An American Son: A Memoir (35 page)

We had certainly gotten his attention. We held a Christmas party for the staff at our home the day Crist released his state of the-race memo. It was a much bigger group than had sat in my family room the previous July and tried to persuade me to stay in the race.

On December 31, we released our own state of the-race memo. I think
it more accurately reflected our state of mind than Charlie’s had reflected his.

Pat went on to describe the stakes of the campaign, which I believed had become more important than who won and who lost.

When I began the campaign, I just wanted to win. I just wanted back in politics. I wanted back in politics so bad that I had considered quitting the race to run for a different office. I had stayed in the race partly because I wanted to, but partly because I felt I didn’t have another choice.

Months later, though, I had fallen in love with it. Maybe some of that had to do with the gains we had made and the national attention that was now focused on our race. But I think it had more to do with the people who responded to our message, who believed in me not because I was the front-runner, but because I believed the same things as they did. They were worried about the direction of the country, and they could see that I was, too. People who had never contributed to campaigns contributed to mine—people who couldn’t even afford to gave me a little. They didn’t do it because they liked me more than they liked Charlie Crist. They did it because they felt I would stand for the principles they stood for, and I could be trusted with their concerns about the country.

We had expected a long, hard slog. We had assumed we would trail Crist until the last few weeks, and maybe never catch him. Yet as 2009 came to an end, we were tied and maybe even ahead a little.

For more than two generations, my family had never achieved their
ambitions. Their talents were unappreciated and unused. They deserved better. They hadn’t done anything wrong; they just had some bad breaks. Why was I succeeding? Why was I living my dreams? I wasn’t more deserving than they were. I wasn’t smarter or a better person. What was the difference between us that allowed me to attain so much in such a short time?

America. America was the difference. I had been born a citizen of the greatest nation in all of human history. I was an American son. I was born privileged. And I was born, as all Americans are, with responsibilities, too. America’s greatness isn’t self-perpetuating. Each generation is responsible for the America we leave our children, for ensuring we are not America’s last privileged generation.

I was on the verge of receiving a truly special privilege. The son and grandson of immigrants and exiles, I was entrusted with the hopes of my fellow citizens, with the dreams they had for their children. That was what this campaign had become to me. I carried the stories of the people who had come to believe in me, who didn’t care how far behind I was in the polls, who didn’t think I was crazy to run against a popular and powerful incumbent governor, who didn’t believe anything was inevitable in America. They wanted me to make a difference—to go to Washington and stand up for them, and offer a clear alternative to the direction that worried them. They believed in me, and I believed in them.

On January 2, Adam Smith picked his “Winner of the Year” in Florida politics: Marco Rubio.

I had “stuck to it,” Smith wrote. Yes, I had. But only because of the people who had stuck with me. Win or lose, I had been privileged, and I will never forget it.

I
DID MY FIRST INTERVIEW WITH NEW YORK TIMES REPORTER Mark Leibovich in November, and a second one in early December. I had been cautious and expected the worst. The
New York Times
is reviled in conservative circles as the official newspaper of the American left. But Mark’s questions were fair, and his interest in the campaign and the Tea Party movement seemed genuine and without bias. I felt the same way after I read the
Times
’s Sunday magazine cover story on January 6, “The First Senator from the Tea Party?”

Some of my advisers believed the magazine’s editors had tried to hurt me by linking me to the Tea Party. But even if that had been their purpose, and I don’t know that it was, I wasn’t upset by the identification with the Tea Party. I was pleased with it, and considered it an advantage in a closed Republican primary. And however one feels about the
New York Times
, it has a reach few other publications have and influences the national media, including the television and radio news producers, as much as any other newspaper in the country. The week after the story appeared, we were deluged with media requests, all of which increased awareness of my campaign among Florida voters, and conservatives around the country, who were increasingly willing to donate to the campaign of the “First Senator from the Tea Party.”

We had the wind at our back. Throughout the fall, more than a dozen
county GOP executive committees had held Senate primary straw polls. I had won every one of them. Some reporters were skeptical about the relevance of straw poll victories since the committees were mostly comprised of the most active and conservative elements of the party. But those were the people most likely to turn out in the primary, and I was encouraged by their results.

We used the straw polls to build our momentum and encourage our supporters. When you’re thirty points behind in the polls, you use any piece of good news to generate enthusiasm. Maybe the straw polls didn’t mean that much. Maybe conservatives were just sending the state party a message that they didn’t want to be ignored and, having made their point, would ultimately decide to vote for the front-runner in the August primary. A January straw poll in Pinellas County would give a clearer indication of where the race was heading, and its results would be difficult for anyone to ignore. Pinellas is Charlie Crist’s home county. A defeat there would be devastating to Crist, and his campaign worked very hard to ensure that didn’t happen.

I was at home the night of January 11 when the state committeeman from Pinellas, Tony DiMatteo, called me. A native New Yorker, Tony D (as everyone calls him) was one of my strongest supporters and had encouraged me to stay in the race. He had been a longtime Crist supporter who had been turned off by the governor’s pivot to the left. He had also been Rudy Giuliani’s county chairman when Crist had used the Pinellas Lincoln Day dinner to announce his support for John McCain days before the Florida presidential primary.

