An American Son: A Memoir (29 page)

I was frequently invited to address a proliferating number of so called Tea Party rallies. The conservative and libertarian activists who attended the rallies had formed an informal alliance to protest the stimulus bill and the accelerated leftward drift of government policies. They were focused on one thing—government’s growing role in the national economy—and they weren’t just angry at Democrats. They were mad at Republicans, too.

My experience has been that the vast majority of the people you will meet at a Tea Party event are regular folks from all walks of life. They were dentists, teachers, accountants and construction workers, many of whom had never been part of a political movement before but were genuinely frightened by the country’s direction and felt compelled to speak out in opposition.

I don’t think their concerns were new to American politics, but their sudden prominence in the national debate was fueled by the confluence of two unique factors. In a single action, the president had monumentally exacerbated concerns about government spending and our massive national debt. And the widespread access to social media gave people the means to communicate those fears and organize their opposition without relying on the convening power of a national political party. With Facebook, Twitter, e mail and texts, anyone could become a political organizer.

In addition to birthing the Tea Party, the stimulus bill would lead to something else as well: the hug that would come to define Charlie Crist. Shortly before Congress passed his stimulus bill, the president looked for a place to hold a campaign-style rally to promote his plan, and a Republican ally to give it bipartisan legitimacy. He found the place in Florida, and the Republican ally in Charlie Crist. On February 10, President Obama arrived at a rally in Ft. Myers, Florida, a city devastated by the housing crisis and subprime mortgage meltdown. Waiting for him was Charlie Crist, who had already declared his support for the stimulus bill. He had traveled to Washington to lend the White House a hand in the effort to convince Congress to pass it, and had lobbied members of Florida’s congressional delegation to vote for it.

Crist introduced the president at the Ft. Myers rally, and when the president made his way to the podium the two men embraced each other. In the months to come, we would use that image to devastating effect.

That embrace reminded Republicans of all the things Crist had done to
build his popularity at the expense of the party’s. He had run for governor as a self-proclaimed Jeb Bush Republican, and then in office had done everything he could do to distance himself from his predecessor’s policies. He had repeatedly left Republicans in the lurch as he announced policy initiatives, without their consultation, that betrayed their principles. He ignored, and often mocked, their views. He misread the times and his party, and believed the path to political prominence as a Republican was to emulate the language and philosophy of Democrats. By endorsing the stimulus bill, he had abandoned Republicans in Florida’s congressional delegation and exposed them to greater political risk for opposing it. Had the embrace symbolized only Crist’s self-interested political maneuvering, the entire episode wouldn’t have amounted to much. But to many Republicans, and especially to the Tea Party movement, it symbolized the Republican Party’s fear of the left and its acquiescence to the rise of big-government intervention in the private sphere as the answer to the nation’s problems, with all its worrisome implications for America’s future.

The embrace was covered by the press, but it didn’t garner much notoriety in the immediate aftermath of the event. Republicans in Tallahassee just shrugged their shoulders. They were accustomed to Charlie breaking ranks to do whatever he believed was in his best interest. They didn’t believe they could do anything to prevent it.

He had that aura then—the aura of a popular and masterful political tactician, whose charm and charisma gave him the freedom to do as he pleased. He didn’t need to demonstrate detailed knowledge of important issues. He could speak on any topic using nothing but clichés. He could poke conservatives in the eye repeatedly. He had a 70 percent approval rating. Nothing could hurt him. Florida had never seen anything like him. He was invincible.

I watched all this and privately seethed. Crist’s example symbolized the problem with Republican leaders generally. They were afraid to oppose the president and take a stand against the conventional wisdom that the country had moved left. If he wanted to, Crist would likely become Florida’s new senator, and he would go to Washington not to fight for the convictions of conservatives, but to ally himself with the Democratic president who was intent on defeating them.

