The Rise of Marco Rubio by Manuel Roig-Franzia

Author:Manuel Roig-Franzia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Rubio’s plan was working so nicely that he could even afford to jab a bit at the Florida reporters his campaign held in such low esteem. In January he tweeted, “I think FL Press corp was excited to see me today. 415 LOL. Remember when toughest question I got was ‘when are you going to drop out?’ ”

Around that time influential players in Florida politics and at the national level were cooling to Crist and warming to the idea of Marco Rubio as their senator, but they were doing so behind the scenes. In the same way that Rubio’s opponents in the Florida house speaker’s race were “beat before they knew it,” Crist’s support was discreetly draining away. “A lot of people connected with [Rubio] before they could go public,” Baxley said. 416 Jumping to Rubio wasn’t simple because so many conservatives had already aligned with Crist, and dumping him would seem disloyal. Rubio supporters needed to make the case that Crist wasn’t true to conservative principles.

Off on the side, José “Pepe” Fanjul, the Cuban American sugar and real estate baron, worked to convert Crist backers into Rubio backers. 417 Marco Men. Fanjul invited one longtime national conservative power broker who had thrown his weight behind Crist to his home on Palm Beach to meet the aspiring senator from Miami for the first time. It was a small get-together, just three or four people, and it gave the political veteran who had come into town a chance to size up Rubio without distractions. “Two things came across to me,” the venerable Republican told me. 418 “In spite of his rhetorical gifts and his very agile mind, he’s very modest. He has humility. That’s a rare quality. The other ‘H’ quality—hubris—is in much larger supply.”

Rubio’s national strategy had its official coming-out party in February in Washington at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, a kind of Lollapalooza for conservatives. Rubio had been invited to speak, another affirmation of his rising stature. He frequently spoke extemporaneously, but his address before thousands from the Republican base was critical, and there was no room for error. Rubio and his advisors wrote and revised, wrote and revised, going through ten drafts before they were satisfied. 419 Minutes before he went on stage they were still tinkering.

That same month, Washington, a city that goes into a panic at the sight of a few snowflakes, was socked in by an honest-to-goodness snowstorm that came to be known, hyperbolically, as Snowmageddon. Rubio nimbly folded the storm that had been on everyone’s minds into the opening of his address, using it to underscore his anti-Obama, anti–big government message. Rubio, who as Florida house speaker could sometimes come off as a bit overwrought and self-righteous, started with a laugh line.

“A week ago we didn’t know we were going to make it here,” he told an audience that might have been mistaken for a pep rally if not for all the suits and wingtips. 420 “We were watching all the images of that winter weather, the extreme blizzard that even impacted government.

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