by Marco Rubio
LIFE WAS GETTING HARDER FOR GOVERNOR CRIST. HALFWAY through the legislative session, he was starting to lose his influence. His once immense popularity that he had used to intimidate the legislature had waned, as poll after poll showed him trailing me by twenty points. He was a lame duck, and Republican legislators began to assert themselves, knowing he would be out of the governor’s office next year. They passed a series of conservative bills on issues ranging from merit pay for teachers to property insurance reforms to mandatory ultrasound tests for women seeking an abortion—all these would present a challenge to the governor. If he signed them, the press would conclude he was trying to shore up his appeal to conservative primary voters. If he vetoed them, it would be taken as a sign he was going to run as an independent despite his denials to the contrary.
I was feeling more confident that the worst of the attacks were behind me. I took Easter Sunday off and spent the day with my family at Veronica’s house. I noticed my father was out of breath after he got up from his chair to get a glass of water. I asked him about it, and he admitted he had been experiencing shortness of breath for a while. He had seen the doctor, who suspected bronchitis and prescribed a cough suppressant.
I had an event the next day with Rudy Giuliani, who had decided to endorse me. He was still very popular in Miami, especially among Cuban Americans. We unveiled his endorsement in Little Havana. I think Rudy believed I was the better candidate, but there was no mistaking he was also intent on settling his unfinished business with Charlie. He never mentioned Charlie by name, but when he told the crowd, “When Marco gives you his word, he keeps it,” everyone knew what he was talking about.
My parents came to the endorsement and got a kick out of meeting Rudy. My dad struggled to catch his breath as he walked from the car to the event. I was increasingly worried about him. He was never one to complain, and he didn’t let on that he wasn’t feeling well. But there was no hiding it. He was plainly in ill health.
The next milepost on the campaign would be our financial report for the first quarter of 2010. Expectations were now reversed. I was assumed to have raised more money than Crist, and Crist’s people were busy inflating expectations in the hope I would fall short of them, which they would attribute to the negative stories about me that had dominated the news in March. I sent an e mail to my supporters on April 7, announcing that we had raised $3.6 million. The figure stunned observers, even those who had believed the Crist campaign’s exaggerations. Most impressively, over 95 percent of my donors hadn’t maxed out their contributions. We now had fifty thousand donors, and almost all of them could still donate more.
If anyone had any doubts that we were in control of the race, they were erased when Crist tried to release his totals quietly on a Friday afternoon, the preferred time for announcing bad news. He had raised $1.1 million. We had outraised him three to one.
Rumors were rampant now that he would leave the Republican Party and run as an independent. He issued another obligatory denial. Then his campaign announced they were spending a million dollars on television ads in Orlando and Tampa. Crist had hoarded his money in past campaigns, waiting for the last few weeks of the election to exploit his advantage. To spend such a sum on ads this early indicated to me that he was planning one last attempt to improve his support with Republican voters before the qualifying date for the Republican primary. If it didn’t work, he would run as an independent. Either way, we weren’t taking any chances. We scheduled a three-day bus tour across the state for the middle of April, around the same time his ads would be on the air. We would kick it off in Orlando.
I had just dropped the kids off at school on the morning of April 12, the day before the bus tour, when my cell phone rang. It was my father. He was very short of breath, and asked me if I would take him to the hospital. I was shocked. He never admitted to being sick and dismissed every illness as little more than an inconvenience. He had to be very ill and very frightened to ask me to take him to the hospital.
I drove immediately to his house and found him waiting on a bench outside. Fifteen minutes later we were sitting in the waiting room at Baptist Hospital. They ran a battery of tests, and later that afternoon the pulmonologist came into my father’s room and asked to speak with the family. My sisters and I stepped into the hallway, where he delivered the bad news. My dad’s lung cancer had returned, and his emphysema had progressed considerably. There were no surgical options, he told us. He advised us to meet with an oncologist, but in his opinion, considering my father’s age and the advanced stage of his emphysema, chemotherapy wasn’t a good option, either. Barbara and I were still probing him for treatment options, when Veronica asked the question neither of us wanted to ask: “How long does he have?”
“With treatment, maybe eight to twelve months,” he said. “With no treatment, considerably less.”
Just as the news my father wouldn’t survive the year was sinking in, staff called to tell me Crist had just gone on air with a brutal attack ad. He e mailed it to me. In a small waiting room at Baptist Hospital, just minutes after I’d been told my father was terminally ill, I watched a thirty-second spot linking me to my successor as speaker, Ray Sansom, who had been forced to resign from office. The ad captioned the word “indicted” under Sansom’s picture, and “subpoenaed” under mine.
All my life my dad had taken care of me. He had driven me to two hospitals when I had a bad stomachache until he found a doctor who would diagnose my problem. When I had injured my knee playing football, my father went with me every day to rehabilitate it. When I came home rather than stay in Gainesville waiting for my last final exam, he had driven me back to school and sat for hours in a Burger King waiting for me to finish my exam. Even when I was grown and married, my dad took me to the hospital when I suffered from stomach flu on Easter Sunday in 1999. He had always been there for me—always—and had never asked for anything from the rest of us. I wanted to be there for him.
