The Wilderness Page 10

  He didn’t have to fill out many job applications, though, before he received the sort of offer generally reserved for people whose fathers have job titles that appear in the Constitution. Armando Codina, a prominent Florida real estate developer and longtime supporter of the newly elected vice president, invited Jeb to join his firm as a partner, invest no money, and collect 40 percent of the profits—all in exchange for allowing Codina to add “Bush” to the company’s name. That sounded equitable enough to Jeb, and so they shook on it.

  Now well on his way to independent wealth, Jeb turned his attention to politics, deciding in 1984 that he would run for chairman of the Dade County Republican Party. He was only thirty-one years old and still relatively new to Florida, and some allies advised him against plunging into Miami’s notoriously fractious local politics, where city council meetings were known to descend into fistfights, and political debates were frequently won or lost in cantankerous shouting matches on Spanish-language radio. The Dade County party, in particular, was sharply divided at the time, primarily between moderate Anglo suburbanites and the fast-growing community of rowdy right-wing Cuban exiles.

  Things worked out for Jeb, though, as things usually did. He easily won the race on the strength of his family’s fame, and proved to have a knack for navigating Miami’s fraught political landscape. As a well-heeled son of the establishment who also happened to have a Latina wife and a brood of Spanish-speaking chiquitos at home, Jeb was well suited to bridge the divide between the GOP’s two local tribes, and soon he had the party machine humming, registering nearly sixty thousand new Republicans in the county during a period when the Democrats lost around twenty thousand.

  He also became a local celebrity, especially beloved by the Cubans, who delighted in seeing this giant lumbering man prop his oversize frame at a table in one Little Havana café or another, downing tazitos of Cuban coffee as he breezily chatted in his gringo-accented Spanish. Often, they would approach him to ask for help with a relative’s immigration status, or lobby him to lean on his contacts in Washington on behalf of an exile cause.

  “Si, si, voy a tratar,” he would promise.

  Yes, yes, he would try.

  “It’s difficult sometimes to live up to the expectations of other people,” Jeb lamented to a reporter one afternoon amid the fawning and favor begging at a crowded Cuban restaurant. “They think I can call up President Reagan and solve anything. They think I live the life of Prince Charles rather than my middle-class life.”

  Of course, even if Reagan didn’t take his calls, his father certainly did—and Jeb called often, laying the foundation for a career in Florida politics with a series of strings pulled and favors called in to the White House. In 1988, Jeb energetically lobbied his father’s staff to appoint a key Miami political ally, Dexter Lehtinen, as U.S. attorney, and when he sensed that they were dragging their feet, he fired off an impatient note to White House counsel C. Boyden Gray: “Boyden, it’s time to act.” He made appeals on behalf of other loyal supporters as well, recommending them for jobs that ranged from IRS commissioner to Supreme Court justice. Once, he even helped facilitate an introduction between an official at the Department of Agriculture and a Florida entrepreneur (and political donor) who was trying to warm the American palate to the taste of cooked rabbit. “The enclosed letter is a bit unusual,” Jeb wrote to one of his father’s top White House aides on behalf of the budding bunny meat magnate, “but it is serious.”

  Not all of Jeb’s requests were granted, but by drawing on his father’s political capital and investing it in scores of microloans sprinkled across Florida’s GOP power brokers, he was able to accrue enough goodwill to assure himself an inside track to the governorship. It was the beginning of an ascent that would be remembered—with the nostalgic, golden-hued quality of a beloved home video—by a generation of Sunshine State conservatives for years to come. As longtime Tallahassee lobbyist Rich Heffley would later effuse, “What Ronald Reagan meant to many Republicans nationally, Jeb means to Republicans in Florida.”

