An American Son: A Memoir (28 page)

I asked friends to do a little preliminary organizational work in the event Jeb changed his mind, but otherwise, Jeanette and I let the matter drop. We had something more important on our minds. Doctors had noticed something unusual in my father’s chest X ray during his annual checkup: a lesion in one of his lungs. They ordered a biopsy, and in December we learned he had lung cancer. He was eighty-two and had smoked virtually his entire life. Previous checkups revealed he suffered from early-stage emphysema, but hadn’t detected the cancer I had long feared he would contract.

A series of tests indicated my father had a small cancerous lesion that had not metastasized. Despite his age, he was a candidate for a surgical procedure, a lobectomy, which would remove the diseased portion of the lung. My father agreed to the surgery, which was scheduled for January. We spent the holidays at home worrying about my father, although his doctors seemed confident of a prognosis for a full recovery.

Just a few days after New Year’s, I was in my office at Broad and Cassel going over financial projections for our new consulting venture when my cell phone rang. It was Jeb. I had been expecting him to call and tell me he was declaring his candidacy for the Senate. Instead he began the conversation by announcing, “I’m not going to do it.” He asked if I was interested in running, and I told him I would give it a serious look. He was encouraging, but cautious, as if he were worried about whether my family and my finances were ready for the challenge. He sounded tired and hurried, and I suspected he had a number of similar calls to make that day. After we hung up, I called Jeanette and told her, “Jeb’s not running. We need to talk.”

I spent a lot of time in January trying to make up my mind. My father had his surgery early in the month and, as the doctors expected, was on his
way to restored health. Not having to worry about my father’s health was a relief that freed me to contemplate the possibility of a Senate run. The more I thought about the issues that were at stake in the next election, the more interested I was in running. The economy was in disastrous shape. I believed only the creativity and dynamism of an unleashed American free-enterprise system would rescue it, but over the last ten years Washington had increasingly relied on the federal government to stimulate economic growth. Now, with a Democratic president and Congress, I expected Washington would assume even greater control of the economy. I was concerned about the administration’s approach to important foreign policy questions as well. President Obama and his allies had promised to reverse many of his predecessor’s policies: closing Guantánamo, retreating from Iraq and trying terrorists in civilian courts. I thought their positions were not just naive, but dangerous.

I was frustrated, too, by the failure of Republicans to counter the leftward drift in Washington with distinctly conservative solutions to our national problems. There seemed to be a growing chorus of Republican voices who argued that to win national elections in the future, we needed to become more like Democrats. Some claimed it was simply a matter of demographics—the country was changing ethnically, culturally and politically, and to retain our appeal conservatives would have to be, well, less conservative. Right-wing purists had cost us the 2006 and 2008 elections, they argued. The future belonged to centrists, and the party needed to nominate candidates who sounded, acted and voted like centrists.

That didn’t make sense to me. President Obama had won a decisive victory, but his election had not established that Americans believed any less in limited government and a free-market economy than they had in the past. He was the most effective political communicator since Ronald Reagan. He was the best-funded candidate in history, and had an enormous financial advantage over Senator McCain. He ran during the most serious economic crisis in a long time, when the incumbent Republican president was very unpopular. And, still, almost half the country had voted against him. The voters hadn’t given him a liberal mandate, and he had been careful to campaign on a centrist, bipartisan message. His election hadn’t been the consequence of a historic demographic and ideological shift. He was a very good candidate running at a very opportune moment for Democrats.

The argument that the Republican Party’s future depended on fielding moderate candidates wasn’t a new one. It had been building for a while, especially in Florida. Charlie Crist had won the Republican nomination for governor by veering as far to the right as he plausibly could. But the day after his primary, he had tacked sharply back to the middle, where he remained ever since. In his two years as governor, he had pursued policies designed to position him as a new kind of Republican: a reasonable, moderate leader who wasn’t afraid to wage war against extreme elements in the party.

In the beginning, he relied on symbolic, stylistic measures to signal he wasn’t like his predecessor, Jeb Bush. He removed Jeb’s appointments to state boards and replaced many of them with Democrats. Soon, however, he began to pursue policies that would mark him as one of the country’s most prominent moderates. He wanted to expand dramatically the government’s role in the property insurance market. And in the summer of 2007, he hosted a huge climate change summit, following which he issued a series of executive orders on global warming.

The capital press corps considered Crist one of the more masterful politicians in Florida’s history, a gifted retail politician who could charm anyone. They loved to cover the Crist as the-antithesis of Jeb angle. And they especially enjoyed it when Crist took on Republican legislators, which he did quite often during his first two years in office. He liked to make a production out of phone calls and meetings with Democrats in the house of representatives. He was clearly trying to create the perception he was a courageous, fighting centrist who would take the party back from conservative ideologues, which, more often than not, meant house Republicans, and particularly me. He often used me as his foil, playing to the liberals’ view that I was an out of touch, stuck in the-past, right-wing disciple of Jeb Bush.

I never bought into any of it, though. I didn’t believe conservatism had vanished in Florida overnight. But even if it had, even if America and the Republican Party were shifting to the left, I wasn’t prepared to join them. I believed in what I did.

