by Marco Rubio
We had the wind at our back. Throughout the fall, more than a dozen county GOP executive committees had held Senate primary straw polls. I had won every one of them. Some reporters were skeptical about the relevance of straw poll victories since the committees were mostly comprised of the most active and conservative elements of the party. But those were the people most likely to turn out in the primary, and I was encouraged by their results.
We used the straw polls to build our momentum and encourage our supporters. When you’re thirty points behind in the polls, you use any piece of good news to generate enthusiasm. Maybe the straw polls didn’t mean that much. Maybe conservatives were just sending the state party a message that they didn’t want to be ignored and, having made their point, would ultimately decide to vote for the front-runner in the August primary. A January straw poll in Pinellas County would give a clearer indication of where the race was heading, and its results would be difficult for anyone to ignore. Pinellas is Charlie Crist’s home county. A defeat there would be devastating to Crist, and his campaign worked very hard to ensure that didn’t happen.
I was at home the night of January 11 when the state committeeman from Pinellas, Tony DiMatteo, called me. A native New Yorker, Tony D (as everyone calls him) was one of my strongest supporters and had encouraged me to stay in the race. He had been a longtime Crist supporter who had been turned off by the governor’s pivot to the left. He had also been Rudy Giuliani’s county chairman when Crist had used the Pinellas Lincoln Day dinner to announce his support for John McCain days before the Florida presidential primary.
“I have some bad news for you,” Tony said in his thick New York accent. “You only got 67 percent of the vote.” I had won the GOP straw poll in Crist’s hometown 106 to 52. There was no way to spin the result. Charlie had had a very bad night. Later that month, Senator DeMint and the Senate Conservatives Fund made an online “money bomb” fund-raising appeal for me, hoping to raise $100,000 for my campaign. It raised $400,000.
In late January Quinnipiac released its latest poll. For the first time in the race, I held a narrow lead. Later that same day, the Crist campaign announced its fund-raising total for the last quarter, and we announced ours. Crist had raised $2 million. We came close to matching him, with $1.75 million. Most of his donors had given the maximum donation, which meant they couldn’t give him any more. Malorie Miller predicted he would start to run out of donors and his fund-raising totals would decline every month. The great majority of our donors gave well below the maximum and could continue to donate to us throughout the campaign. Crist still had a four to one advantage in money on hand, but the trend was strongly in our favor.
For the first time since I got into the race, I would rather be us than them, I thought. I was feeling pretty good about myself and my chances when I was brought swiftly back to earth the next day. I attended a candidates forum in Tallahassee before an Associated Press editors meeting, where a collection of editors and reporters from all of the state’s newspapers were waiting to give me the front-runner’s treatment. They grilled me mercilessly for a solid hour. My press secretary, Alex Burgos, no rookie in dealing with the press, was shocked by the level of hostility in the room. Most of the questions were tough, but fair. Some of my interrogators, however, were openly antagonistic, framing their questions in an almost dismissive way. The editorial page editor of the Palm Beach Post, Randy Schultz, practically shouted his questions. It was not my favorite memory of the campaign, and I’m sure it knocked me off my game a little.
That weekend, Tim Nickens, an editor at the St. Petersburg Times, wrote an editorial, “The Week Crist Got Back on Track.” Nickens began by calling me “the darling of the windbag Washington conservatives” and he praised Crist’s performance at the editors meeting as “particularly sharp.” He called my performance “pitiful” and argued that Crist would make up any ground he had lost come August. Of the possibility of my winning the race, he concluded, “It could happen, but I wouldn’t bet the ranch.”
If Crist had in fact begun a comeback, it wasn’t showing up in the polls yet. A new Rasmussen poll was released on February 1 that gave me a twelve-point lead over Crist. The poll was taken before Nickens’s editorial, however. Once voters read the editorial, maybe they would change their minds. It could have happened, I suppose, but I wouldn’t have bet the ranch on it.
Another poll was released that day by Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio. Based on its results, Fabrizio had some surprising advice for Crist. He should quit the race for the Republican nomination and run for the Senate as an independent. It was a provocative suggestion, but no one took it very seriously at the time. It was clear the race was starting to spiral out of Crist’s control. We expected his campaign would begin punching wildly in the hope of landing a hard hit that could reverse our momentum. State senator Mike Fasano, a big Crist supporter and someone I had considered a mentor, struck first. In a Miami Herald interview, he called me a “slick package from Miami.” “Miami” is code for a lot of things in Florida insider politics, among them the perception of Miami as the home of corrupt Cuban American politicians. We cried foul to the press, but reporters dismissed it as whining. I told myself and my staff we would just have to drop it and learn to live with it.
We kept the campaign focused on the things we could control. We commemorated the first anniversary of the now infamous stimulus bill rally where Crist and President Obama had embraced by staging our own event at the same place. We did a joint event with a national conservative fund-raising organization, FreedomWorks, in Ft. Myers. We broadcast it over the Internet and did several national television interviews to draw attention to it. We used the event to anchor what we called a “stimulus bomb,” an all-out Internet fund-raising appeal on the anniversary of “the hug.”
