An American Son: A Memoir (36 page)

Everything was going our way, and nothing was going right for Crist. Another Rasmussen poll gave me an eighteen-point lead. Our fund-raising for the first two months of the quarter had exceeded our total for all of 2009. It was clear Crist was becoming desperate. His political director and new media consultant left his campaign. And his attacks became sharper and more personal.

Until now, Crist had left the attacks to his staff and supporters. Desperate now, he began to attack me directly. He gave an interview on February 24 in which he began by asserting his confidence he would win the primary, and then he went on the offensive. “You really want to judge the character of somebody, give them power and then you’ll see what they’ll do,” he observed, then accused me of failing that character test.

The statement was filled with absurd lies, but Crist was in a lot of trouble and he needed to do something dramatic and do it quickly to stop my momentum before I couldn’t be stopped. He needed a game changer. We realized this. And we knew he would need to use his most effective attack against me soon. We didn’t know what it would be. But when I landed in Jacksonville on a late February afternoon, I found out.

W
HEN I USED THE AMERICAN EXPRESS CARD ISSUED BY the Florida GOP, I reviewed the statement every month and paid for unofficial purchases directly. The Florida GOP didn’t pay for any of them. But I always knew that if those statements ever became public, they could be made to appear as if I had used party funds to pay for my private expenses.

The state party chairman was a close ally of Governor Crist. We knew he had access to the records of my American Express charges, and we suspected he would eventually leak them to the press. When I landed in Jacksonville, I had a voice mail message waiting from Beth Reinhard at the
Miami Herald
. Someone had given her copies of my American Express statements.

We spent the next forty-eight hours trying to answer a long list of questions she sent us. The bulk of the charges were for airline tickets, mostly flights between Miami and Tallahassee. They were easily explained. I had billed the party for the flights because I often mixed political business with official travel as speaker, and couldn’t charge the taxpayers for them.

There were various other charges that were legitimate but still harder to explain. For example, there were a number of charges to a wine store called Happy Wines. What Beth didn’t know was that Happy Wines has a sandwich counter. It’s located just two blocks from my district office, and I
had used the card to buy sandwiches for working lunches in my office, a legitimate expense. There were grocery charges as well, which she assumed were purchased for my family. In fact, they were for coffee and soft drinks for visitors to my office. State law prohibits the use of state funds for refreshments, so I had used the American Express card to purchase them.

There were some personal charges as well. The largest single expenditure concerned the Melhana Plantation in Georgia, where my family had held a Thanksgiving Day reunion shortly after I had been sworn in as speaker. My travel agent, who had the party card on file, had inadvertently given the plantation the wrong credit card. I caught the mistake at the time and we paid the charges directly to American Express. Not a single cent from the state GOP was used. Complicating the matter, Richard Corcoran, my chief of staff, had charged expenses at the Melhana to his card as well. There was an innocent explanation for that, too. We had planned to have a dinner the night of my swearing in at Melhana for my leadership team and their spouses. We reserved it with his GOP card. But after talking to some of them, we decided to cancel the dinner. The holiday was approaching and most of them wanted to go straight home after the session. The dinner and rooms we had reserved were then credited to my family reunion. We paid that directly to American Express as well. We gave Beth proof we had sent checks to American Express to pay the Melhana bill. She mentioned it near the bottom of her story.

Further complicating all of this was the fact that the Florida GOP had been embroiled for months in disputes over the party’s spending. Alleged overspending was one of the reasons Jim Greer had been forced to resign as party chairman in early 2010. The party’s expenses had interested the Tallahassee press corps for years. Now the veil was partially lifted on how the party spent money. A feeding frenzy ensued.

The same story ran in both the
Miami Herald
and the
St. Petersburg Times
. Then television stations picked it up, some of them inaccurately reporting that the party had paid for my personal expenses. We spent the next two days playing whack a mole with the press, trying to correct the record. For his part, Crist said his campaign had nothing to do with the story. He said he found the whole episode “pretty disturbing,” but voters would have to come to their own conclusions.

Making matters worse was my absence from Florida. I was on a
national fund-raising tour with stops in Chicago, Arizona and California. Meanwhile, the story was leading a number of television newscasts in Florida, especially in Miami. Jeanette would later admit to me how hard it had been for her those few days I was traveling. She encountered friends and supporters who were too polite to say what was on their minds, but she could tell they believed I was in trouble.

My supporters wanted to hear from me. They still supported me, but they needed to hear my side of the story. For two days and nights the story had been reported on local television without a direct response from me. I finally finished the fund-raising tour and boarded an early-afternoon flight to Miami to face the music.

I had a speech the next morning to the Christian Family Network of Miami. Crist and I were both scheduled to appear. I didn’t want to go—I knew it would be a media circus. But I had to face them and the voters.

Crist spoke first. He had a swagger about him that morning, as if he believed he had finally found the magic bullet that would rid him of his rival. He was confident and it showed. During his speech he used the word “trust” fifteen times. Two candidates are asking for your vote, he told the audience. “Who do you trust with your vote?” he asked. They could trust him, he assured them. He had a record of doing what was right, a record that showed his good character. And character, he reminded them, is what someone did “when they think no one is looking.” Everyone in the room knew exactly who he was talking about.