  Marco Rubio’s political rise in Miami was considerably scrappier than that of his Florida forebear. He had none of the cash, connections, or clout that came preassembled and gift-wrapped to every newborn baby with a birth certificate that read “Bush.” The glaring contrast was clear from Rubio’s very first political internship, in the office of Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Whereas Jeb had curried favor with the South Florida congresswoman by using his White House pull to get her husband, Dexter, appointed interim U.S. attorney, Rubio’s only connection to the couple was that Dexter had once put his brother-in-law in prison for drug dealing.

  But what Rubio lacked in a privileged pedigree, he made up for with a distinctly Cuban, can’t-sit-still drive to succeed. In 1996, while working toward a law degree at the University of Miami, Rubio scored a gig as a floor manager at the GOP presidential convention, and from there he sweet-talked his way into the role of Bob Dole’s campaign chairman in Miami-Dade and Monroe counties. In this capacity, he regularly went to bat for Dole on local Spanish talk radio, serving up sharp and often funny sound bites in defense of the Republican nominee. He showed a prodigy’s talent for crafting quotable one-liners.

  “If this election was an audition for host of a talk show, Dole wouldn’t stand a chance,” Rubio told Maclean’s magazine at the time. “This is a campaign that will truly test whether we’re a nation of style or substance.” The nation chose style that year, but Rubio was hooked on politics nonetheless.

  In 1998 he took his first step toward public office by walking across the front lawn of his tiny town’s mayor, Rebeca Sosa, and extending a hand. She paused from tending to the flowers in her garden and listened as this little boy—polite, conscientious, and all of twenty-six years old—told her about his plan to run for a seat on the West Miami City Commission.

  Sosa, who was forty-two, looked him up and down and replied, “You’re too young. Why would you run?”

  But Rubio won her over—as he would millions of others in the coming years—by stirringly reciting his family’s story, and expressing reverence for the cause of the Cuban exiles. He ended up winning the city commission race, and along the way he banked a twenty-five-dollar donation check from one Jeb Bush, who had heard good things.

  But Rubio wouldn’t stay put for long. He was jittery with ambition, positively caffeinated by it. And when a seat in the Florida House of Representatives opened up unexpectedly, he practically leapt to his feet and high-kneed his way into the special election. He had no political network to lean on or record to speak of: his greatest accomplishment had been establishing West Miami’s first bike cop, which he hailed as the “cornerstone” of his campaign. But he relied once again on his silver tongue to snag a coveted endorsement from the Miami Herald, whose editors marveled, “He can turn an anecdote about planting trees in one sun-parched neighborhood into a reverie about the power of public service.” In January 2000, Rubio achieved his second landslide electoral victory in as many years.

  By now he had married his girlfriend—a striking blonde-haired Colombian named Jeanette who had recently worked as a Miami Dolphins cheerleader—and money was tight for the couple. They had only recently moved out of his parents’ house, and so when he reported for duty in Tallahassee at the start of his first legislative session, he spent nights crashing on the couch of a buddy named Danny Diaz. The newly elected lawmaker shared his inauspicious living quarters with his friend’s pet parrot, which greeted each day’s sunrise with a noisy chorus of squawking. One morning, Diaz awoke to the sound of a loud crash in his living room, and when he went to investigate he discovered that a bleary-eyed Rubio had hurled his shoe at the birdcage in frustration.

  Soon after arriving at the capitol, Rubio volunteered to join the redistricting committee, and he threw himself into the tedious, tit-for-tat grind of reshaping state congressional districts—a job that meant spending long days cooped up in a conference room while lawmakers and their aides met
iculously combed through a giant map of Florida, block by block, border by border, hashing out the boundaries one at a time. The work was eye-deadeningly dense and deeply unglamorous, but being inside the room gave Rubio access to inside information—namely, which of his colleagues were at risk of getting drawn out of their districts—and he knew he could quietly parcel it out in exchange for political IOUs. By 2003, he was actively gathering support for a future bid for the speakership, and by 2006, he was sworn in as Florida’s first-ever Cuban American Speaker. At just thirty-five years old, he had hustled his way in to one of the top perches in Florida’s state government on the strength of nothing but his own ingenuity.

