The Wilderness Page 4

  It was now early in the morning on November 7th. Ballots were still being counted in city halls and county courthouses. Concession speeches were still being delivered in function halls and hotel ballrooms. Reporters were still reporting their final campaign stories, and talking heads were still talking 2012 on TV. But for the rising class of Republican strivers and presidential aspirants, the race toward 2016 was already under way.

  Chapter Two

  The Biltmore Caucus

  The tony enclave of Coral Gables rests quietly amid Miami’s noisier, flashier, more famous attractions: to its north, Calle Ocho’s Cuban cafés and musty cigar shops, Hialeah’s casitas and concrete driveways; to its east, South Beach’s neon-lit tourist traps, topless seashores, and speedy cigarette boats slicing through the turquoise bay; to its south, the palm-lined campus of the University of Miami (technically within its boundaries, but culturally walled off); and to its west, twenty miles of suburbia that stretches out, block after block, until running up against the Everglades. The town sprang forth from the imagination of a wealthy heir named George Merrick, who in 1911 inherited thousands of acres of citrus groves and envisioned erecting on the land an “American Venice,” replete with flowing canals, wide boulevards, and picturesque houses clustered in neighborhood villages with distinct architectural themes. His grand plans were ultimately thwarted by the Great Depression and a pair of havoc-wreaking hurricanes, but he left behind a monument to his vision in the form of Miami’s Biltmore Hotel.

  The soaring Spanish-Mediterranean structure—built in 1926 and exquisitely crafted with terra-cotta tiles, groin-vaulted ceilings, and elegant archways—stands at the center of town, towering importantly over the golf courses, banyan trees, and pricey Spanish-revival homes that surround it. It once played host to a diverse array of early-twentieth-century society fixtures—from Judy Garland and Bing Crosby to the Duke of Windsor and Al Capone—but when Gene Prescott, a wealthy Democratic fund-raiser, bought it in the nineties, he was intent on transforming it into a playground for America’s political elite.

  After a $40 million renovation, he persuaded President Bill Clinton to hold a summit of Latin American leaders on its grounds. The First Family ended up taking to the place—returning often for vacations and fund-raisers—and the Clintons’ ongoing patronage turned the hotel into a political destination. Candidates, congressmen, and presidents of all partisan stripes made sure to book suites during their swings through South Florida, where they would spend their nights mingling and drinking with Miami’s influencers by the Biltmore’s pool. George W. Bush became a regular guest when he was president, though he was annoyed by the photo of Bill and Hillary that hung by the front desk. “What am I, chopped liver?” he once complained. On another occasion, Bush and his sworn enemy in the Senate, Democratic leader Harry Reid, ended up at the hotel on the same night for separate events, setting off a panic among Biltmore brass as they worked to keep the peace between the two camps. In 2012, both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney held glitzy fund-raisers at the hotel.

  The frequent visits from dignitaries bestowed an aura of outsize influence upon the local crowd of Biltmore regulars—a swirling, chattering circle of political donors, power brokers, activists, and other prominent Florida politicos. The hotel became a place where Miami-Dade’s important people went to exercise and amplify their importance; to revel in their status; to bask in the belief that their idle, cocktail-buzzed gossip had the power to shape laws, move markets, start wars—and pick the next president of the United States. And in the wake of the 2012 election, no one was more eager for their approval than Florida’s freshman senator.

  Everybody wanted a piece of Marco Rubio. Todo el mundo was clamoring for him (yes, him!)—his endorsement, his opinion, his attention, his name on this bill, his signature on that pledge, his presence at any number of Capitol Hill galas, leadership dinners, party fund-raisers, and policy roundtables. His Senate office had a list of media requests that seemed longer than the football fields he used to run down in high school—not “fast,” his old athletic director had told the author who wrote the biography of Rubio (yes, him!), but “quick,” which meant, “You get to the right spot on the field at precisely the right time.”

  And it wasn’t just the political rags begging for access to him either. The New York Times was sending its star magazine writer down to Miami to write his second long-form profile of Rubio in as many years. Time was talking about putting him on the cover. Every English-and Spanish-language cable channel in the country wanted him on their air. Even filmmaker Robert Rodriguez had tried to get him to make a cameo in the upcoming Machete sequel. He felt like a rock star. Even better, he was hanging out with actual rock stars!