In my anger, I often complained that someone should run against Crist
in a primary and make the argument that America remained a center-right country and conservatives deserved to be represented by at least one of the national parties. Charlie Crist’s election would be a major setback for conservatives, which ought to motivate them to oppose him. “Then why don’t you do it?” responded Jeanette, who was often the audience for my complaints. With that simple question, she exposed me as part of the problem in the Republican Party. At the time, I was just another Republican who worried about the future of my party and country in private, but refused to risk anything to do something about it. I wanted somebody to take on Crist, but I didn’t want to do it myself.

Jeanette embarrassed me with the truth, but I tried hard to deceive myself. I accepted that Crist would be impossible to beat. Even if someone managed to make a race of it, Crist would bury his opponent in negative ads. I spent much of my two years as speaker fighting Crist’s policies to little avail. I was used to losing to him. And, I rationalized, if he ran for the Senate, I could run for governor. Having a conservative back in the governor’s office was important, too. But I couldn’t get her question out of my mind. She was right. I was behaving just like the politicians I criticized. I wanted to be someone more than I wanted to do something, and I preferred the path of least resistance to my ambition.

I continued my tour of the speaking circuit, met with donors and began to hire consultants. After every speech, people would tell me they had been waiting to hear someone articulate a conservative message without apology or obfuscation. They told me they were tired of settling for the least bad alternative, tired of being told to vote for less conservative candidates because they were more electable. They wanted to vote for someone who wasn’t embarrassed to think and talk like a conservative, and they hoped it would be me. It was heady stuff. I was flattered by their attention. But I still thought taking on Crist in a primary would be a suicide mission. So did every political consultant with whom I discussed the idea. The smart play for me was to run for governor, or to be really safe, for attorney general.

Jeanette accompanied me to Kissimmee, where I was scheduled to address the Osceola County GOP. As I waited to take the podium, I mentioned again that I was leaning toward running for governor if Crist declared for the Senate race. “Oh, I guess all you want is a title,” she replied.

I was stung and frustrated by her criticism, and mystified. Jeanette
really isn’t political, and she’s well aware of the sacrifices she’s had to make to support my political career. I couldn’t understand why she felt so strongly about the question. Every political veteran I knew thought Crist would be impossible to defeat, and advised me to run for another office. Why did she have to make me feel so guilty for doing what was the obviously practical thing? Because she was right. She was willing to accept the sacrifices a Senate campaign would impose on her, but not, it became increasingly clear, if I ran for office simply for the prestige of the title. She would bear whatever burden she must if I were acting from conscience, but not if I were fighting for nothing more than my vanity.

Nevertheless, our conversations on the subject as well as my conversations with a small group of friends who agreed with Jeanette always ended when I became angry. How would I raise the money to beat him? How would I defend myself from his attacks? Who would risk making an enemy of the most popular politician in the state by supporting a candidate who couldn’t win? How would I find clients and build a business after I lost, if the whole state knew Crist would want to punish me for running against him? Why was this so hard for them to understand?

I started to change my mind in late March, when the Crist people began sending me the message they could reach out and hurt me any time they pleased. I heard from some of my clients, including Florida International University, that they had been approached by the Crist people and informed the governor was disappointed they had hired me. Some of his operatives were openly challenging me to run, telling people they hoped I would run so they could finish me off once and for all.

Had the Republican Party chairman or Crist himself reached out to me personally in the spring of 2009, they could probably have persuaded me not to run. I’m not proud of it now, but I think if they had acknowledged my concern that the party had strayed too far from our conservative principles, I would have walked away from the Senate race. I was looking for a face-saving way out. Instead, out of pride and hubris, they chose to intimidate me. And I, too, reacted out of pride. They didn’t respect me, and it made me angry. I became more comfortable with the idea of running for the Senate, whether or not Charlie Crist decided to stand in my way.

