An American Son: A Memoir (32 page)

I blew up. I needed their affirmation, I told them, and they were torturing me with what-ifs. “Is this what you really want?” I shouted. “For me to stay on the road and away from my family for another year and a half only to be humiliated and destroyed?” There was another office available for the taking, a highly coveted one, state attorney general, the best stepping-stone to running for governor someday. But they wouldn’t budge. Eventually, I left the discussion and went upstairs. They left minutes after I walked out, and I faced Jeanette alone.

The family argument didn’t work on her. She reminded me how much she disdained politics. But she was at peace with this campaign, and willing to carry the burden at home, because I had convinced her I was fighting for the things we believed in. I became angry again. Why couldn’t she see how impossible the situation was? I couldn’t win, and staying in the race could cost us everything. I went to sleep angry and confused. I wanted out, but people I trusted wanted me to fight to the bitter end. Their opinions mattered to me, and no one’s opinion mattered more than Jeanette’s.

The next morning, when I got up to take the kids to school, I found a
note Jeanette had left for me, giving me permission to do whatever I thought was right.

I had a speech in Port Charlotte that night, and Jeanette decided to go with me in anticipation that it would be my last speech as a candidate for the U.S. Senate. We discussed my decision again as we drove to the event. Whenever she seemed to accept it, however, she would catch herself and ask if we couldn’t take more time to think about it. I lost my patience again. “No!” I shouted. “No more waiting.” Jeanette countered, “Nothing important in life is easy, and the problem with you, Marco, is that you want it to be easy.” I was furious with her.

I called Al Cardenas from the car and told him his analysis of my situation had intrigued me, but I would need leading Republicans in the state to support me publicly if I decided to switch races. I authorized Al to call a few of them and see if he could get them on board.

The audience in Port Charlotte became unexpected allies in Jeanette’s appeal to my conscience. I’m not sure why, but somehow I managed to find my voice again in my speech that night. I talked from the heart about the challenges facing our country and the reason why I wanted to serve in the Senate. The response overwhelmed me. One person after another thanked me for running and told me they had waited for years to hear a candidate speak about the things that mattered most to them. I felt guilty as I listened to them, knowing that in a few days’ time I might disappoint every one of them.

Jeanette didn’t say a word on the drive home. She just listened as I mused aloud about what might have been if only I had enough money, if only the odds weren’t so long, if only the risks weren’t so great.

The incumbent attorney general and presumptive Republican nominee for governor, Bill McCollum, called me the next day. He didn’t push me to switch races, but he did extol the virtues of the AG job and expressed his excitement at the prospect that I would join a united Republican cabinet
slate. In truth, I wasn’t looking for a deal that would guarantee me the nomination. I knew I would have a primary even if Crist agreed to endorse me for attorney general. Crist’s lieutenant governor, my former house colleague Jeff Kottkamp, wanted to run for the office, and I didn’t think anyone’s endorsement would deter him.

If I ran for attorney general it would be because my fears had gotten the better of me. I was afraid to lose. I was afraid to be embarrassed. I was afraid to fail. I wanted to take the easiest path available to elected office, and I made up all sorts of rationalizations to disguise my cowardice. Hadn’t I wanted to run for AG a few years earlier? Wouldn’t I have run for it if the opportunity had presented itself when I was leaving the legislature? Wasn’t it the right thing to do for my family? With the support of the party establishment, I wouldn’t have to begin campaigning in earnest until next year. I could spend more time with my kids. I could make a little money before I had to leave my practice. I wasn’t afraid, I tried to convince myself. I was just being practical, and putting my family before myself just like my parents had done.

I had just about made up my mind. I had even written a speech announcing my decision and apologizing for disappointing my supporters. “Our ideas are strong,” I intended to say, “but our fund-raising hasn’t been.” Nevertheless I decided to keep my Senate campaign schedule until I announced my decision, figuring that the events I had scheduled were events I would have to do anyway as an AG candidate. I flew to Tallahassee and met two former aides, Bill Helmich and Evan Power, who drove with me to Pensacola, where I was scheduled to meet with the editorial board of the
Pensacola News Journal
before an eleven o’clock speech to the Gulf Coast Economics Club. Brendan Farrington, the AP political reporter, came along for the ride.

We talked about various issues on the three-hour drive, but Brendan was most curious about how I thought I could win the Senate race considering Crist’s enormous financial advantage. Since I was already strongly leaning toward switching races, I had a hard time making a convincing argument for how I would defeat an opponent I didn’t believe I would defeat. Then Brendan got a phone call.

I could tell it was about me. After he hung up, he apologized for what he was about to ask me. He had just gotten off the phone with a very reliable source in Tallahassee who had told him in no uncertain terms that I was going to switch races.

If I admitted I was thinking about it, my Senate race would be over right then. If I ruled it out, my campaign for attorney general might be over before it began. Lying wasn’t just morally wrong, it would be politically devastating. Once you lie to a reporter, they will never trust anything you tell them again. The press might like you personally, but if they think you’re a crook or a liar, you’re finished. They’ll suspect everything you do and say, and they’ll make their suspicions clear in every story they write about you.

I was trapped, and I was angry. I knew what had happened. Crist’s people had gotten wind of the calls Al Cardenas was making on my behalf. Rather than wait for me to make an announcement when I was ready to do it, and risk that I would change my mind, they decided they would force my hand that day. They wouldn’t give me time to let the people who had risked the most to support me know my decision before it became public. I wouldn’t even be able to give Senator DeMint the courtesy of a phone call to explain my reasons.