  The suddenness of Rubio’s ascent—combined with his piles of law school debt and continually tight personal finances—led him to indulge joyously in the perks available to a person in his position. He watched his beloved Miami Dolphins from box seats belonging to professional influence peddlers. He made liberal use of the Florida Republican Party’s credit card. And as a new Speaker, he was astonished by how easily someone in his role could cash in.

  “It’s amazing,” Rubio marveled to a friend at the time. “I can call up a lobbyist at four in the morning, and he’ll meet me anywhere with a bag of forty thousand dollars in cash.”

  As Rubio neared the end of his final legislative term in 2008, he started to feel that familiar itch of the achievement junkie again—the restless shoe shuffling, the nervous knee jiggling, the eyes darting this way and that in search of his next fix. But unlike the straightforward course of Rubio’s path up to now, the next step was not immediately obvious. He would claim, years later, that he “couldn’t wait to be liberated from public office—from its crowded, rigid schedule; from its news clips, phone calls, and emails; from the too many nights spent away from my wife and kids.” But his closest political allies in Miami would remember it differently.

  During an intimate breakfast meeting at the Biltmore shortly after his final legislative session ended, Rubio huddled with a coterie of friendly donors, activists, and friendly local media figures to weigh his options. The consensus at the table was that he should wait for the right statewide race to open up—attorney general, maybe, or even governor. But Rubio wasn’t having it. He was practically panicked at the thought of spending any time out of office and away from the spotlight.

  What if my donors are poached when I’m away? he fretted. What if my supporters abandon me? I could be finished in politics!

  As his voice betrayed a growing agitation, some at the table began exchanging sideways glances, perplexed by the spectacle and slightly embarrassed for Rubio. “He was just missing that sense of maturity you want,” one of the breakfast attendees would later tell me.

  Finally, Ninoska Pérez Castellón, a popular local radio personality who frequently interviewed Rubio on air, felt it necessary to interject with some tough love.

  “Marco!” she snapped. “You could be governor, or even in Congress! You don’t want to burn yourself as mayor of Dade County.” Slow down and stop worrying so much, she told him. “People aren’t going to forget you.”

  But Rubio couldn’t help himself. Within months, he would shock the Florida political world by launching a long shot Senate bid against the state’s popular Republican governor, Charlie Crist. Entering the race was by any objective measure a terrible idea. Hasty. Ill considered. Imprudent. Dumb. And then, of course, the young underdog won.

  In the rise of Marco Rubio, success always rewarded audacity—until his 2013 immigration flameout. He limped away from the arena at the end of that summer bruised, bloodied, bludgeoned, but not changed. He was still restless, still anxious, still possessed of a world-beating charisma. And with 2016 on the horizon, Rubio’s most audacious gambit yet was still ahead of him.

  While Rubio and Bush spent 2013 picking a big, visible, high-stakes fight to widen the Republican tent—and then losing—Paul Ryan quietly embarked on his own personal, pared down outreach mission to the same end.

  At the outset of his expeditions into the world of urban poverty, Ryan approached the project with the general demeanor of a fanny-pack-wrapped tourist gawking through binoculars at all the exciting new scenery. The objective of the trips was straightforward: his tour guide, Bob Woodson, would introduce him to ministers, volunteers, and grassroots leaders who were successfully combating the effects of poverty on the ground, and Ryan would try to figure out how the federal government could better empower them.

  Ever since the New Deal, conservatives had argued that the ever-expanding welfare state threatened to crowd private charities and ministries out of the public square—creating widespread dependence on ineffective one-size-fits-all federal programs at the expense of America’s diverse and creative civil society. The problem was that while Republicans had spent a lot of time over the years figuring out how to make their vision sound pretty—George H. W. Bush memorably likened local charities to “a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky”—they often had too little real-life evidence to point to. Ryan’s 2013 poverty tour would be about arming himself with the anecdotal ammunition he knew he’d need to make his case.

