An American Son: A Memoir (21 page)

I didn’t have a burning desire to be the first Cuban American speaker. But after Gaston’s bid failed, there wasn’t any reason I should dismiss the idea. Two speakers would serve before my class chose one. Whatever assignment I received from the next speaker, Johnnie Byrd, would determine whether or not I had a decent shot at becoming speaker in 2006.

I wanted to be majority leader. It would give me a platform to become involved in all the major issues addressed by the house, while a committee chairmanship would restrict my involvement to issues within my committee’s jurisdiction. But every supporter I talked to discouraged me from going after the job. They said I could kiss good-bye any ambition for speaker if I were majority leader. I would be in the vote-counting business, and would have to twist arms on difficult votes, making as many enemies as friends in the process.

I saw the job differently. First, there was no guarantee I would be elected speaker, but I had a good chance right now of joining the senior leadership of the house. I had confidence in my communications skills, too, and believed the majority leader’s job would give me ample opportunity to communicate the Republican message on important issues.

Mike Corcoran was a consultant to incoming speaker Johnnie Byrd who also did some work for me. I asked him to help persuade Johnnie to restructure the majority leader’s job, proposing that the majority leader’s responsibilities be limited to communication, and all vote-counting responsibilities given to a more powerful whip’s office. After several weeks of pitching, Speaker Byrd offered me the newly restructured majority leader’s job.

I had been whip in my first two years, and I was about to be majority leader. Soon, I would have to make another, much more difficult decision, a decision that would affect not just my political future, but the happiness of my family.

I
N ONE RESPECT, A CAMPAIGN FOR SPEAKER IS SIMILAR TO a primary campaign. You don’t need bumper stickers or signs or television ads, but you do travel the state and meet with the voters. They are a very select group of voters, to be sure. But as with any group of voters, their interests are various. Some colleagues want assurances their support would be rewarded with a committee chairmanship. Others simply support the candidate they like the best. Most, however, want to be with the winner, and wait to pledge their support to a candidate until they have a good idea who’s going to win.

I knew if I ran for speaker I would have to overcome several obstacles. I represented a district in Miami-Dade, the most populous region in Florida, and the least popular with house members from the rest of the state, who believed South Florida received a disproportionate share of the state’s budget. There had not been a speaker elected from Miami-Dade since 1971, the year I was born.

To have any chance at all, I had to have the united support of the Miami-Dade delegation, which has a long history of fractiousness. At least one of Gaston’s supporters in the delegation believed I had undermined his speaker’s bid by not ruling out a run of my own. A newly elected member of the delegation was upset with me because I had supported his primary opponent. I was far from assured of unified support within my own delegation.

A few weeks after he withdrew from the speaker’s race, Gaston asked to have lunch with me, and urged me to run. To his credit and my good fortune, he hadn’t believed I had tried to undermine him. He didn’t hold me responsible for the defeat of his aspiration to be Florida’s first Cuban American speaker of the house. On the contrary, he told me he had gotten the ball to the five-yard line, and was now relying on me to get it into the end zone. He was proud of how close he had come, and prouder still he had made it more likely that a Cuban American would eventually be elected speaker.

I decided to run, and from the start I made a series of terrible blunders. The first and most egregious was my failure to consult with Jeanette. She should have had a veto over my decision. I took for granted she would support the idea. My presumption was a mistake, and a selfish one, since Jeanette would have to assume even more of the responsibilities for raising our children and running our household than she already disproportionately shared. The travel and time the campaign required would come at the expense of my family. Jeanette would be publicly supportive of my bid. But privately, she resented the way I made my decision, and had every right to.

My second mistake was to let the
Miami Herald
know I would run before I informed most of the members in the Miami-Dade delegation of my intentions. I had conferred with a few of them about my decision, but most of them learned about it when they read it in the newspaper. They all eventually supported me, but many of them would show little enthusiasm for my campaign.

I opened a political committee to cover the expenses of my campaign for speaker. But I decided Jeanette and I would manage the fund-raising and reporting for the committee ourselves. That decision proved to be a disaster. I had estimated I would need to raise between $30,000 and $40,000 to pay for my travel, dinners and other events I would host, and to dispense campaign donations to Republican candidates. I seriously underestimated the costs, and raised and spent considerably more than I had anticipated. I was in over my head trying to do everything myself. I often used my or Jeanette’s personal credit cards to pay for many of the campaign’s expenditures. When I received my statement, I would spend hours trying to figure out which were political, and which were personal.

I asked Jeanette to serve as the committee’s treasurer, putting her in an impossibly difficult situation. She didn’t accompany me on most of my
trips or attend many of the events I attended in South Florida. She had to jog my memory to determine which credit card purchases were campaign expenditures, sometimes weeks after I had made them. It was an imperfect accounting system, to say the least.

Years later, my lack of bookkeeping skills would come back to haunt me. The press and Governor Crist raised the matter during my U.S. Senate campaign, implying I had pocketed money from my finance committee and used it to pay for personal items. It wasn’t true, but I had helped create the misunderstanding my opponents exploited.