Pride, prestige, respect. They drive our ambitions, and sometimes become them. We don’t often recognize how they can blind us to their
ultimate insignificance to our happiness even though the evidence is often in plain sight. I sat in my home office one warm spring afternoon, making calls to prospective donors. Jeanette was running errands, and our younger son, Dominick, was alone in his playroom next to the office. I heard our home alarm sound to indicate someone had opened a door or window. I assumed Jeanette had returned and so, lost in conversation, I thought nothing of it. But after a few minutes, something stirred my awareness and I hung up the phone to check on Dominick. He wasn’t in the playroom. I ran to the back of our house and found the door open. My heart began to race. We have a small pool, only a few feet deep, but big enough for a small child to drown in. That’s where I found my little boy, floating facedown.

I jumped in and pulled him out. He was silent for a few seconds—seconds that felt like minutes. Then he began to cry and vomit pool water. I was shaking as I held him, imagining the calamities that might have happened—could have easily happened. I might have been upstairs and not heard the door chime. I might have spent a minute longer on the phone. But I hadn’t, and my son was spared. Yet, so close had we come to a tragedy, I saw how slight a thing pride is compared to love—how powerless it is to heal a broken heart or fill a life that has lost a beloved. The campaign and its problems meant nothing to me that afternoon. I held my son in my arms—my breathing, living son—and I wanted nothing else.

The shock of almost losing him and the moment of clarity it gave me subsided. I haven’t forgotten it or the lesson it taught me. Yet I went back to the work I had chosen—to politics, to the campaign and its demands. And as before, these pursuits monopolized my time and thoughts. I think I understand now that the restlessness we feel as we make our plans and chase our ambitions is not the effect of their importance to our happiness and our eagerness to attain them. We are restless because deep in our hearts we know now our happiness is found elsewhere, and our work, no matter how valuable it is to us or to others, cannot take its place. But we hurry on anyway and attend to our business because we need to matter, and we don’t always realize that we already do.

On Good Friday, a well-known lobbyist, one of Crist’s closest supporters, asked to meet me for lunch. I expected another heavy-handed attempt to scare me out of the race. I was surprised when he told me he thought Crist would be crazy to run for the Senate seat, and if I announced I was
running, he would probably change his mind and remain in the governor’s office. He didn’t want a primary, not even one he was confident he could win. To his credit, the lobbyist was transparent about his motives for approaching me. His business depended on his access to the governor, and if Crist left for Washington, there was no guarantee he would have the same kind of access to his successor.

Jeanette had been suspicious of the meeting and urged me not to go. She thought I was relying too much on the opinions of others, as well as on my fears. “Put your trust in God, not other men,” she cautioned. Easier said than done, I thought at the time. Did God read polls? In all of the polls, I trailed every other name. I was upside down in some of them—pollster speak for when there are more people who have an unfavorable impression of a candidate than a favorable one.

As Crist’s decision drew near, many of my potential rivals began to position themselves to run for an office other than the Senate. Attorney General Bill McCollum, who had lost the previous Senate primary to Mel Martinez, announced he wouldn’t run for the Senate, a clear indication he expected Crist to run, but would run to succeed him as governor. Congressman Connie Mack announced he would seek reelection. The Mack family was close to Crist.

McCollum’s decision put more pressure on me. He had already started raising money for his reelection as attorney general, which he could easily transfer to a gubernatorial campaign. He was lining up supporters for the campaign, while I was still debating which office to run for. I couldn’t wait any longer for Crist to make his decision. I needed to make my own and hope it would influence his. On April 14, in an interview with the
St. Petersburg Times
, I said my decision whether or not to run for the Senate would not be predicated on Charlie Crist’s decision. Many people didn’t believe me. Most assumed I was bluffing, and I would eventually run for governor or attorney general.

I still harbored illusions I could preserve my options a while longer. But with each passing day, I was drawn more to a Senate campaign. Maybe it was the people I met on the stump who urged me to run or maybe it was Jeanette’s surprising calm about the campaign. For whatever reason, I was beginning to feel more at peace with it. I was ready for whatever Charlie Crist decided to do. Or at least I thought I was.