker.

  It takes a while to get accustomed to attacks when you haven’t been a target of them before. And I didn’t have to wait long for the next one to appear. The St. Petersburg Times ran a story detailing my involvement with Florida International University. The gist of it was an allegation that I had steered money to the school when I was speaker and, in return, they hired me after I left office. In truth, the school’s share of the funding was in proportion to what it had received in past years, and what it has received since. Furthermore, all of the projects had been vetted and approved by the board of governors. None of them were linked to anything I had planned to do in the future. In fact, at one point the school had felt as if they had not gotten enough.

  During the last days of my last session as speaker, FIU’s director of legislative affairs, my former aide, Michelle Palacios, came to my office to complain about how the school was being treated in the budget. I thought this was unfair and it led to a pointed argument between us in front of Jeanette and David Rivera. I felt bad about it afterward. It had been a tradition in Florida for presiding officers to shower their hometown university with new projects. Given that I was the first presiding officer from Miami in many years, she was under tremendous pressure to deliver for the school.

  Because they were hurting me personally, I was certain these attacks were hurting my campaign. I was sure they would blunt our momentum.

  Our biggest fund-raising event in December was hosted by Senator DeMint on the fifteenth. I was having my picture taken with major donors when I received a text message from Scott Plakon, a freshman state legislator who had been one of the few to endorse me publicly:

  Congratulations on the new Rasmussen poll!

  I had no idea what poll he was referring to, but I immediately searched on my iPhone for an answer. On the Rasmussen Web site there was a satellite image of a hurricane bearing down on Florida, and in bold, a subject title I will never forget: “43–43.” According to Rasmussen, the race was now tied. I shared it with the D.C. crowd, who appreciated hearing the news but didn’t seem to grasp its importance. In Florida, the impact was immediate. Adam Smith, at the St. Petersburg Times, explained it succinctly: “Whether or not you believe the Rasmussen poll showing Charlie Crist tied with Marco Rubio, the governor’s inevitability argument is gone.”

  After weeks of attacks and intense press scrutiny, we were still gaining on him. The attacks weren’t working, at least not yet. Voters were worried about big things, and our plan was to keep our campaign focused on big things.

  Stung by the events of the last three months and especially the troubling trend in the polls, the Crist campaign had to reassure its supporters and donors. They released a memo about the state of the race that closed with an attack: I was “a typical double-talking politician” and “not the conservative he has painted himself to be. . . . On everything from taxes and spending to gun rights and cap and trade, his campaign rhetoric is very different from the reality of his record.”

  We had certainly gotten his attention. We held a Christmas party for the staff at our home the day Crist released his state of the-race memo. It was a much bigger group than had sat in my family room the previous July and tried to persuade me to stay in the race.

  On December 31, we released our own state of the-race memo. I think it more accurately reflected our state of mind than Charlie’s had reflected his.

  A lot of wild punches. And early negative advertising. And mudslinging mail. And anonymous websites. All repeated ad nauseam. So be forewarned. It’s coming. Very, very soon.

  Pat went on to describe the stakes of the campaign, which I believed had become more important than who won and who lost.

  The outcome of this election will, in many respects, help determine the future of the United States—whether your children and mine will have the same opportunities we had, and our parents before us had. Again, remember: this is not about us. It is about our country and our future.

  When I began the campaign, I just wanted to win. I just wanted back in politics. I wanted back in politics so bad that I had considered quitting the race to run for a different office. I had stayed in the race partly because I wanted to, but partly because I felt I didn’t have another choice.

  Months later, though, I had fallen in love with it. Maybe some of that had to do with the gains we had made and the national attention that was now focused on our race. But I think it had more to do with the people who responded to our message, who believed in me not because I was the front-runner, but because I believed the same things as they did. They were worried about the direction of the country, and they could see that I was, too. People who had never contributed to campaigns contributed to mine—people who couldn’t even afford to gave me a little. They didn’t do it because they liked me more than they liked Charlie Crist. They did it because they felt I would stand for the principles they stood for, and I could be trusted with their concerns about the country.

  We had expected a long, hard slog. We had assumed we would trail Crist until the last few weeks, and maybe never catch him. Yet as 2009 came to an end, we were tied and maybe even ahead a little.

  For more than two generations, my family had never achieved their ambitions. Their talents were unappreciated and unused. They deserved better. They hadn’t done anything wrong; they just had some bad breaks. Why was I succeeding? Why was I living my dreams? I wasn’t more deserving than they were. I wasn’t smarter or a better person. What was the difference between us that allowed me to attain so much in such a short time?

  America. America was the difference. I had been born a citizen of the greatest nation in all of human history. I was an American son. I was born privileged. And I was born, as all Americans are, with responsibilities, too. America’s greatness isn’t self-perpetuating. Each generation is responsible for the America we leave our children, for ensuring we are not America’s last privileged generation.

  I was on the verge of receiving a truly special privilege. The son and grandson of immigrants and exiles, I was entrusted with the hopes of my fellow citizens, with the dreams they had for their children. That was what this campaign had become to me. I carried the stories of the people who had come to believe in me, who didn’t care how far behind I was in the polls, who didn’t think I was crazy to run against a popular and powerful incumbent governor, who didn’t believe anything was inevitable in America. They wanted me to make a difference—to go to Washington and stand up for them, and offer a clear alternative to the direction that worried them. They believed in me, and I believed in them.

  On January 2, Adam Smith picked his “Winner of the Year” in Flori
da politics: Marco Rubio.

  Eight months ago even some of his biggest admirers were calling him crazy and shortsighted. Why in the world would the promising former Florida House Speaker launch a futile U.S. Senate campaign against an immensely popular sitting governor sure to raise vast amounts of money? . . . Today, Marco Rubio vs. Charlie Crist is among the marquee races across the country and Rubio is a star.

  I had “stuck to it,” Smith wrote. Yes, I had. But only because of the people who had stuck with me. Win or lose, I had been privileged, and I will never forget it.

  CHAPTER 29

  It Could Happen, but I Wouldn’t Bet the Ranch

  I DID MY FIRST INTERVIEW WITH NEW YORK TIMES REPORTER Mark Leibovich in November, and a second one in early December. I had been cautious and expected the worst. The New York Times is reviled in conservative circles as the official newspaper of the American left. But Mark’s questions were fair, and his interest in the campaign and the Tea Party movement seemed genuine and without bias. I felt the same way after I read the Times’s Sunday magazine cover story on January 6, “The First Senator from the Tea Party?”

  Some of my advisers believed the magazine’s editors had tried to hurt me by linking me to the Tea Party. But even if that had been their purpose, and I don’t know that it was, I wasn’t upset by the identification with the Tea Party. I was pleased with it, and considered it an advantage in a closed Republican primary. And however one feels about the New York Times, it has a reach few other publications have and influences the national media, including the television and radio news producers, as much as any other newspaper in the country. The week after the story appeared, we were deluged with media requests, all of which increased awareness of my campaign among Florida voters, and conservatives around the country, who were increasingly willing to donate to the campaign of the “First Senator from the Tea Party.”