In my past run-ins with Crist, I had managed to swallow my pride, keep my temper in check and react intelligently, not emotionally, to the provocations. Not this time. I’d had enough of their disrespect. I told Brendan I wasn’t going to drop out of the Senate race. I was going to shock the world in August 2010 when I won the Republican Party nomination for the U.S. Senate.

I sent an e mail to Cardenas telling him Crist’s people had jumped the gun after they learned he was making calls. The Crist people were trying to deny me the ability to tell my closest supporters I was quitting the race, after the risks they had taken to back me and the money they had struggled to raise for me. I hadn’t even told my wife my final decision. Al acknowledged their bad faith, and sympathized. But it didn’t change anything, he told me. I still couldn’t win the Senate nomination, and I could still be attorney general. Furthermore, he had put his own credibility on the line by making calls on my behalf. I ended the exchange by telling him that I had not agreed to be treated this way. Crist had overreached. They had put me in a terrible situation. And now they would have to wait for my decision.

I returned to Miami the next day in time for a morning speech to a local Rotary Club. When I finally got home, Jeanette had a surprise waiting for me. She had assembled the same group of friends from the previous night, and this time they had come better prepared to convince me to stay
in the Senate race. David Rivera brought a poster-size sticky pad. As each of them suggested something that needed to be done to give me a decent chance to win the Senate nomination, David would post one of the big notes on our family room wall.

I just sulked. After my declaration to Brendan, the idea of switching races was all but dead. I would have to stay in the Senate race or stay in private life. I grew increasingly irritated with every suggestion David posted on the wall.

I wasn’t just feeling trapped by Crist’s maneuvering. Something else was gnawing at me. I was ashamed. I felt I had been tested by adversity and failed. I had lost my nerve. I was nothing like my grandfather, a disabled man who had lost his job and his status and yet took any work he could find to feed his family. Walking for miles every day, falling down, getting up, walking some more; rejected, humiliated, ignored. He had never quit. He had never given in to self-pity.

I was nothing like my father, motherless and working since he was nine. He had gone to bed hungry many nights. He had lived in the streets and slept on a wooden crate in a storeroom. He had tried and failed and tried and failed again to start a business. He had lost his country. His work as a bartender had him coming home late at night well into his seventies. I had never heard a single complaint escape his lips.

The trials I was facing were nothing compared to theirs. I worried I wouldn’t get to be a United States senator because I couldn’t raise money and my opponent had embarrassed me. If I decided to see the thing through to the end, it would be only because I had no other choice. It was such a pitifully small test of my strength, and all I wanted was to get out of it.

Why had God allowed me to go further than my father or grandfather had ever had a chance to go? They were better men than me. Why did He give me opportunities they never had? Why had I failed, when my blessings were so much greater than theirs and their trials so much more severe than mine?

Because God uses our failures more than our successes to teach us the most important lessons and to lead us to Him. Maybe I couldn’t be a U.S. senator or the attorney general. But I could be something more. I could be more like the better men who raised me and taught me what it takes to be a good man.

God had blessed me with everything I needed to make this race. When I worried I couldn’t provide for my family, I found a job and clients. When I worried about the sacrifices my ambitions would force on my wife, He gave her the strength and conviction to support me. That day in Washington, when I left the meeting with Senator Cornyn and his staff feeling dejected and hopeless, hadn’t I been bolstered by Senator DeMint? When two party leaders had agreed to invoke Rule 11, didn’t a woman I barely knew find the strength to say no? When I came home demoralized and feeling sorry for myself after the worst forty-eight hours of my political career, He opened my ears to the voices of little children, telling me,
Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid.

This wasn’t about the Senate. It wasn’t about politics. God didn’t endorse candidates. He wanted me to trust Him, to rely on Him, to lean on Him. He didn’t want me to believe He would make me a senator. He wanted me to believe that whatever happened He loved me and would give me the strength and peace of mind to endure it.

No matter what I did, I couldn’t escape this test. My friends wouldn’t give me a pass. My wife wouldn’t support me if all I wanted was a job with a title. I wouldn’t be able to scheme my way out of a predicament and into an office I didn’t have to fight as hard to win. I wouldn’t rely on Him if I ran for attorney general. I would have the party establishment behind me. And if I won, I would give myself the credit for being shrewd and calculating.

I believe now God wanted me in a hopeless situation, where my scheming and calculating wouldn’t save me. Only the most improbable confluence of events would make it possible for me to win election to the Senate, even to make it just a competitive race. Everything I thought I knew about campaigns would have to be proven false for me to win.

I know all these things now. But I wouldn’t admit them then. I was resigned to running and losing the Senate race, not because I wanted to, but because I couldn’t think of a face-saving way out of it. Before my friends left my house that night, I asked them if they were happy with my decision. “Is this what you want? To see me destroyed by millions of dollars of negative ads? To watch my political career end in humiliation?”

By now they had gotten used to my self-pity. “We’ll see you tomorrow,” they said.

T
HE NEXT FUND-RAISING QUARTER WOULD END ON SEPTEMBER 30. I had to raise a million dollars by then to have any hope of being considered a credible candidate, and I would have to pull out all the stops to do it. I’d have to pass around a basket at my speeches collecting contributions. I would have to hold dozens of fund-raising events, and no event could be too small. I would need an aggressive mail solicitation program. And finally, I would need one big finance event that would raise as much as a quarter of our fund-raising total to prove I could attract support from big donors.