  In the meantime, the congressman insisted that they keep the trips off the media’s radar for a while. He worried that letting reporters tag along would get in the way of his fact-finding—or, even worse, make the trips look cynical and calculated.

  They started in early February with a visit to Milwaukee, where they toured a Christian ministry that fought urban blight by collecting unused building materials from local construction companies and selling them to needy customers for pennies on the dollar. A month later, they stopped by Pastor Holloway’s shelter for women and children in Maryland, which had helped hundreds of homeless families—many of them escaping abusive men—put their lives back together. Over the next fourteen months, Ryan followed Woodson to an innovative halfway house in Cleveland; a black church in New Jersey that schooled congregants in how to escape predatory lenders and personal debt; and a “boot camp” in Indianapolis that sought to whip the underachieving men in one disadvantaged neighborhood into shape with tough-love counseling and a forward-thinking work placement program.

  The more Ryan saw, the more disorienting it all was. His tourist-like enthusiasm quickly wore off, replaced by a somber recognition of just how much he didn’t know. Up until now in his career as a policy maker, Ryan had interacted with communities like these from a distance, primarily in the form of canned talking points and budget debates about funding NGOs (Beltway-speak for nongovernmental organizations). Now he was being exposed to the complexities of low-income life that didn’t fit in the thirty-second spot, the outlay spreadsheet, or the stump speech applause line. It was gritty and uncomfortable—and it was even starting to change his mind on some political issues.

  One particularly eye-opening experience came on a rainy night in San Antonio while Ryan toured a ministry for heroin addicts called Outcry in the Barrio. The pastor in charge, Jubal Garcia, escorted Ryan, Woodson, and a couple of other visitors to a makeshift intake facility, where about a half dozen men lay shivering in bunk beds as they suffered through the first throes of gut-wrenching detox. A couple of volunteers—recovering addicts themselves—ministered to the men, while Garcia made introductions. A few of the detoxers, Ryan learned, had spent the previous night passed out under a bridge, and had been driven to the rehab center that day by some holy combination of rock-bottom resolve, divine intervention, and high-and low-pressure fronts. A longtime addict named Tony, who had tattoos running up and down his arms to cover the track marks, told Ryan it was his fourth time at Outcry. “I believe in God, and I believe that he keeps bringing me back, trying to tell me that it’s time to change,” he said. “Either that or I am going to die in the street.”

  For all the phony photo ops that Beltway bubble dwellers employed to prove they were in touch with real America, few officeholders had ever been put in a position to chat with
heroin addicts hours after they shot up—and the experience jarred Ryan. He followed Garcia around in a sort of daze at first, trying to process it all without accidently doing something insensitive. When one of the detoxers began convulsing, Garcia invited Ryan to join him in praying for the man. Tentatively, the congressman knelt at the addict’s bedside, and together he and the pastor laid hands on him and asked God to give him strength in his battle with addiction. When they finished, Garcia suggested that they offer prayers to the rest of the men in the intake room, and Ryan agreed. One by one, they blessed each man, and by the time they finished, Ryan felt spiritually invigorated. As Garcia was preparing to leave the room, the congressman spotted one more addict in the corner and called out, “We have another one over here.”

  The intensity of the night was seared into Ryan’s mind, and in the weeks that followed he thought often of the addicts and volunteers he had met at Outcry. The ministry was inspiring, but its task seemed utterly Sisyphean: no matter how many people it successfully treated, a new group of desperate, strung out addicts would ramble in through the doors the next day. As he struggled with how he could do anything in Washington that might possibly make a tangible difference to the men in that room, he kept coming back to the issues of prison reform and drug sentencing laws. By default, Ryan had been a standard-issue tough-on-crime Republican throughout his career, but his conversations with the men in San Antonio—many of whom had spent huge chunks of their lives in a destructive cycle of addiction, imprisonment, relapse, and recidivism—led him to believe there had to be a better way to help drug addicts find redemption than locking them up.