An American Son: A Memoir (31 page)

I had hopes of landing an endorsement from the Club for Growth, a well-established organization of fiscal conservatives. The club had a national network of active supporters, who, if motivated, could raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in small and midsized donations for a candidate. Given his spending record in Tallahassee, Crist wouldn’t get the club’s endorsement. But given the odds against me, I didn’t know if I could, either. I met with club leaders in Washington D.C., and our meeting went well, but I could tell they were worried I didn’t have a realistic path to victory. I made the case that their endorsement would help me create a path. It would boost my credibility and help me raise money. But in an election year with so many competitive races, and the majority in both houses of Congress at stake, the club was reluctant to waste its resources on a candidate it preferred but didn’t think could win. I left the meeting hopeful that I had a decent shot at their endorsement, but knowing it would be a while before they made a decision.

I returned to Miami that night. When I landed, I saw I had an e mail from one of my consultants informing me that Senator DeMint wanted to speak with me the next day. The first question Jim asked me was if I was going to change my mind and drop out of the Senate race. Crist’s people had spread the rumor in Washington that I was only posturing and would soon give up my Senate bid to run for attorney general, and the NRSC had parroted the assertion. I told Jim I had no intention of switching races. He was glad to hear it, and told me he would endorse me and use the resources
of the Senate Conservatives Fund to help finance my campaign. It was very welcome news.

I went back to Washington on the morning of June 16 and held an endorsement press conference with Senator DeMint, followed by a telephone press conference with Florida reporters. Because I was running against the candidate chosen by the party leadership, we had a hard time finding a place to stage the endorsement. The senatorial committee would not allow us to use its facilities, of course. Other venues we inquired about using turned us down as well. We eventually decided to hold the event outside on a sidewalk across the street from the Capitol, and hoped it wouldn’t rain. It turned out to be the best day of the campaign so far, after weeks of being pummeled with news of endorsements for Crist. Jim was a first-term senator and, at the time, still relatively unknown. But the fact that a sitting Republican senator would break ranks with the senatorial committee and endorse me intrigued reporters, and it was the first sign that I might prove to be a credible challenger.

Crist’s people tried to belittle the endorsement and DeMint. A
Miami Herald
reporter asked Jim why anyone in Florida should care if he endorsed me. Crist had called him personally to talk him out of supporting me. When that failed, his people pushed the line that Jim was an extremist and coaxed Florida reporters to question me about him and try to get me to distance myself from him. Jim handled the questions like a real pro and I followed his lead. He told reporters his endorsement didn’t mean he and I agreed on every issue. But we agreed on the most important thing: America was in trouble and we needed to change course fast. I didn’t know Jim well when he endorsed me, but my respect and admiration for him grew over the course of the campaign and the time we’ve served together in the Senate. He’s genuinely committed to the principles of limited government and the free-enterprise system. He’s not a show horse. He’s the real deal.

Jim’s endorsement was a nice boost, but I immediately returned to the rigors of the campaign: the early-morning flights; the endless interviews, speeches and meetings; beseeching donors; the lonely hotel room at the end of the day. I had to make a living in whatever time I could spare from the campaign and squeeze in time every week to work for my clients. I also made certain I never missed my kids’ school events. But most days, I left the
house before they woke up and came home after they had gone to bed. I missed them, and Jeanette. It’s strange how lonely you feel even when you’re constantly in the company of others, if the ones you love the most aren’t there.

As the end of the fund-raising quarter approached, we scheduled a few finance events in the hope we could raise enough to make a small impression. We held one in Orlando that was only a modest success, and another at Miami’s Biltmore Hotel that did a little better. Neither event reached its stated goal, and the hosts were embarrassed. Every dollar counts, I told them. It took courage to put your name on a fund-raising invitation for me in June 2009, when it would be noticed by the Crist people, and filed away in their long memories.

Meanwhile, the Crist finance machine kicked into high gear. Charlie is a legendary fund-raiser, renowned for his relentless pursuit of every available and not so available dollar. I wondered if I had it in me to be such a prodigious fund-raiser. Everyone told me I would have to be. But I hated putting the hard sell on people for money. If that’s what it took to win, I would lose.

Everyone expected Crist would have a record-breaking finance quarter. No one expected me to match him. But I had to show I was on pace to raise enough money to be a viable, if disadvantaged, challenger.