On February 17, Jeanette and I flew to Washington for a speech at the annual CPAC conference of conservative activists. I was receiving a great deal of national press coverage by now, but the CPAC speech was my first chance to showcase my message before almost the entire Washington press corps. I was unusually nervous about it. Normally, I am a confident public speaker, but this one gave me the jitters. I was worried expectations for my speech were too high and I would fall short of them, disappointing conservatives from around the country and leading reporters to wonder what all the hype was about. The speech went very well, and was well received. You always worry that your impression might be different from the press’s, but every press account acknowledged that, in my Washington D.C. debut, I had done what I had to do.
There were minor bumps here and there, but we had won all but a few days over the last four months. Our fund-raising was outpacing our every projection. We were ahead in the polls. After months of hounding Crist for debates, he had finally agreed to one, scheduled for late March on Chris Wallace’s Fox News Sunday show.
By late February, we started to hear rumors Crist was seriously considering running as an independent. It still seemed implausible to me. Crist had spent his entire political career in the Republican Party. His financial base was in the party. He couldn’t walk away from that, could he? Jim DeMint had heard the same rumors. His Senate Conservatives Fund launched another fund-raising appeal for me in a Web ad couched as a poll. “Will Charlie switch parties?” it asked.
Everything was going our way, and nothing was going right for Crist. Another Rasmussen poll gave me an eighteen-point lead. Our fund-raising for the first two months of the quarter had exceeded our total for all of 2009. It was clear Crist was becoming desperate. His political director and new media consultant left his campaign. And his attacks became sharper and more personal.
Until now, Crist had left the attacks to his staff and supporters. Desperate now, he began to attack me directly. He gave an interview on February 24 in which he began by asserting his confidence he would win the primary, and then he went on the offensive. “You really want to judge the character of somebody, give them power and then you’ll see what they’ll do,�
�� he observed, then accused me of failing that character test.
He comes here to Tallahassee . . . he hires twenty people at $100,000 a piece. He spends . . . a half million dollars to make the place where the house members eat nicer. . . . This is a fiscal conservative? Not by any definition I have seen. . . . You carve in for a buddy of yours the opportunity to sell food on the turnpike, and who has to veto it? The governor—who he calls the moderate. Who’s the real fiscal conservative here? His first budget that he presents to me as speaker of the house when he had power—almost $500 million of earmarks. I’ve got to pull out my pen and veto it.
The statement was filled with absurd lies, but Crist was in a lot of trouble and he needed to do something dramatic and do it quickly to stop my momentum before I couldn’t be stopped. He needed a game changer. We realized this. And we knew he would need to use his most effective attack against me soon. We didn’t know what it would be. But when I landed in Jacksonville on a late February afternoon, I found out.
CHAPTER 30
March Madness
WHEN I USED THE AMERICAN EXPRESS CARD ISSUED BY the Florida GOP, I reviewed the statement every month and paid for unofficial purchases directly. The Florida GOP didn’t pay for any of them. But I always knew that if those statements ever became public, they could be made to appear as if I had used party funds to pay for my private expenses.
The state party chairman was a close ally of Governor Crist. We knew he had access to the records of my American Express charges, and we suspected he would eventually leak them to the press. When I landed in Jacksonville, I had a voice mail message waiting from Beth Reinhard at the Miami Herald. Someone had given her copies of my American Express statements.
We spent the next forty-eight hours trying to answer a long list of questions she sent us. The bulk of the charges were for airline tickets, mostly flights between Miami and Tallahassee. They were easily explained. I had billed the party for the flights because I often mixed political business with official travel as speaker, and couldn’t charge the taxpayers for them.
There were various other charges that were legitimate but still harder to explain. For example, there were a number of charges to a wine store called Happy Wines. What Beth didn’t know was that Happy Wines has a sandwich counter. It’s located just two blocks from my district office, and I had used the card to buy sandwiches for working lunches in my office, a legitimate expense. There were grocery charges as well, which she assumed were purchased for my family. In fact, they were for coffee and soft drinks for visitors to my office. State law prohibits the use of state funds for refreshments, so I had used the American Express card to purchase them.
There were some personal charges as well. The largest single expenditure concerned the Melhana Plantation in Georgia, where my family had held a Thanksgiving Day reunion shortly after I had been sworn in as speaker. My travel agent, who had the party card on file, had inadvertently given the plantation the wrong credit card. I caught the mistake at the time and we paid the charges directly to American Express. Not a single cent from the state GOP was used. Complicating the matter, Richard Corcoran, my chief of staff, had charged expenses at the Melhana to his card as well. There was an innocent explanation for that, too. We had planned to have a dinner the night of my swearing in at Melhana for my leadership team and their spouses. We reserved it with his GOP card. But after talking to some of them, we decided to cancel the dinner. The holiday was approaching and most of them wanted to go straight home after the session. The dinner and rooms we had reserved were then credited to my family reunion. We paid that directly to American Express as well. We gave Beth proof we had sent checks to American Express to pay the Melhana bill. She mentioned it near the bottom of her story.
Further complicating all of this was the fact that the Florida GOP had been embroiled for months in disputes over the party’s spending. Alleged overspending was one of the reasons Jim Greer had been forced to resign as party chairman in early 2010. The party’s expenses had interested the Tallahassee press corps for years. Now the veil was partially lifted on how the party spent money. A feeding frenzy ensued.
The same story ran in both the Miami Herald and the St. Petersburg Times. Then television stations picked it up, some of them inaccurately reporting that the party had paid for my personal expenses. We spent the next two days playing whack a mole with the press, trying to correct the record. For his part, Crist said his campaign had nothing to do with the story. He said he found the whole episode “pretty disturbing,” but voters would have to come to their own conclusions.
Making matters worse was my absence from Florida. I was on a national fund-raising tour with stops in Chicago, Arizona and California. Meanwhile, the story was leading a number of television newscasts in Florida, especially in Miami. Jeanette would later admit to me how hard it had been for her those few days I was traveling. She encountered friends and supporters who were too polite to say what was on their minds, but she could tell they believed I was in trouble.
My supporters wanted to hear from me. They still supported me, but they needed to hear my side of the story. For two days and nights the story had been reported on local television without a direct response from me. I finally finished the fund-raising tour and boarded an early-afternoon flight to Miami to face the music.
I had a speech the next morning to the Christian Family Network of Miami. Crist and I were both scheduled to appear. I didn’t want to go—I knew it would be a media circus. But I had to face them and the voters.
Crist spoke first. He had a swagger about him that morning, as if he believed he had finally found the magic bullet that would rid him of his rival. He was confident and it showed. During his speech he used the word “trust” fifteen times. Two candidates are asking for your vote, he told the audience. “Who do you trust with your vote?” he asked. They could trust him, he assured them. He had a record of doing what was right, a record that showed his good character. And character, he reminded them, is what someone did “when they think no one is looking.” Everyone in the room knew exactly who he was talking about.
I, on the other hand, had no swagger. I was shaken, and I’m sure it showed. I had survived other attacks, but this was different. I was embarrassed by how the story made me look and I was worried. I was convinced this attack would work.
After my speech, I came down from the dais and faced the press for forty minutes. I answered every question they asked and didn’t end the press conference until they ran out of things to ask me about. There was nothing more I could do. I had explained my side of the story. Now I would have to wait to see what the impact would be.
The Herald had a hot story on its hands: an underdog makes an improbable climb to the top only to be undone by his own mistakes. They wrote a series of follow up stories and blog posts raising any number of questions about my future. Would the state attorney prosecute me for inadvertently using the party’s charge card to pay for personal flights? Would prominent conservatives they had called back off their support for me? What about the $133.35 charge to the barbershop? What was that for? A haircut? Mani-pedi? Moisturizing treatment? They were items purchased for a raffle at a local GOP event, but that fact hardly deterred the wild speculation.
Things got even stranger when Crist appeared on Fox News and claimed he had heard the barbershop charge was for a back wax. He repeated the claim the next day. The reporters who covered it wrote the governor appeared “animated” and “excited” to talk about the subject. “The issue is trust,” Crist told the St. Petersburg Times. “The issue is whether or not people can trust the speaker to spend their money wisely. I mean, clearly they can’t.”
On March 9, Crist’s campaign opened yet another line of attack. The Herald reported that while I campaigned as a fiscal conservative, internal documents from the governor’s office linked me to $250 million in “earmarks.”
This was less than accurate as well. The majority of the spending items the article referred to had been
sponsored by other legislators. My name appeared on documents linking me to them because when called by the governor’s office during the veto review process, I had expressed support for them. But there is a big difference between being a supporter of a project and the actual sponsor of a request, a distinction the article never tried to make. However, nuanced defenses don’t do well during a time of frenzied reporting and the Herald’s headline read, “Rubio’s Campaign Image Belies History of $250 Million in Pork Requests.”
“Sounds like Porkus Rubio to me,” Crist helpfully added. He had me on defense for the first time in months, and he wasn’t about to let up. His campaign spent the rest of the month making one related attack after another.
The St. Petersburg Times ran a story titled “Marco Rubio’s Lavish Rise to the Top,” examining the spending of my own political committees and insinuating I had used them for personal gain.
An editorial in the St. Petersburg Times said, “These disclosures are just the latest to show how Rubio exploited the perks of political office and subsidized his lifestyle as he climbed to power.” Beth Reinhard asked for my tax returns, to see if I had amended them to reflect the illicit charges Crist had alleged. Then Reinhard and Adam Smith at the Times teamed up on a story about my former chief of staff’s use of his party American Express card. Their main allegation was that we had hired a car service when we attended a GOPAC conference in Washington D.C. in 2006 and had spent $5,000 on rooms at the Mandarin Oriental luxury hotel. There was a good answer for that, too, of course. We had stayed at the hotel because that’s where the conference was held. And we had hired a car service because we had a large group of people with us, and it was more convenient and no more expensive than hiring cabs for all of us.