by Marco Rubio
The dominant issue in the debate would also be a challenge. Univision executives made no secret of their support for immigration reform, and they used the network to advocate for it. Of all the candidates, my position on immigration was most in conflict with Univision’s, and I suspected the debate would turn into a one-hour argument about immigration.
The debate was held at the Univision affiliate’s studio in Doral. I knew the place well. I had worked there as a political commentator in the 2008 election. I knew all the people who worked there, and considered many of them friends. When we arrived, we were taken to a small greenroom just off the main studio. I was nervous but well prepared. We were brought into the studio for a quick microphone check, and then returned to the greenroom until it was time for the debate to begin.
There was a delay. The Meek campaign had complained about a small portable fan that had been placed behind Crist’s podium. Crist usually had a fan at his feet when he spoke in public. The few times he spoke without one, he perspired profusely. Meek claimed the fan was distracting. Furthermore, he insisted that if Crist had a fan, all the candidates should have one. The dispute was nothing more than a head game, of course, and I found it mildly amusing. If Crist and Meek wanted to fight about a fan, that was fine with me. Crist threatened to walk out if he wasn’t allowed to keep his fan. Meek’s people finally relented, and it was time to take our places in the studio.
As I stepped up to the podium, I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. I spotted Jeanette sitting in the front row of the audience. She gave me a big smile to remind me to smile. Her mother sat on one side of her while my mother sat on her other side, and gave me a look of motherly pride I had seen many times before. The intro music started and our first three-candidate debate was under way.
The immigration issue certainly played a prominent role in the debate. I was asked why I didn’t support comprehensive reform and the DREAM Act. I began by reminding the audience that immigration wasn’t just an issue I had studied and debated. It was an experience I had lived. My parents and grandparents were immigrants. My brother was an immigrant. My aunts and uncles were immigrants. My wife’s family are immigrants. I lived in a neighborhood of immigrants. I know how important legal immigration is and how problematic illegal immigration could be. I simply believed the immigration reforms that Congress had considered went too far and would create incentives for others to come here illegally.
I agreed that we needed to do something to help children whose parents had immigrated illegally, who had grown up here and were American in every way except legally, and were at risk of deportation. But the DREAM Act had been written too broadly. We needed more targeted legislation if we were to address the issue without exacerbating our illegal immigration problem.
I was also asked whether I supported making English the official language of the United States, one of the most misunderstood issues of our time. Virtually every important document in the United States is written in English. Our Constitution, our federal and state laws, private contracts and the tests that are administered in our schools are all written in English. English has been the predominant language of Americans since we were thirteen separate colonies. It is our de facto official language, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with recognizing that fact. Some people argue that declaring English to be our official language would prohibit other languages from being spoken in this country. But the government can’t tell you what language to speak at home. It can’t tell a restaurant owner what language to use on his menus.
I think everyone should learn other languages. Knowledge of foreign languages is economically empowering and culturally rewarding. But English is our unifying language. We can all speak whatever language we like here. But we should have one language in common, and given our history, it’s obvious it should be English. Some critics argue that it’s nativist or racist to support English as our official language. I think that’s absurd. Learning to speak English is more than a sign of respect from immigrants for their new country. Knowledge of English is necessary to the economic progress and social assimilation of every American citizen.
On almost every issue we discussed in the debate, Crist managed to take a position to my left—a position he hadn’t taken when he was running as a Republican and trying to appeal to conservative primary voters. Near the end of the debate, I decided to call attention to his wholesale reinvention as a postpartisan statesman. “Everyone sees what you’re doing,” I told him. “Everyone gets it. For twenty years, you ran as a Republican on the same things you’re now criticizing me for.” I thought it was an effective reminder of what everyone in the audience already knew. Unfortunately, the effect was lost in translation.
The debate was for the most part uneventful. No one scored a knockout or made a major gaffe. However, some reporters thought my positions on English as our official language, the DREAM Act and Arizona’s immigration law would hurt me with Hispanic voters. The general consensus, though, which I agreed with, was there had been no clear winner. Further lessening its impact, Univision’s Florida affiliates broadcast the debate at eleven o’clock on Friday night.
Crist had shaken up the race in the summer when he withdrew from the Republican primary, and breathed new life into his campaign during the oil spill. But we had been patient, and had faith in our campaign plan. We were confident we could take back the initiative when we began running our television ads. We believed Democrats would rally to the Democratic candidate in the fall. And we knew the race would again become primarily a debate over the direction of the country. It was hard to see that in the summer, when many felt we were letting the race get away from us. But we had stuck to our course.
Now I was the front-runner again. The polls consistently gave me a double-digit lead. We were exactly where we wanted to be. There was much work left to do. But off in the distance, for the first time, I could see the finish line.
When he began his campaign as an independent, Crist had promised the return of the happy warrior, vowing he wouldn’t run any more negative ads. As summer gave way to fall and his lead in the polls vanished, he changed his mind again.
In late September, he ran a TV ad criticizing my spending record as speaker and claiming he had vetoed $500 million I had “tried to sneak” into the budget, including $1.5 million for a rowing center and $800,000 to renovate the fields where I played flag football. The ad backfired on him. It was blatantly misleading. The spending had been proposed and promoted by others. I had nothing to do with their inclusion in the budget. But the ad’s real damage was to Crist’s new image as postpartisan statesman. Rather than use a narrator’s voice in the ad, Crist looked directly into the camera and attacked me himself. Nothing could have contradicted his happy warrior image more than the image of Crist as an attack dog, broadcast across the state at his expense.
Crist’s allies opened a 527, a tax-exempt political fund, to promote Crist’s candidacy. They sent a mail piece titled “The Real Rubio” to Republican voters across the state. The front of the piece had an image of what appeared to be militant student protesters, along with a picture of Che Guevara over my left shoulder. On the back, it identified several bills that would have given children of undocumented immigrants in state tuition rates and health insurance. The mailer was designed to tamp down Republican enthusiasm for me by raising doubts about my positions on illegal immigration.
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.
CHAPTER 37
Journey’s End
THE 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 rig
ht 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.
