An American Son: A Memoir (37 page)

I
T WOULD BE THE FIRST TIME I FACED AN OPPONENT IN AN organized debate, and it would be before a national audience. I had a tendency to become emotional in my speeches and in informal debates with colleagues on the floor of the Florida House, when I would speak quickly and appear excited. On television, that would come across as angry or shaken, and I knew I would be judged in this debate as much for my tone and composure as I would be for the substance of my arguments.

I suppose from the experience of working with me in Tallahassee, Crist and his team believed I was easily angered and flustered. I knew they thought if Crist pushed the right buttons, I would lose my cool and appear unprepared for the national stage. After the miserable experience of the last few weeks, they had good reason to believe it, along with a treasure trove of material to use to provoke me. I was still sensitive and angry about the false accusations made against my character. It wasn’t hard to get me worked up about them. I would have to exercise much greater restraint than I was known to possess if I were to avoid coming off as bitter and overwrought.

Most of our debate preparation was intended to prepare not just my responses to the attacks Crist would make, but my demeanor when I responded. We held numerous and elaborate prep sessions for all the debates. We tried to imagine every conceivable question and line of attack, and rehearsed repeatedly until I not only had effective responses, but
could deliver them calmly, without rushing them. We tried to replicate the experience of the debate, even some of the smallest details. Todd Harris led the debate prep and did an excellent job of posing questions in the style of whoever was moderating the debate. His questions were often tougher than any of the questions I was actually asked in the debates. We would play the intro music and impersonate the moderator’s welcome for whichever news show was hosting the debate. We always held a final, brief prep session on the day of the debate, and to break the tension, we would watch clips from the movie
This Is Spinal Tap
, a favorite of mine.

My friend and former colleague Gaston Cantens played Crist in our mock debates. He did a very good job. He hit me with every conceivable attack. Some were over the top; others were more deftly delivered and harder to rebut. They all pissed me off. But hearing the attacks and responding to them over and over again conditioned me to them, and helped me control my emotions. Had I responded in an actual debate the way I responded in our first mock debate, it would have been a disastrous performance.

I knew my challenge was to diminish the impact of Crist’s provocations by responding to them calmly and effectively. Over the course of many hours of preparation, I came to believe that if I could govern my emotions and not appear shaken by his attacks, Crist might overplay his hand and hurt himself. Charlie’s strength was never his policy acumen. More than anything else, it was his personal likability that made him popular with voters. He had a real knack for making people like him even when they disagreed with him. But, now trailing in the polls, he had become increasingly harsh and heated in his attacks. If I could remain cool under attack, the focus would turn to his aggressiveness. The more he attacked me, the more he would chip away at his best asset, his likability.

I was a nervous wreck when we arrived at the Fox studios, although I was careful not to show it. Months before, when I was badly trailing Crist, it would have been hard to make me nervous. When I didn’t have anything to lose, I didn’t have anything to be nervous about. But that had changed now. I was ahead. I believed I would win, and I had become afraid to lose.

Jeanette, David Rivera, Esther Nuhfer and my media consultant, Todd Harris, waited with me in the small greenroom. I had the same feeling you get while pacing in a hospital waiting room while a loved one is in surgery.
Twenty minutes before nine o’clock, there was a knock on the door. It was time to go.

I made my way to the studio, where I found Crist already seated at the table. We exchanged pleasantries while a microphone was attached to my lapel. I was immediately struck by the smell of Red Bull. I don’t know how much of the beverage Charlie had consumed, but it was enough to notice—he reeked of it. Plus he had a mug in front of him filled with coffee. I’m in for quite a ride, I thought to myself.

They counted us down, the camera’s red light came on and we were on air.

As expected, Crist came out swinging. He repeatedly referred to my political committee as a “slush fund.” He accused me of using my public office for “personal enrichment.” He frequently called me a “lobbyist.” Chris Wallace didn’t ask a question that Crist didn’t use as another opportunity to attack me. I don’t know if it was a Red Bull overdose or a sense of desperation that drove him, but Charlie’s aggressiveness was almost frenetic.

Just as in football games, once the debate started my jitters disappeared. I had a clear strategy and I’d been well prepared to execute it. I needed to calmly dismiss each of his attacks, and pivot back to the core of my message: that the campaign was about sending someone to Washington who would stand up to Barack Obama and offer clear alternatives to his policies. Our plan was to let him attack me for a while before responding. If I struck back too quickly, I might appear defensive and prickly. I had to play rope a dope for a while, and then counterpunch.

After he had made a series of allegations, he accused me of double billing flights to Tallahassee. It was time to respond. As composed as I could be, I looked him in the eye and said, “Governor, you just don’t get it.”

The crux of my response was to dismiss his attacks as irrelevant to Floridians. At a time when our nation faced so many challenges, I explained, all Crist wanted to talk about were my American Express card, political committee and airline flights. We were running in a Republican primary, I reminded him, and Republicans are looking for a fighter to take on the Obama, Reid and Pelosi agenda, not for the candidate who makes the most personal attacks.

Nothing is more important in a campaign than to be in sync with the voters’ priorities. I had spent a year listening to Republican voters in every
county in Florida. I doubt there was another politician in Florida at that time who was more in touch with the mind-set and emotions of Republican voters than I was. I knew they were in no mood to credit a campaign that was based on personal attacks. They wanted an assurance that their nominee for the Senate would fight for the people of Florida, not for themselves.