I was proud of our campaign at the end of June. We had survived Crist’s early knockout strategy, the onslaught of endorsements and calls for me to get out of his way, and we were still on the field. We had even managed to score an important endorsement. And we were outworking Crist on the campaign trail. I spoke to any group who would have me, and was gaining supporters at all of them. We saw a glimmer of hope in a Mason-Dixon poll at the end of June. Among Florida Republicans who recognized both Charlie’s and my name, we were essentially tied. When we released our fund-raising numbers, though, I knew we had a rocky road ahead of us. We fell well short of our goal—so short there was no way we could spin it into a positive.

We had a good message and a great political environment to run in. The idea that the race would be a battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party intrigued people who followed campaigns closely, and ensured our campaign would have their attention. For now anyway. Candidates
can’t live on Facebook and Twitter alone. They need money to run ads and, more important, to defend themselves from the attacks that begin the moment they start to rise in the polls. We didn’t have the money, and I wasn’t very confident we would do much better in the next quarter.

After we reported our numbers, everyone waited anxiously for Crist’s report. We knew he would report a big number. We didn’t expect the bombshell that awaited us.

M
Y STAFF ASSUMED I MEANT TO GIVE THEM A PEP TALK, but the e mail I sent them the morning of July 7, the day we reported we had raised only $340,000 for the quarter, was intended to boost my morale as much as theirs.

I flew to Orlando two days later for a meeting. When I flew home that afternoon, I had an unwelcome surprise waiting for me when I landed.

The Crist campaign had been setting expectations about his fund-raising haul for weeks. They had bragged to reporters they were on track to raise $3 million. They let our low number sink in for a day before they announced theirs. In the seven weeks since he had announced his candidacy, Charlie Crist had raised $4.3 million, or an average of $86,000 a day. “I am humbled by the support that I am receiving from the people of Florida and around the country,” Crist wrote in the statement announcing his total.

It was an extraordinary, record-breaking amount of money. The previous quarterly record for a Senate campaign was the $1.7 million Mel Martinez had raised in the first quarter of 2004. Even the mighty Jeb Bush’s best
quarter was only $2.7 million. There was no way we could spin this. It was just bad news—very bad news.

I kept campaigning over the next few days, but as the magnitude of Crist’s haul sank in, I grew increasingly discouraged. That Sunday, in its regular weekly feature, the
St. Petersburg Times
declared the political winner and loser of the week. It was no contest.

In one paragraph, the newspaper had perfectly captured the common perception of the race after Crist’s announcement, and my own mind-set as well. That weekend I began to contemplate seriously switching races or dropping out altogether.

I met Al Cardenas for breakfast that Saturday. He strongly advised me to quit the Senate race and run for attorney general before I did lasting damage to my career. He reminded me that if Republicans lost the governor’s race in this election, the attorney general would become the de facto head of the Florida Republican Party, and the obvious front-runner for the gubernatorial nomination in 2014. I had an opportunity to escape an impossible predicament in better shape politically than I had been in when I entered the race. I would have the entire GOP leadership behind me, including Governor Crist.

On Sunday night, I convened a meeting at our house with some of my closest friends and advisers. I invited State Representative Steve Bovo and his wife, my former aide Viviana; Julio Rebull, a trusted adviser; my former house colleague Ralph Arza; my campaign manager, Brian Seitchik; and my pollster, Dario Moreno. Another friend, Esther Nuhfer; David Rivera; and David’s aide, Alina Garcia, joined us on the phone as well. I asked them to come under the pretense that I wanted to discuss my options with them: whether to remain in the Senate race, to switch to the attorney general race or not to run for any office. But after my conversation with Cardenas, I was
already leaning strongly toward ending my Senate campaign and running for attorney general. I just wanted my friends to endorse the decision.

I laid out the rationale for ending the campaign. I would never raise enough money in a bad economy and while running against a sitting governor known for keeping score and punishing transgressors. Even if I got a little traction in the polls, it wouldn’t be sustainable when Crist unleashed a barrage of negative ads against me that would quite possibly make me unelectable for any office forever. When they were done with me, I said, no one would want to hire me to be their lawyer.

Jeanette led the charge against my decision, and most of the others joined her. The money would come after the legislature adjourned, they argued. If I spent more time making finance calls, I would raise more in the next quarter. From time to time, someone would blurt out the name of a donor I hadn’t reached out to yet who might be willing to raise money for me. I pushed back, arguing again and again that no matter what we did or how long we waited I would never raise enough to make the race competitive, and being stubborn could cost me any future political career, and quite possibly my livelihood. But every time I thought they were all on board, one of them would come up with another reason to stay in the race.