We decided to go ahead with the first part of the bus trip, but announced that my father’s cancer had returned and we had to cut the trip short so I could make arrangements for his care. I did an interview with Sean Hannity on the evening of April 13, from The Villages in north-central Florida. At the end of the interview I asked Sean if I could say hello to my dad in Miami. I knew he was watching. He always was.
I returned to Miami and cleared my calendar for the next few days. We had him discharged from the hospital and moved him to Barbara’s house, which was just a few blocks from my house. I spent much of the first day making certain he had oxygen there. The next day, I took him to get a PET scan to determine whether his cancer had spread. It hadn’t, and his oncologist thought it was worth a shot to see if he could tolerate chemotherapy. My sisters believed that, given his age and emphysema, chemotherapy would only debilitate him more rapidly and make his last few months of life unbearable. But, like me, they couldn’t accept the idea of letting his cancer grow if there was a chance we could arrest it. I pushed for the chemo, and my dad consented.
I drove him to his first chemo treatment and got him situated in the chair where he would receive the chemo over the next several hours, leaving him with a portable radio tuned to a baseball game and a sandwich from Subway. I went home reflecting on the end of the cycle of life, when the child takes care of the parent.
Encouraging my father to undergo chemotherapy proved to be a terrible mistake. He didn’t respond well to it. He lost a lot of weight and all his hair. He stopped after three treatments. I had made a very bad call, and my dad had suffered for it.
It took me a while to get back into a frame of mind to continue the campaign. My heart wasn’t in it. I knew my father wanted to see me win. Even in his suffering, he watched Fox News all day long, waiting for news about my campaign. Back I went, into the thick of it, and soon the campaign’s rhythm, its highs and lows, the good and the bad news, began to preoccupy me again.
On April 15, Quinnipiac released another poll that gave me a huge lead. By now, another poll w
ith me ahead wasn’t really news. But this poll got my attention because it also found that, were Crist to run as an independent, he would have a narrow lead. As soon as I saw it, I knew it would get Charlie’s attention, too.
Until then, we had asked ourselves whether Crist would leave the Republican Party to become an independent. But that was the wrong question. In Florida, you can retain your party affiliation and still run in a general election under the designation of “no party affiliation.” In other words, Crist didn’t have to leave the GOP to run in a three-way race in the fall. He just had to qualify as a “no party” candidate by filling out the appropriate paperwork and paying the filing fee.
No one had asked Crist that question. So one of my consultants, Alberto Martinez, pitched it to several reporters. Miami Herald reporter Marc Caputo asked Crist on April 15, “Will you withdraw from the Republican primary?” Crist responded, “That’s the last thing on my mind right now.” It was an obvious evasion. By now, we all knew that was exactly what he was considering.
Just as he had done a year earlier when he had dragged out his decision to run for the Senate, Crist again became the constant object of speculation about his intentions. Whether or not he would run as an independent was the hottest political question in the news. Suddenly, he wasn’t the struggling former front-runner in the GOP primary anymore. He had once again become Charlie Crist, man of intrigue. He milked it for all it was worth, and then fate gave him the perfect issue to potentially change the direction of the race.
Republicans in the Florida legislature had worked the entire session on a bill instituting teacher tenure and merit pay—the reforms that conservatives love and teachers’ unions hate. The debate had become very heated. The teachers’ unions used social media and protest rallies to build opposition to the legislation. It was an impressive, well-executed, grassroots effort that caught the bill’s supporters off guard. The legislature passed it anyway, and sent it to the governor. He could either sign it and please conservatives who had deserted him for me, or he could veto it and please the teachers’ unions, many parents and a growing number of voters who had rallied to the teachers’ unions’ side. I never had any doubt which course he would choose.
He vetoed the bill on the afternoon of April 15, and the next day he was greeted as a conquering hero at a celebration rally held at Alonzo and Tracy Mourning Senior High School in Miami. Suddenly Facebook and other social media were inundated with teachers and even union officials thanking Crist, and urging support for his Senate bid as a reward for vetoing the bill.
Some people in my campaign began to panic. They believed Crist had seized a rare and perfectly timed opportunity to transcend traditional politics and win the election in a three-way race. They thought he would be able to put together a coalition of moderate Republicans, centrist Democrats, independents and teachers’ unions. I was less worried about it. I recognized he had managed in a single stroke to generate enthusiasm for his campaign and open a path to victory in the fall. But I knew, too, he would have to sustain the new enthusiasm over an entire summer and the beginning of the new school year until the general election. That was a steep hill to climb. Furthermore, if anyone should have been worried, it was Kendrick Meek, the expected Democratic nominee. The teachers’ unions were part of his base, not mine.
Over the weekend there were more signs Crist was getting ready to run as an independent. He pulled his ads comparing me to Sansom off the air, and rather than replace them with another ad, he asked that his money be returned. He was saving his money again.
On the afternoon of April 19, Rob Jesmer, the executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, sent an e mail to Republican donors, affirming his view that Crist would not run in the Republican primary. He concluded, “Whether or not you supported our endorsement of Governor Crist, we all share the same goal of keeping the seat in Republican hands. To that end, if the Governor decides to run independent . . . we will support Marco Rubio in any way possible.”
That same evening, for the first time, Crist admitted what everyone already knew: he was seriously thinking about running as an independent. “I’m getting all kinds of advice,” he told the press corps with a chuckle. “I take my cues from people in Florida. That’s what I care about. . . . This is a decision that has to be made by the thirtieth, and I want to do what’s right for the people of our state.”
The next week was dominated by speculation about Crist’s intentions. It was clear to me what he was going to do. Meanwhile, far offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, the oil rig Deepwater Horizon was about to explode, a disaster that would soon have an impact on the campaign.
The rest of April was fairly uneventful until it was time to qualify for the ballot at the end of the month. We held a filing announcement in West Miami on the twenty-seventh. We chose as the site a small city park just a few blocks from my house. The park had sentimental value to me. I had played there as a kid after we returned from Las Vegas. I had taken pictures of Jeanette and my parents there that I included in a mail piece in my first campaign for West Miami commissioner. We held Amanda’s first birthday party there.
My father’s breathing had become so labored that we had to drive him in a car right up to the stage. After I made brief remarks in English and Spanish, I sat down at a table and signed the qualifying documents. My father sat to my left. He was nearing the end of his life—a life that had begun over eight decades earlier in Havana, a life that had known pain, hunger, suffering and more than six decades of hard work. Now his younger son might be elected to the U.S. Senate in seven months—an achievement that seemed unlikely to me just a year before, an achievement that would have been unimaginable to him when he arrived penniless in his new country over half a century before. It was the last time he would appear at any of my public events.
Later that evening, word spread that Crist had scheduled a major event in his hometown, St. Petersburg, for the evening of April 29. There wasn’t any doubt or drama anymore about what he intended to do. He would run for the Senate as an independent. At 9:07 on the morning of April 29, I received a text message from Al Cardenas regarding news he had just received from Crist’s campaign manager Eric Eikenberg.
Eric Eikenberg just called me to let me know that he gave cc his 2 week notice yesterday—confirmed cc is running as an npo. Keep this to yourself for now.
Alex Leary of the St. Petersburg Times wrote an article a few days later that described the factors that had influenced Crist’s decision. Leary had spent the entire day before the announcement with Crist. He wrote about people who had called to encourage the governor. According to Crist, Donald Trump, Arnold Schwarzenegger and tennis great Chris Evert had all urged him to run as an independent. So had a good many teachers and school superintendents. So had people in the street he had met that day, who expressed to him their frustration with partisan gridlock. But the most telling incident included in the article had occurred at 11:12 a.m. that day, when Crist’s pollster told him he was winning a three-way race for the Senate by twelve points.
I listened to his announcement on the radio as I drove Anthony to his T ball game. Crist decried partisan politics and condemned Republicans in the legislature as recalcitrant. He didn’t want to work for a political party, he said. He wanted to work for the people of Florida. He wanted to do this for them. That might have all been true. But as Alex Leary’s article made clear, most of all he wanted to win. And so did I.
CHAPTER 33
Behind Again
IT HAD BEEN QUITE A RIDE ALREADY. I HAD GONE FROM A sure loser without a viable way to quit the race to the surging front-runner. Now the stars had aligned again for Crist. The bickering Florida legislature and an unpopular bill had given him the opportunity to wear the mantle of a postpartisan populist. He made the most of his opportunity and reclaimed the lead in the race for the U.S. Senate. A Rasmussen poll released on May 4 confirmed he had retaken a lead, though by a smaller margin than Crist’s pollster had given him. Ma
king matters worse, a new issue loomed that gave him the perfect platform from which to take command of the race.
The explosion on the Deepwater Horizon had resulted in an uncontainable oil gusher that was pouring fifty-three thousand gallons of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico, threatening Florida’s coastline. Predictably, support among Floridians for offshore drilling dropped dramatically. I was asked by a reporter on May 4 if I still supported offshore drilling. I responded by acknowledging the horrible threat from the oil spill, and confirmed I still supported offshore drilling. I didn’t believe we could become energy independent without it. Crist saw his opportunity and pounced. Although he had supported drilling in 2008, he was now 100 percent against it. It was a smart political move.
I knew that as long as oil was spewing uncontrolled into the Gulf, offshore drilling would be unpopular. But when the well was capped and the spill contained, over time support for offshore drilling would increase. People understood the country needed all its energy resources. But in the present crisis, support for drilling, like support for Social Security and Medicare reform, would be a test of principle over politics. My only hope was that voters would give me credit for being serious about the issue and not opportunistic. Time would tell.
Another issue that had come to the fore began to hurt us as well. I was troubled when the Arizona legislature passed an immigration bill that allowed law enforcement officers to demand proof of legal residence from anyone they had lawfully detained and suspected of being in the country illegally. I thought the law would lead to racial profiling. As I started to hear more about Arizona’s illegal immigration problem, I recognized that Arizona’s situation was different and more severe than Florida’s. Florida doesn’t share a porous border with a neighboring country. It’s surrounded by ocean. We certainly have an illegal immigration problem, but it is mostly caused by people overstaying their visas.