Wallace ran a clip of Jeb Bush criticizing Crist’s support for the stimulus package as a “mistake.” Jeb was the gold standard to Florida Republicans, and his criticism was difficult for Crist to brush off. But when Wallace followed up by asking Crist if he would have voted for the stimulus had he been in the Senate at the time, Crist’s response was yes, he would have voted for it. It was devastating. Given the mood of Florida Republicans, there was no way Crist could win the primary after reaffirming his support for legislation they abhorred.

After a break for commercials, it was my turn in the hot seat. Wallace asked me about several state immigration enforcement bills that Crist and others had accused me of blocking. I’ve always believed immigration is a federal issue, best left to the federal government. Our immigration system is a big enough mess as it is. Adding fifty different sets of state immigration laws would only make it worse. I believe border security and immigration policy are federal responsibilities, and as speaker I had said as much. But I had never blocked immigration bills introduced in the house. Most house members hadn’t wanted to deal with them, especially since they knew there was no chance the Florida Senate would pass them.

Crist attempted several other attacks, including denouncing my tax swap proposal as the largest tax increase in Florida history, but they were ineffective. Then Wallace turned to him and asked him to rule out running as an independent, which he did, unequivocally. He said he was a Republican and he wasn’t going anywhere. That wasn’t true even at the time he said it, which we would soon learn.

Months later, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement released the transcript of a telephone conversation between Jim Greer, the Florida GOP chairman, and his executive director, who was cooperating with authorities in their investigation of Greer. The conversation had taken place a few days before the Fox News debate, and in it Greer told his aide that if Crist couldn’t turn things around soon, he was seriously thinking about running as an independent.

The debate was reaching the end. The hour had flown by. I needed to deliver my central message concisely in my closing statement. I pointed out that Florida was worse off now than it had been when Crist was elected governor, and then I asked Florida Republicans a simple question: “Who do you trust to stand up to Barack Obama and offer a clear alternative? I’m running for the U.S. Senate because I will stand up to [him]. We can’t trust you, Governor, to stand up to Barack Obama.” It was a simple equation. If Republicans didn’t trust Crist to oppose the president’s policies, they wouldn’t nominate him.

Crist used his closing statement to launch another attack. He called me a “$300,000 lobbyist-lawyer,” and asked, “Whose interest was he really looking out for? We have a very fundamentally different view about public service. I think it is to serve the public. That’s why I took the stimulus money—because I put people above politics.”

Attacking me personally wasn’t an end in itself. Crist needed to provoke an angry reaction from me. He and his campaign viewed me as an immature hothead and wanted to goad me into appearing as such. They hadn’t managed to do it yet, and this was his last shot. Not getting a reaction to his last attempt, he went off script and overreached. He said he wanted to know why I hadn’t released my tax returns yet. “We asked you to do it three days ago, and you still haven’t done it. Is it because you’re doctoring them?”

An accusation of filing fraudulent tax returns is a pretty serious allegation, and Chris Wallace felt I deserved an opportunity to respond. Mustering all the calm I could summon, I called the charge “outrageous.”

“This campaign is eleven months old, and this debate is now forty minutes old, and we have yet to hear a single, significant public policy proposal from Charlie Crist.”

Crist tried to get in the last word. “Oh, yes, we have,” he shouted. But Wallace interjected and ended the debate. In my final observation, I had reminded voters that Crist had spent the entire debate attacking me. The sunny, optimistic Charlie Crist, the self-described “happy warrior,” was now a shrill attack dog.

We got up to leave. Charlie was polite but in no mood for small talk. We shook hands, and he quickly disappeared into the hallway. Todd Harris came to get me. As we walked down the hall, he whispered to me, “You
kicked his ass.” My toughest critic was waiting for me in the greenroom. As soon as I walked into the room, Jeanette gave me her verdict. “That was awesome,” she said. Over the years, I have come to marvel at how uncanny a barometer Jeanette is of how other people perceive things. She’s not a political expert. And yet I am constantly amazed by her ability to spot and predict political trends before they’re apparent. In the fall of 2007, after watching the Republican presidential candidates debate, she predicted Mike Huckabee’s rise months before it occurred. In the spring of 2011, she predicted Rick Santorum would emerge as a leading candidate when he was still in single digits in the polls. She has an instinct for how voters will view someone or something, and is almost never wrong. If she was happy about my performance, I had a good reason to feel very good about it.

Almost immediately after the debate, the Crist campaign focused on one of my answers to Wallace and insisted it had been a major gaffe. Wallace had asked me whether I would change the cost of living adjustment for Social Security. I had answered him honestly, saying that “all these issues have to be on the table,” including “the way we index increases in the cost of living.”

The Florida press said I had handed Crist his next line of attack. In retiree-rich Florida, talking about any changes to Social Security was political suicide, they insisted. But after talking to thousands of Republican voters, I knew this election would be different. People were worried about the dire fiscal situation the country was facing. For a long time, Americans had felt that government was spending too much money, but believed the consequences wouldn’t be experienced until well into the future. The sheer scope and size of the stimulus bill coupled with the massive spike in the national debt had convinced most people that the chickens might soon come home to roost. For the first time, people began worrying they might actually live to see America become insolvent.

Some Republicans had gotten into trouble in the past by questioning the necessity of Social Security and Medicare. That debate was over. Americans had paid into the entitlement programs all their working lives, and they expected a return on their investment when they retired. We need to focus on saving Social Security and Medicare, both of which, but especially Medicare, are headed for bankruptcy. That was the point I had made to voters. I didn’t want to abolish Social Security. I wanted to save it. But to do
that, I had to accept that my Social Security benefits would be less generous than my parents’ benefits.