“I have some bad news for you,” Tony said in his thick New York accent. “You only got 67 percent of the vote.” I had won the GOP straw poll in Crist’s hometown 106 to 52. There was no way to spin the result. Charlie had had a very bad night. Later that month, Senator DeMint and the Senate Conservatives Fund made an online “money bomb” fund-raising appeal for me, hoping to raise $100,000 for my campaign. It raised $400,000.

In late January Quinnipiac released its latest poll. For the first time in the race, I held a narrow lead. Later that same day, the Crist campaign announced its fund-raising total for the last quarter, and we announced ours. Crist had raised $2 million. We came close to matching him, with $1.75 million. Most of his donors had given the maximum donation, which
meant they couldn’t give him any more. Malorie Miller predicted he would start to run out of donors and his fund-raising totals would decline every month. The great majority of our donors gave well below the maximum and could continue to donate to us throughout the campaign. Crist still had a four to one advantage in money on hand, but the trend was strongly in our favor.

For the first time since I got into the race, I would rather be us than them, I thought. I was feeling pretty good about myself and my chances when I was brought swiftly back to earth the next day. I attended a candidates forum in Tallahassee before an Associated Press editors meeting, where a collection of editors and reporters from all of the state’s newspapers were waiting to give me the front-runner’s treatment. They grilled me mercilessly for a solid hour. My press secretary, Alex Burgos, no rookie in dealing with the press, was shocked by the level of hostility in the room. Most of the questions were tough, but fair. Some of my interrogators, however, were openly antagonistic, framing their questions in an almost dismissive way. The editorial page editor of the
Palm Beach Post
, Randy Schultz, practically shouted his questions. It was not my favorite memory of the campaign, and I’m sure it knocked me off my game a little.

That weekend, Tim Nickens, an editor at the
St. Petersburg Times
, wrote an editorial, “The Week Crist Got Back on Track.” Nickens began by calling me “the darling of the windbag Washington conservatives” and he praised Crist’s performance at the editors meeting as “particularly sharp.” He called my performance “pitiful” and argued that Crist would make up any ground he had lost come August. Of the possibility of my winning the race, he concluded, “It could happen, but I wouldn’t bet the ranch.”

If Crist had in fact begun a comeback, it wasn’t showing up in the polls yet. A new Rasmussen poll was released on February 1 that gave me a twelve-point lead over Crist. The poll was taken before Nickens’s editorial, however. Once voters read the editorial, maybe they would change their minds. It could have happened, I suppose, but I wouldn’t have bet the ranch on it.

Another poll was released that day by Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio. Based on its results, Fabrizio had some surprising advice for Crist. He should quit the race for the Republican nomination and run for the Senate as an independent. It was a provocative suggestion, but no one took it very
seriously at the time. It was clear the race was starting to spiral out of Crist’s control. We expected his campaign would begin punching wildly in the hope of landing a hard hit that could reverse our momentum. State senator Mike Fasano, a big Crist supporter and someone I had considered a mentor, struck first. In a
Miami Herald
interview, he called me a “slick package from Miami.” “Miami” is code for a lot of things in Florida insider politics, among them the perception of Miami as the home of corrupt Cuban American politicians. We cried foul to the press, but reporters dismissed it as whining. I told myself and my staff we would just have to drop it and learn to live with it.

We kept the campaign focused on the things we could control. We commemorated the first anniversary of the now infamous stimulus bill rally where Crist and President Obama had embraced by staging our own event at the same place. We did a joint event with a national conservative fund-raising organization, FreedomWorks, in Ft. Myers. We broadcast it over the Internet and did several national television interviews to draw attention to it. We used the event to anchor what we called a “stimulus bomb,” an all-out Internet fund-raising appeal on the anniversary of “the hug.”

On February 17, Jeanette and I flew to Washington for a speech at the annual CPAC conference of conservative activists. I was receiving a great deal of national press coverage by now, but the CPAC speech was my first chance to showcase my message before almost the entire Washington press corps. I was unusually nervous about it. Normally, I am a confident public speaker, but this one gave me the jitters. I was worried expectations for my speech were too high and I would fall short of them, disappointing conservatives from around the country and leading reporters to wonder what all the hype was about. The speech went very well, and was well received. You always worry that your impression might be different from the press’s, but every press account acknowledged that, in my Washington D.C. debut, I had done what I had to do.

There were minor bumps here and there, but we had won all but a few days over the last four months. Our fund-raising was outpacing our every projection. We were ahead in the polls. After months of hounding Crist for debates, he had finally agreed to one, scheduled for late March on Chris Wallace’s
Fox News Sunday
show.

By late February, we started to hear rumors Crist was seriously
considering running as an independent. It still seemed implausible to me. Crist had spent his entire political career in the Republican Party. His financial base was in the party. He couldn’t walk away from that, could he? Jim DeMint had heard the same rumors. His Senate Conservatives Fund launched another fund-raising appeal for me in a Web ad couched as a poll. “Will Charlie switch parties?” it asked.