An American Son: A Memoir (34 page)

Crist had promised to endorse Rudy for president in 2008, and he and Rudy had planned to fly around staging endorsement rallies in various Florida cities. But when Rudy’s numbers began to fall, Crist backed out of the commitment and endorsed John McCain just a few days before the
Florida primary. Rudy still held a grudge and was waiting for the right moment to exact maximum retribution.

I kept a punishing schedule of speaking events, interviews and fund-raisers. I traveled every day but Sunday. My days began early in the morning and ran late into the evening. We did everything we could to keep our burn rate low. We often drove instead of flying, and we avoided renting cars. As often as possible, I stayed in my supporters’ guest rooms rather than in hotels. Many mornings it would take me a few seconds to remember the city I was in and whose guest room I inhabited. I was often hoarse from speaking. I spent so much time talking on my cell phone I developed a sore on my ear. Everyone on the campaign worked to the point of exhaustion.

I began to believe that we would meet our goal. It would all depend on the New York event. On the morning of September 23, Jeanette and I boarded a flight for LaGuardia Airport. We had lunch with Mark Gerson that afternoon, and I made a few more fund-raising calls before we left for the Fanjuls’ apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The event was well attended, and while it didn’t appear that many people had brought checks, the total raised that night exceeded our goal. The next day I flew to Washington for a couple of interviews and a meeting with Senator Tom Coburn. Then we returned home to Florida, and I went back out on the road.

More good news arrived on September 25, when conservative columnist George Will wrote a very flattering and encouraging account of our campaign. On a Sunday morning a month later, I was making breakfast for the kids when I thought I heard Will mention my name on ABC’s
This Week with George Stephanopoulos
. I turned up the television in the kitchen in time to hear him predict I would win the primary. Jeanette came into the room and I excitedly told her the news. “That’s nice,” she said, then handed me a bag of garbage and asked me to take it outside.

I worked sixteen to eighteen hours virtually every day. I did Lincoln Day speeches, more interviews, more little fund-raisers. I missed my family. I wanted to wake up in my own bed every morning and have dinner with my wife and kids every night. But whenever I started to feel sorry for myself, I thought of my grandfather and my parents, and the years of thankless toil they had endured. How tired had they been? How often were they discouraged?

In the long and hard days of the summer of 2009, I found the strength to go on by remembering where I had come from. I had done the best I could. With the support of my wife and friends, I had overcome my fears and was fighting for what I believed. Would it be enough to make a difference? I didn’t know, but I would find out soon enough.

P
AT SHORTRIDGE CALLED ME WITH THE NEWS EARLY ON the morning of October 3. They hadn’t finished counting yet, but he was confident we had raised over a million dollars for the quarter. When we announced the total on October 6, the impact was immediate.

In his daily blog “The Fix,”
Washington Post
reporter Chris Cillizza wrote, “What Rubio did with his fundraising showing over the past three months is ensure that the race he had hoped for will happen. That race? A choice between himself, a conservative, and Crist, a moderate, with national implications for the future of the Republican Party.”

Adam Smith of the
St. Petersburg Times
reported, “Charlie Crist has a real race on his hands. . . . The hefty fundraising quarter establishes Rubio’s viability and is likely to spur more interest in the 38 year-old Cuban-American from Miami.” The executive director of the Club for Growth told Smith, “We’re certainly going to take a closer look at getting involved in this race.” A few days later, they would announce their endorsement of my campaign.

To borrow a phrase used too often in politics, our million-dollar quarter was a game changer.

The Crist campaign released its total two days later. He had raised $2.4 million, with now more than $6 million on hand. He still held a significant advantage, but we had every reason to be optimistic. Our strong
quarter ensured we would continue to receive media attention. It would be months before we raised enough money to buy television spots to introduce me to voters. In the meantime, we had to rely on earned media, the free press, to get out our message. If I had had another poor quarter, the press would have ignored me, concluding I wasn’t a legitimate challenger.

We encouraged people who liked me but were worried about getting involved in the race. Time and again, I met with prospective donors and conservative leaders who expressed their frustration with Crist. But a consultant or lobbyist had whispered in their ear that I couldn’t win. Now there was a glimmer of hope that I might.

We had always expected our fund-raising would trail Crist’s. We just wanted to have enough money on hand near the end of the campaign to finance a last-minute surge that could overtake him. And we didn’t expect my poll numbers to improve until we raised enough to buy advertising. We were wrong. Two weeks after we announced our fund-raising numbers, two polls showed we had made significant gains on Crist without spending a cent on television. In August a Quinnipiac poll had Crist beating me by almost 30 percent. Quinnipiac’s most recent survey showed his lead cut in half. A Rasmussen poll released the same day gave Crist a fourteen-point lead, down from twenty points in August.

Alex Burgos, my press secretary, released a statement that summed up my mind-set perfectly.

We had turned a corner. Twelve weeks earlier, I feared I couldn’t mount a credible challenge to Crist and had to be talked out of quitting the race to avoid embarrassment. There was still a long fight ahead of us, but we were clearly in the game.