The legislature’s 2003 session was a miserable experience for all involved. The legislature failed to deliver a state budget on time despite having a surplus of revenue. And the political capital Speaker Byrd possessed when he entered the office was exhausted before he gaveled the session to order.

I spent much of my spare time during the session cultivating personal relationships with members and with people who might influence them. I used Gaston to keep our delegation united in support of me, while I met with members from the rest of the state. In that effort, I had two key allies, Stan Mayfield of Vero Beach and Ralph Arza from Miami. Both had entertained the idea of running for speaker, but Ralph had decided to support me and persuaded Stan to do the same. As the first member from outside South Florida to back me, Stan was a hugely important recruit.

The morning Allan Bense was designated the next speaker, we began securing pledges. I was off to an early start with fifteen pledges—thirteen from the South Florida delegation, Stan Mayfield’s pledge and another from John Carassas, a colleague at Becker and Poliakoff.

My closest competitor was Dennis Ross. Dennis looked and comported himself like a speaker. He was a mature, intelligent and well-respected member of my class. He had ten pledges. Several of the other candidates had three or four. The race looked like it would be close and protracted, not unlike the Bense/Cantens race that preceded it.

I had a pretty good idea where most members stood. That summer, David Rivera had traveled the state and met with most members in his class. He took detailed notes of his conversations, and knew what each of his classmates thought about me. Some thought I was too close to Johnnie Byrd. Others didn’t like Stan or Ralph, and expected they would receive the
best leadership positions if I were elected. Others liked me, but weren’t ready to make a commitment yet.

Stan and Ralph devised a plan to collect second-choice commitments from members, so I would have the lead in pledged members and the lead in members who pledged to support me if their candidate dropped out of the race. It proved to be a smart move.

I was at home on a Tuesday night when David Rivera called to tell me he had just heard from someone in Lakeland, Florida, where Dennis Ross lived. Dennis had told friends he was dropping out of the race. I started speed-dialing members who had pledged to him but had committed to me as their second choice. The next morning, I drove up I 75 with my aide Sebastian Aleksander to districts in the western part of the state and appealed in person to members who had supported Dennis. By the end of the day, I had twenty-nine pledge cards.

On Thursday morning, I started reaching out to my rivals to convince them to drop out and support me. By Thursday afternoon the last of my competitors had quit the race. Not all of them committed to me, but I was the only candidate left. I had thirty-nine votes, and I rushed to get the rest.

On Friday, we chartered a plane and flew from Ft. Lauderdale to Tampa, where about twenty house freshmen were meeting at State Representative Kevin Ambler’s house to deliver their pledge cards to me. I invited Gaston to come with me. He had done so much for me, and I wanted him to be there to share in our historic success. But I invited so many people to fly with me there wasn’t a seat for David Rivera, my friend and most loyal supporter. He had done more for my candidacy than anyone else, and I left him to drive to Tampa on his own. Just as I had once taken Jeanette’s support for granted, so, too, had I taken David’s for granted.

Earlier in the week, all indications were it would be a long and hard-fought battle for speaker. By the end of the week, in a flurry of activity, I had secured all the votes I needed. Just four years earlier, I had been a city commissioner in little West Miami, and an unknown candidate in a special election for the house. Now I was on the verge of becoming speaker of the Florida House, the first from Miami in over a quarter century, and the first Cuban American ever.

I
WOULD NOT BE OFFICIALLY DESIGNATED SPEAKER UNTIL November 2006, three years after I had secured the necessary pledges, and in that long interim anything could happen. Rumors that an attempt might yet be made to challenge me began circulating almost immediately after the last of my opponents had quit the race. My first concern was to keep my voters on board, no matter what enticements might be offered them to reconsider their commitment.

Early in 2004, I hired Richard Corcoran to run my political organization. An attorney from Crystal River, Florida, Richard was smart and highly regarded. His first task was to reorganize my political committee, which was an accounting mess, and after a quick review he decided to close it. Once I appeared to have the votes to be elected speaker, money had begun pouring into the committee. It had to be carefully accounted for and wisely spent. We opened a new committee, which Richard would run, and hired a professional accounting firm to keep the books.

During my campaign for speaker, members repeatedly expressed to me their frustration with their lack of influence over how the house was managed and the policies the leadership decided to pursue. They resented the top-down management style of previous speakers, and insisted on a more collaborative process. I agreed with them, and assured them that as
speaker I would leave it to members to create and pursue policy priorities, while I oversaw the management of their agenda.

Richard and I spent many hours devising a leadership structure that would give more power to the members. Critical to the success of any leadership team is choosing the right people for it, and Richard and I gave a lot of thought to finding the right ten to fifteen people to serve as my inner circle. I was influenced by Jim Collins’s book
Good to Great
and his advice that a leader’s most important function was to get the right people on the bus and assign them seats where they would make the best use of their talents. Once I had the right people, the team would decide the bus’s destination.