An American Son: A Memoir (44 page)

An unforced error on my part was outside the control of the Crist campaign. But they could try to get Meek out of the race. By the middle of October, the press was reporting rumors that Crist and Meek were discussing a deal. Nothing in Kendrick’s history or personality led me to believe he would seriously contemplate withdrawing from the race. Everything I knew about him after a decade of dealing with him told me quitting wasn’t in his DNA. But the chatter continued and grew stronger, and we began to worry that Crist might manage to make it a two-man race after all.

The Crist campaign began aggressively pushing the narrative that I was an outside-the-mainstream radical and that every vote for Meek was a vote for me. They got Democratic activists and even a few Meek volunteers to make the same case to the
Times
and
Herald
. Crist met with an influential Palm Beach Democratic club, which formally called on Meek to drop out of the race. They had planned to ambush Kendrick and urge him to withdraw at a meeting they’d scheduled with him, but Kendrick got wind of their agenda and canceled the meeting. On October 13, the
Times
and
Herald
political bureau reported the growing speculation and went into considerable detail about how Meek’s withdrawal would shake up the race.

The temptation to become overly cautious when you’re ahead is, I’m convinced, hardwired in the human brain. I had seen it many times on the football field. But, as the old adage goes, “the only thing a prevent defense prevents is a win.” No matter how much I wished I could have canceled the debates, I had no intention of playing prevent defense, and was intent on giving a spirited performance.

Crist came out with guns blazing in our debate on October 15. He leveled many of the same charges he had been making for months, and continued to present himself as the reasonable centrist running against a liberal Democrat and an “extremist” right-winger. I was ready for it, and delivered the counterpunch I had been preparing for days.

Crist unveiled one attack that I hadn’t prepared for, citing a local left-leaning Hispanic newspaper to argue I had turned my back on my “Hispanic family.” I used the attack to reintroduce my family’s story.

He went after me again on Social Security, too, but I managed to turn the attack on him. I called it shameful. “You know my mom’s a beneficiary of Social Security—you’ve met her. And you know why I know it’s shameful, Governor? You can’t even look at me as I tell you these things.” In another year and with another messenger, the attack might have hurt. But in 2010, voters were concerned with President Obama’s agenda, and Crist, having reversed his positions on so many issues, didn’t have the credibility to attack mine.

I felt pretty good about my performance, although I worried a little that I had been too heated in my exchanges with Charlie. But the most encouraging response of the debate wasn’t mine, it was Kendrick’s. “I will not drop out of this race for any reason,” he insisted when asked directly about his intentions. “I am nominated by the Democrats of the state of Florida. I am in this race to run to be the next United States senator. And no, I am not running for second.” That was exactly what I had hoped to hear from him.

Our next debate was scheduled for a few days later. The day before the debate, President Clinton had appeared at a rally for Kendrick and gave a
rousing testimonial to Kendrick’s virtues and his chances to win the election. Behind the scenes, however, he might have been delivering a very different message. Ten days later, a detailed report in
Politico
described Clinton’s efforts to persuade Kendrick to drop out of the race and endorse Charlie. Using his aide, the Florida native Doug Band, as an intermediary, Clinton argued that Kendrick could be a hero to the Democratic Party, credited with stopping my election to the Senate by clearing the field for Crist. If the report was true, we had come dangerously close to a genuine October surprise. Stephen Moore, writing in the
Wall Street Journal
, also reported Meek was on the verge of dropping out, and the speculation began to alarm us.

Kendrick later admitted Clinton had discussed the subject with him, but denied he had agreed to drop out.
Politico
’s sources insisted that he had, however. They said an actual date had been set for a withdrawal announcement, October 26, and Kendrick had twice agreed to it. The deal had fallen apart only after Kendrick’s wife insisted he still had a chance to win.

I don’t know how close Kendrick came to quitting. No one would have blamed him if he had. I had once been the candidate with no chance to win who was seen as an impediment to my party’s plans to retain Mel Martinez’s Senate seat. I remember how discouraged I had been in the summer of 2009, how hard it had been to get up in the morning and campaign for a nomination I had no chance of winning, how close I came to quitting. Kendrick was working as hard or harder than I was, and he had little to show for it. He was out of money. He didn’t have any ads on the air or polls to encourage him. He didn’t have a realistic path to victory.

I gained a tremendous amount of respect for Kendrick Meek in the final weeks of the campaign. I thought he was often the best candidate on the stage in our debates. He kept his chin up, and fought as hard as he could despite the long odds he faced. I didn’t agree with him on many issues, but I knew one thing about Kendrick Meek. He was a man of character and dignity.

I think I would have still won had Kendrick withdrawn from the race. We had ads ready to air in the event he did. I think we would have made a compelling argument that Kendrick’s endorsement of Crist was an example of the backroom deals that were ruining American politics. I think it would have nationalized our race even more and triggered an enormous
spike in our fund-raising. Many thousands of votes would have already been cast by then, and I think we would have hung on to win. But it would have made it a much closer race, and been one heck of a final twist in a race that had already had more than its fair share of surprises.

In the midst of all this speculation, Kendrick turned in another spirited performance in the October 16 debate. Crist delivered more of the same attacks on me, and added a new one, asserting I had changed my position on personal injury insurance legislation after the mother of my neighbor, a chiropractor, purchased our former home. The attack fell flat—first, because it was an obvious overreach; and second, because the press had already investigated the charge and found no evidence to support it. Finally, by the end of the campaign, after all his policy reversals and reinventions, Crist didn’t have enough credibility left with voters to make any attack stick. He continued to call me an extremist, but the charge fell on deaf ears. Voters knew me by now. The best decision we made was to introduce voters to my personal story before Crist could transform me into someone I wasn’t. They had heard my family story many times, in my own voice as I looked into the camera and told them who had made me the man I was.

I was comfortably ahead. We had more money and a better organization. I was going to win. At that point, it was very unlikely that anything Charlie or I said could change the outcome. I didn’t need to deliver a knockout punch in our next debate. But I went for one anyway.

Our fifth debate began on the morning of October 24, and was something of a home game for Crist. It was jointly sponsored by CNN and the
St. Petersburg Times
, and was held on the campus of the University of South Florida in Tampa, Charlie Crist territory. Candy Crowley of CNN moderated it, and the
Times
’s Adam Smith was also on the panel, so we expected to be asked again about the American Express card and my spending record.

We had our fair share of supporters in the audience, but Crist had many more, and he was visibly buoyed by them. The debate had the feeling of a last stand, and Crist’s body language suggested he had one last trick up his sleeve. I was unnerved.

He was very aggressive throughout the debate—maybe too aggressive. He repeatedly interrupted me. He used all of his time, and much of mine, to make sweeping allegations against my character. As the debate entered
its final minutes, I was trying to answer a question from Candy when Crist interrupted me again and tried to fit in all his attacks in one exchange. The exchange is best captured by the transcript of the debate:

Upon hearing the heckler line, the panel, the audience and even Kendrick broke out into laughter. Crist appeared as if the frustrations of the entire campaign had finally gotten the best of him and erupted in one singular moment.

In the middle of the laughter, Crist tried to recover, using a line he had used against me in the spring, when I had complained about his attacks: