by Marco Rubio
The next few days are among my fondest memories of the campaign. The crowds were large and enthusiastic and the events well organized. I was able to introduce my wife and children to thousands of people who had supported me for so many months, and they were able to witness the excitement of the campaign. My mother cried at every event. We had a heckler at one of them, a libertarian who was upset with me about something. He was far away from the stage, but he had a bullhorn, which made it hard for me to be heard. My mother cried because he disrupted the event.
An enormous crowd greeted us at a rally near The Villages in north-central Florida. My mother wept because she couldn’t believe so many people had turned out to see her son. And at each event, I would talk about how my parents had inspired me and shaped my character and beliefs. My mother cried every time I mentioned them. She couldn’t understand how her quiet, anonymous, itinerant life could inspire anyone. She had just wanted us to have a better chance to make something of ourselves than she had.
Now she saw with her own eyes the significance and scale of the undertaking. This wasn’t a West Miami City Commission race. It was a high-profile race in one of the biggest states in the most important nation in the world. This was her son, on the verge of accomplishing something she had never dreamed I might do. Later, she told me how overwhelmed Papá would have been to witness it, and how proud my father was of me before he died. If I hadn’t been so tired she would have made me cry.
The race had now entered its last phase. Absentee ballots were being mailed and early voting would commence in less than two weeks. Each passing day brought new polls that confirmed my lead. And each poll was a reminder to my opponents that time was running out. American political history is full of exciting stories of last-minute come-from-behind victories. But with nearly half the voters now casting their ballots before Election Day, the chances of that happening again, at least in Florida, are less likely.
I was aware of all this. Our own polls gave us a bigger lead than the public polls showed. My consultant Heath Thompson, who has a brilliant strategic mind but is not known for his optimism, warned me every day that the polls were bound to tighten in the final days. And every day I braced for it. But by mid-October, it still hadn’t happened. What had been clear to me since late September was now clear to the Crist campaign. The race could become competitive only if I made a major gaffe or if Kendrick Meek’s campaign collapsed.
Four debates were still on the schedule and each of them posed the risk of a self-inflicted wound. I began questioning my advisers about the wisdom of agreeing to so many debates when we were so far ahead in the polls. They kept reminding me the debates helped keep Kendrick afloat. I understood that, but I still wanted to get out of at least one of the debates. All we were doing, I argued, was giving my opponents a free forum to attack me. Finally, Jeanette got tired of my complaining and told me to suck it up and stick with the plan.
An unforced error on my part was outside the control of the Crist campaign. But they could try to get Meek out of the race. By the middle of October, the press was reporting rumors that Crist and Meek were discussing a deal. Nothing in Kendrick’s history or personality led me to believe he would seriously contemplate withdrawing from the race. Everything I knew about him after a decade of dealing with him told me quitting wasn’t in his DNA. But the chatter continued and grew stronger, and we began to worry that Crist might manage to make it a two-man race after all.
The Crist campaign began aggressively pushing the narrative that I was an outside-the-mainstream radical and that every vote for Meek was a vote for me. They got Democratic activists and even a few Meek volunteers to make the same case to the Times and Herald. Crist met with an influential Palm Beach Democratic club, which formally called on Meek to drop out of the race. They had planned to ambush Kendrick and urge him to withdraw at a meeting they’d scheduled with him, but Kendrick got wind of their agenda and canceled the meeting. On October 13, the Times and Herald political bureau reported the growing speculation and went into considerable detail about how Meek’s withdrawal would shake up the race.
The temptation to become overly cautious when you’re ahead is, I’m convinced, hardwired in the human brain. I had seen it many times on the football field. But, as the old adage goes, “the only thing a prevent defense prevents is a win.” No matter how much I wished I could have canceled the debates, I had no intention of playing prevent defense, and was intent on giving a spirited performance.
Crist came out with guns blazing in our debate on October 15. He leveled many of the same charges he had been making for months, and continued to present himself as the reasonable centrist running against a liberal Democrat and an “extremist” right-winger. I was ready for it, and delivered the counterpunch I had been preparing for days.
This notion, Governor, that you switched to become an independent because you’re some kind of centrist who’s looking out for the betterment of the country, quite frankly, is a fairy tale that only you believe. You’re running as an independent not because you took a principled stand on the issues; you’re running as an independent because you took a poll.
Crist unveiled one attack that I hadn’t prepared for, citing a local left-leaning Hispanic newspaper to argue I had turned my back on my “Hispanic family.” I used the attack to reintroduce my family’s story.
We’re all used to hard-knuckle politics in these debates, but that’s . . . offensive and outrageous for you to talk about me turning my back on my Hispanic family. Let me tell you about my family. My family worked very hard so that I could have opportunities they didn’t have. My father worked thirty, forty, sixty, seventy hours a week as a bartender. My mother was a cashier, she was a stock clerk.
He went after me again on Social Security, too, but I managed to turn the attack on him. I called it shameful. “You know my mom’s a beneficiary of Social Security—you’ve met her. And you know why I know it’s shameful, Governor? You can’t even look at me as I tell you these things.” In another year and with another messenger, the attack might have hurt. But in 2010, voters were concerned with President Obama’s agenda, and Crist, having reversed his positions on so many issues, didn’t have the credibility to attack mine.
I felt pretty good about my performance, although I worried a little that I had been too heated in my exchanges with Charlie. But the most encouraging response of the debate wasn’t mine, it was Kendrick’s. “I will not drop out of this race for any reason,” he insisted when asked directly about his intentions. “I am nominated by the Democrats of the state of Florida. I am in this race to run to be the next United States senator. And no, I am not running for second.” That was exactly what I had hoped to hear from him.
Our next debate was scheduled for a few days later. The day before the debate, President Clinton had appeared at a rally for Kendrick and gave a rousing testimonial to Kendrick’s virtues and his chances to win the election. Behind the scenes, however, he might have been delivering a very different message. Ten days later, a detailed report in Politico described Clinton’s efforts to persuade Kendrick to drop out of the race and endorse Charlie. Using his aide, the Florida native Doug Band, as an intermediary, Clinton argued that Kendrick could be a hero to the Democratic Party, credited with stopping my election to the Senate by clearing the field for Crist. If the report was true, we had come dangerously close to a genuine October surprise. Stephen Moore, writing in the Wall Street Journal, also reported Meek was on the verge of dropping out, and the speculation began to alarm us.
Kendrick later admitted Clinton had discussed the subject with him, but denied he had agreed to drop out. Politico’s sources insisted that he had, however. They said an actual date had been set for a withdrawal announcement, October 26, and Kendrick had twice agreed to it. The deal had fallen apart only after Kendrick’s wife insisted he still had a chance to win.
I don’t know how close Kendrick came to quitting. No one would have blamed him if he had. I had once been the candidate
with no chance to win who was seen as an impediment to my party’s plans to retain Mel Martinez’s Senate seat. I remember how discouraged I had been in the summer of 2009, how hard it had been to get up in the morning and campaign for a nomination I had no chance of winning, how close I came to quitting. Kendrick was working as hard or harder than I was, and he had little to show for it. He was out of money. He didn’t have any ads on the air or polls to encourage him. He didn’t have a realistic path to victory.
I gained a tremendous amount of respect for Kendrick Meek in the final weeks of the campaign. I thought he was often the best candidate on the stage in our debates. He kept his chin up, and fought as hard as he could despite the long odds he faced. I didn’t agree with him on many issues, but I knew one thing about Kendrick Meek. He was a man of character and dignity.
I think I would have still won had Kendrick withdrawn from the race. We had ads ready to air in the event he did. I think we would have made a compelling argument that Kendrick’s endorsement of Crist was an example of the backroom deals that were ruining American politics. I think it would have nationalized our race even more and triggered an enormous spike in our fund-raising. Many thousands of votes would have already been cast by then, and I think we would have hung on to win. But it would have made it a much closer race, and been one heck of a final twist in a race that had already had more than its fair share of surprises.
In the midst of all this speculation, Kendrick turned in another spirited performance in the October 16 debate. Crist delivered more of the same attacks on me, and added a new one, asserting I had changed my position on personal injury insurance legislation after the mother of my neighbor, a chiropractor, purchased our former home. The attack fell flat—first, because it was an obvious overreach; and second, because the press had already investigated the charge and found no evidence to support it. Finally, by the end of the campaign, after all his policy reversals and reinventions, Crist didn’t have enough credibility left with voters to make any attack stick. He continued to call me an extremist, but the charge fell on deaf ears. Voters knew me by now. The best decision we made was to introduce voters to my personal story before Crist could transform me into someone I wasn’t. They had heard my family story many times, in my own voice as I looked into the camera and told them who had made me the man I was.
I was comfortably ahead. We had more money and a better organization. I was going to win. At that point, it was very unlikely that anything Charlie or I said could change the outcome. I didn’t need to deliver a knockout punch in our next debate. But I went for one anyway.
Our fifth debate began on the morning of October 24, and was something of a home game for Crist. It was jointly sponsored by CNN and the St. Petersburg Times, and was held on the campus of the University of South Florida in Tampa, Charlie Crist territory. Candy Crowley of CNN moderated it, and the Times’s Adam Smith was also on the panel, so we expected to be asked again about the American Express card and my spending record.
We had our fair share of supporters in the audience, but Crist had many more, and he was visibly buoyed by them. The debate had the feeling of a last stand, and Crist’s body language suggested he had one last trick up his sleeve. I was unnerved.
He was very aggressive throughout the debate—maybe too aggressive. He repeatedly interrupted me. He used all of his time, and much of mine, to make sweeping allegations against my character. As the debate entered its final minutes, I was trying to answer a question from Candy when Crist interrupted me again and tried to fit in all his attacks in one exchange. The exchange is best captured by the transcript of the debate:
Crowley: Mr. Rubio, do you see Mr. Crist as a person who’s able to change the play when he had to, and that you’re an ideologue, or how do you—?
Rubio: Well, two separate questions… He changes positions on issues because he wants to win the election. I mean, it’s been documented by the St. Petersburg Times, the newspaper Adam works in—
Crist: That is so untrue and so unfair for you to interpret what’s in my heart.
Rubio: Can I finish the—There’s an article. I didn’t write it. The article was in the St. Petersburg Times, and it said that, basically, on the day he switched parties, he was sitting across the table from a reporter—
Crist: Well, let’s talk about another article that was in the St. Petersburg Times—
Rubio:—and picked up the phone—
Crist:—about the job you got—
[Cross talk]
Rubio:—and called the pollster, and the pollster told him you have a better chance of running as an independent.
Crist: You traded tax money to get two jobs at a university and a hospital—
Rubio: Can I—can I—
Crist:—by steering millions of dollars to—
Rubio: That’s categorically false. . . .
[Cross talk]
Crist: If people at home make $165,000—I don’t, and I’m the governor of Florida. But he traded money to get it. That was in the St. Petersburg Times, too.
[Cross talk]
Rubio: That is a false accusation. Not only is that a false accusation but it’s been a trend in this campaign. Any time we get into the issues, the governor wants to turn it into something else because he’s wrong on the issues.
[Cross talk]
Crist: Why won’t you release your RPOF [Republican Party of Florida] credit card and clear this up?
Rubio: On the ideologue issue, as of today I have now been—
Crist: And why is there a federal investigation into your reporting income?
Rubio: This is just one litany of falsehoods after another.
Crowley: Well, why don’t you—maybe he would let you—why don’t you—Can you answer this question, and then we’ll—
Crist:—across the state of Florida for the past year.
At the mention of the American Express card, Adam Smith jumped in:
Smith: Why not release the full IRS records, the full credit card statements from what you charged on the card?
Rubio: Adam, these questions have been answered now since February. My tax returns are public. I’ve gone well beyond the point of disclosure. The bottom line is people want to focus on these issues because they’re wrong on the important issues. This country has a $13.5 trillion debt.
Crist: He doesn’t want to release them because he doesn’t believe in transparency. I created the Office of Open Government in the governor’s office for the first time in the history of our state.
That was it. I’d had enough, and out came a line I hadn’t rehearsed or prepared:
Rubio: I’ve never had a heckler at the debate. I’ve always had them in the audience.
Upon hearing the heckler line, the panel, the audience and even Kendrick broke out into laughter. Crist appeared as if the frustrations of the entire campaign had finally gotten the best of him and erupted in one singular moment.
In the middle of the laughter, Crist tried to recover, using a line he had used against me in the spring, when I had complained about his attacks:
Crist: That’s the way it is. Welcome to the NFL.
Finally the laughter died down and Adam interjected:
Smith: Go ahead. Let him finish.
I gathered myself and pivoted to what the race was all about:
Rubio: I apologize. I mean, I’ve had this heckler going on for two minutes now.
Here’s what I’d like to be able to tell you about ideology and all this talk about—This is a national talking point now that the Democrats have adopted across the country.
Here’s the reality. I have now received the endorsement of six separate major newspapers in Florida, not exactly the place conservatives go to hang out, at editorial boards.
And the reason why they are supporting me is because I’m the only candidate in this race that’s proposing serious answers to the serious issues that face America. And that’s what this election is about at the end of the day.
It’s n
ot about you, Governor. It’s not about your ability to deliver the lines you’ve been planning for two weeks. It’s not about you, Congressman. And it isn’t even about me.
Crist: It’s about—
Rubio: This election is about the people watching whose country is going in the wrong direction, who understand that, if we keep doing what we are doing now, we are going to be the first Americans in history to leave our children worse off than ourselves. That’s what this election is about. I was hoping that’s what this debate would be about. And I hope that’s what the next eight days is about.
The debate ended a few minutes later. The race was over and everyone in the room knew it. As I watched Crist leave the debate site, I felt, for the first time in a while, sympathy for him. I knew how great his disappointment must be to find himself involuntarily out of office, after enjoying such acclaim only a year before. And I felt for his parents who were in the audience that morning. They were surely as proud of him as my parents were of me.
The final debate occurred a few days later, moderated by David Gregory of NBC. Compared to the preceding debate, it was mostly uneventful. Kendrick looked tired, which he had every reason to be. I was exhausted, but I had the encouragement of knowing I was going to win. I don’t know how he kept walking his long, hard road, but he did. He saw it through to the end, and I respected him for it. Charlie seemed dispirited, as if finally resigned to losing. He took a few shots at me, but they were tamer now. I don’t think he wanted the last impression voters would have of him to be the image of an angry, negative politician. Charlie had always been a charmer, a likable and adept politician who loved what he did for a living. I respect that, too. And I think he wanted voters to remember him that way.
We had finished the last of six debates. Five of them had been very spirited affairs. I had been campaigning for a year and a half in a race that had more twists and turns than I could ever have imagined possible. I had experienced every emotion. I’d been discouraged and angry, thrilled and proud. I’d been defiant and embarrassed, saddened and overjoyed. And now I was tired and ready for it to be over.