I, on the other hand, had no swagger. I was shaken, and I’m sure it showed. I had survived other attacks, but this was different. I was embarrassed by how the story made me look and I was worried. I was convinced this attack would work.

After my speech, I came down from the dais and faced the press for forty minutes. I answered every question they asked and didn’t end the press conference until they ran out of things to ask me about. There was nothing more I could do. I had explained my side of the story. Now I would have to wait to see what the impact would be.

The
Herald
had a hot story on its hands: an underdog makes an improbable climb to the top only to be undone by his own mistakes. They wrote a series of follow up stories and blog posts raising any number of questions about my future. Would the state attorney prosecute me for inadvertently
using the party’s charge card to pay for personal flights? Would prominent conservatives they had called back off their support for me? What about the $133.35 charge to the barbershop? What was that for? A haircut? Mani-pedi? Moisturizing treatment? They were items purchased for a raffle at a local GOP event, but that fact hardly deterred the wild speculation.

Things got even stranger when Crist appeared on Fox News and claimed he had heard the barbershop charge was for a back wax. He repeated the claim the next day. The reporters who covered it wrote the governor appeared “animated” and “excited” to talk about the subject. “The issue is trust,” Crist told the
St. Petersburg Times
. “The issue is whether or not people can trust the speaker to spend their money wisely. I mean, clearly they can’t.”

On March 9, Crist’s campaign opened yet another line of attack. The
Herald
reported that while I campaigned as a fiscal conservative, internal documents from the governor’s office linked me to $250 million in “earmarks.”

This was less than accurate as well. The majority of the spending items the article referred to had been sponsored by other legislators. My name appeared on documents linking me to them because when called by the governor’s office during the veto review process, I had expressed support for them. But there is a big difference between being a supporter of a project and the actual sponsor of a request, a distinction the article never tried to make. However, nuanced defenses don’t do well during a time of frenzied reporting and the
Herald
’s headline read, “Rubio’s Campaign Image Belies History of $250 Million in Pork Requests.”

“Sounds like Porkus Rubio to me,” Crist helpfully added. He had me on defense for the first time in months, and he wasn’t about to let up. His campaign spent the rest of the month making one related attack after another.

The
St. Petersburg Times
ran a story titled “Marco Rubio’s Lavish Rise to the Top,” examining the spending of my own political committees and insinuating I had used them for personal gain.

An editorial in the
St. Petersburg Times
said, “These disclosures are just the latest to show how Rubio exploited the perks of political office and subsidized his lifestyle as he climbed to power.” Beth Reinhard asked for my tax returns, to see if I had amended them to reflect the illicit charges Crist had alleged. Then Reinhard and Adam Smith at the
Times
teamed up on a
story about my former chief of staff’s use of his party American Express card. Their main allegation was that we had hired a car service when we attended a GOPAC conference in Washington D.C. in 2006 and had spent $5,000 on rooms at the Mandarin Oriental luxury hotel. There was a good answer for that, too, of course. We had stayed at the hotel because that’s where the conference was held. And we had hired a car service because we had a large group of people with us, and it was more convenient and no more expensive than hiring cabs for all of us.

March seemed like one long, brutal beating. We were stuck in a daily cycle: Crist leaks an attack to the newspapers, the papers write a story, television picks it up, Crist attacks me for it. I was convinced we had been seriously hurt, possibly irreparably. I was incredibly embarrassed. For the first time, people were mentioning the attacks at my events. Sometimes a supporter or donor would ask me to explain one or another of them. Other times, someone in the crowd would ask me about them. And a day didn’t pass when a reporter didn’t ask me about a back wax or some other frivolous allegation.

My mood changed. I sure wasn’t upbeat. When I was home, my mind was elsewhere, lost in my thoughts and worries. It was frustrating to Jeanette, and rightly so. The campaign was important, but my kids still needed a father and she needed a husband. I was constantly on the road, and I wasted what little time I spent with my family by obsessing over my problems.

I tried to brace myself and my staff for the next round of polls, which I was certain would show a Crist resurgence. But I was wrong. On March 10, an Insider Advantage poll gave me a thirty-six-point advantage. On the eighteenth, a Daily Kos poll had me ahead 58 to 30. Five days later, another Rasmussen poll had the race 56 to 34 in my favor. I hadn’t lost my lead. I had widened it.

I had been on defense every day for a month. It had been a miserable time. Yet our lead had grown. I was shocked. I imagine Charlie was even more surprised.

There was growing chatter that if after all these attacks Crist couldn’t turn the race around, he would have to give up on the Republican nomination and run as an independent. He consistently denied it. I still didn’t believe the rumors. But that didn’t stop us from raising money off the speculation.

The end of the month was now in sight and with it the end of my personal March madness. One major event remained: the
Fox News Sunday
debate scheduled for Sunday, March 28. Unless one of the candidates makes a major gaffe, most debates make little impact on a race. But as Jeanette and I boarded our flight to Washington, we had a feeling this debate would matter more than most.