It might be hard to remember now, but in the early months of 2009 the GOP was somewhat in the wilderness, engaged in a national debate about whether or not the party had to move to the center to stay relevant in American politics. I thought the U.S. Senate was the right platform to take a stand that the country already had a Democratic Party and didn’t need another.

While the prospect of fighting for the direction of my party and the nation excited me, there were other considerations that made a Senate campaign a difficult undertaking for me. Broad and Cassel had tolerated my absences when I was speaker, but I doubted they would give me leave to wage a statewide campaign. Even if they did, it would be a risk to run for the Senate while still associated with a law firm. The firm’s clients would likely become fodder for my opponents’ research.

By late January, I started to raise a little money and travel the state to make my case to voters that the country needed to return to the principles of limited government and the American free-enterprise system. I thought the Republican Party needed to make that argument and counter the president’s policies. If I was right, I thought I would pick up support quickly. If I was wrong, I would run out of steam immediately, and realize this was not the time.

I spoke to virtually every Republican club or executive committee in the state that would have me. I usually drove myself to the engagements, and often returned home after midnight. On more than one occasion, I felt myself starting to drift into sleep at the wheel, the darkness and hum of the engine lulling me to sleep. I would turn up the air-conditioning as cold as it could get and roll down all the windows. Then I’d turn on the radio and blast it. If that didn’t work, I’d call someone on my cell phone, usually Jeanette, and talk until I pulled into my driveway.

I didn’t know it at the time, but these early speaking events were the seeds that would blossom into a hundred flowers. Each one led to invitations to address another group. I felt like a preacher on the circuit, delivering the Republican sermon on small government and free enterprise. My audiences were enthusiastic, and started spreading the word about the young conservative with the right message, who was running for the right reasons.

There were still many questions I needed to answer before I could take the plunge. But I had made a good start. I had found a good message that resonated with the Republican base. My wife was supportive, and sometimes even excited about the campaign. Most polls showed I was barely an afterthought for most voters, but I was experienced enough not to worry about early polls. Most voters didn’t know who I was, but if my message
created a little enthusiasm and momentum, I would raise enough money to tell them who I was.

I wasn’t the front-runner, and I didn’t think I would have a clear path to the nomination. But I thought it was at least a fifty-fifty proposition. By February, I was pleased with my progress. That would change in just a few days.

T
HE NEWS ON THE MORNING OF FEBRUARY 4 WAS HARD TO believe. Charlie Crist was considering the Senate race now that Jeb Bush had announced he wasn’t running. There had been rumors to that effect earlier, but no one had taken them seriously. Everyone close to him had laughed them off. It made little sense to anyone. Crist was an immensely popular governor who stood a good chance of running unopposed for reelection. It was an open secret that he harbored presidential ambitions, and a landslide reelection as governor in 2010 would ensure he was a serious contender for the presidential nomination in 2012. It was still unlikely he would run for the Senate, but his flirtation with the idea would freeze the field and make it very hard for any other candidate to get traction until he made a decision after the legislature adjourned in May.

I’m not proud of my initial reaction to the news. If Crist runs for the Senate, I thought to myself, I’ll run for governor. It made political sense. I had spent nine years in state government, and I knew Tallahassee politics and state issues very well. But my reaction was strictly grounded in ambition. I missed public service, no matter how hard I tried to convince myself and others that I didn’t. All it took was the availability of a high office to expose how intensely my ambition still burned.

I continued to travel the state, giving speeches and raising my profile. I would run for either senator or governor depending on Crist’s decision. It
didn’t matter much to me which office was available—I wanted back into politics. I hadn’t made my intentions clear to the partners at Broad and Cassel, and they were understandably annoyed by the frequent news reports about my potential candidacy. They had expected me to focus on our new business venture, and instead I was spending more and more time on the road in what certainly appeared to be a political campaign. I knew by the middle of February that if I decided to run for office I would have to leave the firm.

I contacted my clients and informed them I intended to open a small practice of my own as a sole practitioner, and hoped they would consider retaining my services. To my relief, they all assured me they wanted to continue our association. For the first time in my life, I would be working for myself, and without a guaranteed monthly paycheck. If I couldn’t generate enough business or if I failed to collect my fees every month, I wouldn’t be able to pay my bills. It wasn’t the most opportune moment to strike out on my own, but I didn’t believe I had an alternative.

Although I was prepared to switch races and run for governor, I remained focused on national issues in my speeches. With every speaking event, it became clearer to me how agitated the Republican base had become. The conservative faithful were the backbone of the party, and they had been concerned about the party’s direction even before the 2008 election. But one month into his term, President Obama had badly overreached his mandate and his miscalculation gave rise to a new political movement that would define the elections of 2010.

In Washington, the passage of the president’s economic stimulus bill in February 2009 was greeted as a respectable first success for the new president. Its $800 billion price tag might have been massive in scope, and some of its provisions demanded by the Democratic leaders in Congress were typical pork barrel excesses that wouldn’t do anything to encourage economic growth. But circumstances being what they were—a deep economic recession, financial markets in crisis, a president riding a wave of popularity in the wake of his historic election with an ample reservoir of political capital—his first major legislative initiative didn’t appear to be an overreach. But to many Americans, already shocked by the unprecedented expense of the banking and insurance industry bailouts, it was one step too many toward an era of big government and potential financial ruin.