An American Son: A Memoir (43 page)

The use of Che Guevara’s image was particularly galling. Guevara was a cold-blooded killer, and he’s reviled by the Cuban exile community. The use of his image in American pop culture is a pet peeve of exiles everywhere. But it was only a mailer. And as angry as it made me and others, it would have been counterproductive to have overreacted to it. Had we howled in protest, we would have brought it to the attention of thousands of voters who hadn’t received the mailer or who had thrown it away without noticing it. Charlie’s campaign would have been very pleased if we had helped them make the race about immigration rather than the direction of the country.

So we stayed focused on our message and paid as little attention as possible to the attacks. It wasn’t easy. But having the discipline to stick with our message was the main reason we had retaken the lead. Everything seemed to be going according to plan. A new Mason-Dixon poll showed Kendrick was gaining ground on Charlie. The race was becoming a fight for second place.

I appeared on CBS’s
Face the Nation
on the last Sunday in September. As I expected, the show’s host, Bob Schieffer, asked me to address the attacks the Crist campaign had been making all year long. For months, his allies in Washington had been spreading unfounded rumors about me, urging senators against endorsing me because “the other shoe was going to drop.” Later, they explicitly warned that I was under investigation and would be indicted before Election Day. When I met with Senate Minority
Leader Mitch McConnell for the first time, I could tell some of this was clearly on his mind. And it was clearly on Bob Schieffer’s mind as well.

Bob asked me about the American Express charges, and I explained again that the party had never paid the charges; I had paid them myself, which by now was a well-documented fact. The
St. Petersburg Times
and
Miami Herald
, which felt they had ownership of the issue, called it a “nuanced” response. But it wasn’t. It was a simple assertion of fact. The claim that I had charged personal items to an American Express card I obtained through my association with the Florida GOP was accurate. It was also accurate that the party hadn’t paid them. I had.

Bob also asked me about my personal finances. There existed then and even now a false notion in the press, promoted first by Crist, that I was campaigning as an antidebt fiscal conservative while I accumulated an irresponsible amount of personal debt. Yes, I have debts. But my debts are not some exotic instruments contrived to support my extravagant lifestyle. They consist almost entirely of two things: my mortgages on my two homes and my student loan from law school. I’m not in arrears on any of my debts. And I’m not the only person my age who still has payments left on his student loan. Sadly, with tuition costs as high as they are today, large student loan debt is a fact of life for people who aren’t wealthy. President Obama was still paying off his when he was elected to the Senate.

One of the lessons I learned in the campaign is not to fixate as much as some reporters do on the attacks, rumormongering and hyped controversies that political campaigns manufacture. Political reporters are attracted to them because their editors believe such stories drive ratings and attract readers. Voters have different interests. That’s not to say voters don’t care about questions of public and private integrity, or that they hold politicians in higher esteem than the press does. But they won’t credit attacks on a candidate’s character, no matter how much attention reporters pay them, if there isn’t evidence to support it or assertions the candidate cannot persuasively refute. The primary purpose of attacks is not simply to stain an opponent’s character but to knock the opponent off message, particularly if the message is a winning one. And in Florida, where over half the voters opposed President Obama’s agenda, our message was certainly winning. We were courting voters, not reporters. As long as I stuck to my message, I was certain I would win.

We had more money than my opponents to spend on television ads. Several third-party groups were running ads criticizing Charlie. Ours was also the only campaign that had even a semblance of a grassroots operation. The signs of our success were everywhere. My crowds were bigger, my supporters more enthusiastic. We had begun our own internal tracking poll, a rolling three-day average that showed I had a solid lead with some room to improve.

As we entered the last month of the campaign, victory was in sight. If I stayed on message and we concentrated on executing our plan, I would be elected to the United States Senate. There were only three things that could derail us: a genuine scandal, a race-altering gaffe on my part or a last-minute October surprise. We avoided the first two, but only narrowly averted the third.

T
HE BIG SURPRISE IN EARLY OCTOBER WASN’T THAT WE were ahead, but rather that Kendrick Meek had a chance to overtake Charlie Crist for second place. His primary victory and a few effective TV spots had given him momentum that was showing up in the public polls. Our tracking poll confirmed it. It was encouraging news for him and even better news for us.

The only way Charlie could win the election is if Kendrick’s support collapsed or Kendrick was somehow persuaded to drop out of the race. There wasn’t any evidence he was collapsing in the polls. Quite the contrary. But we knew he would need to raise more money to stay on the air, and to do that, he would need to turn in solid performances in the debates. We had agreed to six televised debates in the fall because they would give him exposure and remind Democratic voters there was a genuine Democrat in the race.

The next debate was scheduled for October 6. As the clear front-runner, I expected to be on the receiving end of attacks from both Charlie and Kendrick. The Crist campaign fired the first salvo the day before the debate, when they launched a television ad attacking my position on Social Security. Political observers believed I had made myself vulnerable to attack when I stated my honest views on the subject in the Fox News debate, and I knew they might be right. They don’t call Social Security and Medicare
the third rail of politics because voters are disinterested in the programs. Even conservative voters are apprehensive when a candidate talks about changing Social Security or Medicare.