I was enjoying our recent success, but I still had to work three times harder than Crist to raise a fraction of what he raised. I had to meet with more voters than he did. I had to give more speeches, and give them well, day after day. It was starting to take a physical and emotional toll. I wasn’t sleeping enough. I didn’t get any exercise. I wasn’t eating properly. Dinner
was usually something that came on a cardboard plate, eaten in the car as we drove from one event to the next. I usually went to bed after midnight and woke up before six the next morning for the first call of the day.

But we were moving. I had buzz, and I didn’t want to lose it. Our improved poll numbers and fund-raising were attracting interest from the national press and from others. Mitt Romney called me just to check in, he said. He wasn’t ready to endorse me, and I didn’t ask him to. But I knew he was reaching out because he thought he might soon want to endorse me. National cable interview requests started to increase. Even the BBC covered a campaign swing through the Panhandle. Everywhere we went local TV crews were waiting. Local newspaper reporters followed us to every event. My higher profile made it easier to schedule more fund-raisers and attract more people to them.

By the middle of November conventional wisdom believed the race had been transformed. Whispers were now heard from the Crist world that they realized they had waited too long to take the threat seriously and were now in free fall. They had hoped to score an early knockout, and almost had. Now they found themselves in a proxy fight for the soul of the Republican Party. They were confident their financial advantage would overwhelm me. Now they accepted I would have enough money to compete to the end. They decided they couldn’t wait any longer. It was time to attack.

On November 17, the
National Journal
blog “Hotline On Call” reported the Crist decision.

Thanksgiving couldn’t come soon enough. I was exhausted, physically and mentally, and needed the four-day weekend to rest. The first volley of Crist’s attack would launch just after the holiday.

Moments before I took the stage on December 2 for a speech to Florida TaxWatch, an organization of fiscal conservatives, Crist’s communications director released a statement accusing me of hiding my real record of supporting “the largest tax increase in Florida history” and squandering “hundreds of thousands . . . in taxpayer dollars” and implying I had “tucked away” in the state budget $800,000 “for artificial turfs on Miami-Dade fields where he played flag football.”

I had never been in political combat like this, and his attacks stung me. But my campaign did a good job of pushing back and discrediting them. The largest tax increase the Crist release criticized was the consumption tax I had proposed to replace property taxes as part of our property tax reform. It was a false charge because the plan would have reduced taxes overall. I had nothing to do with the artificial turf earmark—by their own admission, two other legislators had put it in the budget. Crist’s spokeswoman had also alleged I had presided over a banquet of pork for Miami when I was speaker. But as Florida’s most populous county, Miami-Dade always receives the largest share of the state budget. It has the biggest delegation in the Florida House and Senate, and many of the appropriations were sought by other members of the delegation, not me. State spending for Miami didn’t increase appreciably when I was speaker.

It takes a while to get accustomed to attacks when you haven’t been a target of them before. And I didn’t have to wait long for the next one to appear. The
St. Petersburg Times
ran a story detailing my involvement with Florida International University. The gist of it was an allegation that I had steered money to the school when I was speaker and, in return, they hired me after I left office. In truth, the school’s share of the funding was in proportion to what it had received in past years, and what it has received since. Furthermore, all of the projects had been vetted and approved by the board of governors. None of them were linked to anything I had planned to do in the future. In fact, at one point the school had felt as if they had not gotten enough.

During the last days of my last session as speaker, FIU’s director of legislative affairs, my former aide, Michelle Palacios, came to my office to complain about how the school was being treated in the budget. I thought this was unfair and it led to a pointed argument between us in front of Jeanette and David Rivera. I felt bad about it afterward. It had been a tradition in Florida for presiding officers to shower their hometown university
with new projects. Given that I was the first presiding officer from Miami in many years, she was under tremendous pressure to deliver for the school.

Because they were hurting me personally, I was certain these attacks were hurting my campaign. I was sure they would blunt our momentum.

Our biggest fund-raising event in December was hosted by Senator DeMint on the fifteenth. I was having my picture taken with major donors when I received a text message from Scott Plakon, a freshman state legislator who had been one of the few to endorse me publicly:

I had no idea what poll he was referring to, but I immediately searched on my iPhone for an answer. On the Rasmussen Web site there was a satellite image of a hurricane bearing down on Florida, and in bold, a subject title I will never forget: “43–43.” According to Rasmussen, the race was now tied. I shared it with the D.C. crowd, who appreciated hearing the news but didn’t seem to grasp its importance. In Florida, the impact was immediate. Adam Smith, at the
St. Petersburg Times
, explained it succinctly: “Whether or not you believe the Rasmussen poll showing Charlie Crist tied with Marco Rubio, the governor’s inevitability argument is gone.”

After weeks of attacks and intense press scrutiny, we were still gaining on him. The attacks weren’t working, at least not yet. Voters were worried about big things, and our plan was to keep our campaign focused on big things.

Stung by the events of the last three months and especially the troubling trend in the polls, the Crist campaign had to reassure its supporters and donors. They released a memo about the state of the race that closed with an attack: I was “a typical double-talking politician” and “not the conservative he has painted himself to be. . . . On everything from taxes and spending to gun rights and cap and trade, his campaign rhetoric is very different from the reality of his record.”