We knew the attack was coming and had taped a rebuttal ad weeks earlier. My gut told me to go up with our rebuttal immediately in the same markets where Crist’s ad was running. But to do that we would have to take down a very effective spot that hadn’t run its full course. “Burn in” is consultant terminology for the number of times viewers see an ad before they remember it. The minimum burn in rate is one thousand gross rating points, which means viewers on average will see the spot ten times. If we replaced our current ad with our Social Security rebuttal, the former would have been a waste of money since most viewers wouldn’t have seen it enough times to remember it. Fortunately, we didn’t have to rely on my gut instincts to make the decision. We closely monitored our tracking polls to see if Crist’s attack was hurting us. We saw no change in our numbers for the first three nights, and after six nights we actually improved slightly with seniors. So we left our current ad up until it ran its course, and then ran the Social Security ad for a few days to be on the safe side.

We announced our fund-raising total for the quarter before the debate. We had raised $5 million in the third quarter, an eye-popping number. Had anyone suggested a year earlier that I would raise $5 million in total for 2010, I would have thought they were out of their mind. But our small donors were contributing again and again. Washington political action committees that had previously given to Crist were now donating to us. And our fund-raising events in Florida were now on par with the biggest candidate events in the country.

The debate was held at the ABC affiliate in Orlando, with George Stephanopoulos moderating. It got off to a lively start, as Crist tried to land a few punches by delivering a few well-rehearsed lines. He said I wasn’t drinking too much Kool-Aid, I was “drinking too much tea,” a clear allusion to my ties to the Tea Party movement. But the surprise of the night to most observers was Kendrick Meek. He was trailing in the polls and short on money, but he was energized and focused throughout the debate.

He took a few good shots at me. In particular, he criticized my opposition to the president’s health care bill. I countered by calling the health care bill a massive failure. After we finished our back-and-forth, Crist pointed
at both of us as an example of the kind of partisan bickering he wanted to change.

Crist had somehow managed to get himself seated in the middle, to my left and Meek’s right. It was a visual metaphor for the position he wanted to occupy in the race. I expected him to say something to draw attention to the fortuitous seating arrangement—something like, “Marco is on my right and Kendrick is on my left, and I’m right in the middle, where most Floridians are.” But to my surprise he never seized the opportunity.

Kendrick took a few shots at Charlie, but for the most part the debate was a confrontation between me and an energized Kendrick, which pleased both of us. I thought I did fine, but the best news of the night was that Kendrick did very well. The better he did, the happier we were. I attacked him for being a left-wing, consistent liberal Democrat. To some observers, that sounded like a boilerplate partisan attack. But its purpose was to rally Democrats to Kendrick’s defense. There is nothing that motivates the base of either party like seeing one of their own under attack from the other side. The more I went after him, the more Democratic voters would see him as their guy.

After the debate we began a three-day bus tour, and Jeanette and the kids came with me. So did my mother. She had had an awfully rough month trying to get used to life without my father. We thought the trip would do her good. She enjoyed the crowds and the energy of the campaign. And I enjoyed having her with me.

Jeanette and the kids and my mother boarded the bus right after the debate, while I did a few postdebate interviews. When I joined them, I found my mother quietly crying. One of the kids had picked up my iPad, which I had left on the bus. My screen saver was a picture of my father. My mother had seen it and started to cry. I told her it was a reminder he was still with us, coming along on the bus tour, just where he would have wanted to be were he still alive.

The next few days are among my fondest memories of the campaign. The crowds were large and enthusiastic and the events well organized. I was able to introduce my wife and children to thousands of people who had supported me for so many months, and they were able to witness the excitement of the campaign. My mother cried at every event. We had a heckler at
one of them, a libertarian who was upset with me about something. He was far away from the stage, but he had a bullhorn, which made it hard for me to be heard. My mother cried because he disrupted the event.

An enormous crowd greeted us at a rally near The Villages in north-central Florida. My mother wept because she couldn’t believe so many people had turned out to see her son. And at each event, I would talk about how my parents had inspired me and shaped my character and beliefs. My mother cried every time I mentioned them. She couldn’t understand how her quiet, anonymous, itinerant life could inspire anyone. She had just wanted us to have a better chance to make something of ourselves than she had.

Now she saw with her own eyes the significance and scale of the undertaking. This wasn’t a West Miami City Commission race. It was a high-profile race in one of the biggest states in the most important nation in the world. This was her son, on the verge of accomplishing something she had never dreamed I might do. Later, she told me how overwhelmed Papá would have been to witness it, and how proud my father was of me before he died. If I hadn’t been so tired she would have made me cry.

The race had now entered its last phase. Absentee ballots were being mailed and early voting would commence in less than two weeks. Each passing day brought new polls that confirmed my lead. And each poll was a reminder to my opponents that time was running out. American political history is full of exciting stories of last-minute come-from-behind victories. But with nearly half the voters now casting their ballots before Election Day, the chances of that happening again, at least in Florida, are less likely.

I was aware of all this. Our own polls gave us a bigger lead than the public polls showed. My consultant Heath Thompson, who has a brilliant strategic mind but is not known for his optimism, warned me every day that the polls were bound to tighten in the final days. And every day I braced for it. But by mid-October, it still hadn’t happened. What had been clear to me since late September was now clear to the Crist campaign. The race could become competitive only if I made a major gaffe or if Kendrick Meek’s campaign collapsed.

Four debates were still on the schedule and each of them posed the risk
of a self-inflicted wound. I began questioning my advisers about the wisdom of agreeing to so many debates when we were so far ahead in the polls. They kept reminding me the debates helped keep Kendrick afloat. I understood that, but I still wanted to get out of at least one of the debates. All we were doing, I argued, was giving my opponents a free forum to attack me. Finally, Jeanette got tired of my complaining and told me to suck it up and stick with the plan.