  When Bono had come to the Hill in 2011 to lobby Congress for aid to Africa, Rubio had impressed the iconic U2 front man with his uncommonly informed musings about hip-hop.

  “Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever in my life heard a senator talk about Eminem versus Tupac,” Bono had confessed to Rubio, which opened the door for the senator to offer his theory about how U2’s music had been “the beginning of modern Christian rock.”

  What do you mean? Bono had asked him. (Yes, him!)

  “Well, your songs were about social justice, and had these bigger messages with a Christian bent, but without cramming it down anyone’s throat,” Rubio had explained. “You guys inspired a lot of Christian bands that came later on.”

  And then Bono had actually agreed with his analysis! I never thought about it that way, he said, but it’s true. They traded phone numbers and now kept in touch via text message.

  Yes, these were heady times for Marco Antonio Rubio. Mitt Romney had lost. The GOP was in disarray. The consensus among the Beltway opinion makers, the greenroom mainstays, and the blue check mark Twitterati was that Republicans needed to find a “fresh face” to rebrand their party. And at the moment there wasn’t a face in American politics that looked fresher than the boyishly handsome visage of the junior senator from Florida—with his soft features, his brown eyes, his wrinkle-free forehead framed by that neat coif of dark hair that was… yes, that item in Esquire had noted it, and it was true… thinning a little on the top, but it was barely noticeable as long as he kept it combed just so. And was it any wonder that his party had just tapped him to deliver the official Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union address in February? GQ magazine was calling his speech at the Republican National Convention earlier that year “the best of its kind since Obama’s.” Karl Rove was calling him “the best communicator since Ronald Reagan.” In the early assessments of the 2016 Republican presidential field, every oddsmaker in the political universe had him (yes, him!) at the front of the pack.

  Just as his high school athletic director once forecasted, Rubio had gotten himself to the right place on the field at precisely the right time, and he felt now as if he was sprinting down the sideline, a static-like roar emanating from the stands—unbeatable, untouchable, unstoppable…

  Right up until the moment he stepped foot in the Biltmore.

  The hotel was a couple of miles from Rubio’s house in West Miami, and whenever he was home he made a point of working out at the Biltmore’s gym—partly because the facility was first-rate and he liked its spin classes, but also because it was a political necessity for a Miami officeholder such as himself to put in face time there. The small talk with the local donors during water breaks, the chance encounter with the state representatives in the lobby, the offhand compliment extended to the Cuban exile power brokers on his way out—all of it was crucial to keeping his South Florida political network well fertilized.

  But these days running the gauntlet of the hotel lobby lobbyists had a way of draining Rubio of the high-flying hustle that powered him when he was in Washington. Up there, he was a superstar, a media sensation, a standard-bearer for a new generation of Republicans. But here at the Biltmore, he was the kid who used to sneak onto the golf course late at night with his buddies to get
drunk on beer; the young lawyer who received a free upgrade on his wedding night so that he and his bride, Jeanette, could stay in a suite; the baby-faced freshman senator who had lots of potential, but so far seemed unwilling to live up to it.

  Here, he was just Marquito.

  Oh sure, the Biltmore crowd was rooting for him—The local kid making good! Their little chiquito all grown up!—but it was agonizingly obvious to Rubio that they weren’t yet sold on his presidential timbre. Part of the reason was the omnipresent comparison he had to face whenever he was here. Jeb Bush, the godfather of Florida Republicanism himself, lived nearby and worked out of the hotel’s office suite. The heroic tale of Jeb’s governorship had been reverently retold over the years at a hundred Lincoln Day Dinners from Palm Beach to Pensacola, and it was the stuff of legend among the Republicans who hung out at the Biltmore. The story went like this: Once upon a time, Prince Jeb rode into Tallahassee on a white steed and gallantly wrested the capitol from the hands of the fire-breathing Democrats, becoming Florida’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction to enjoy a GOP-controlled state legislature while in office. He ruled for two glorious terms, presiding over an economic boom, enacting a slew of conservative reforms to education and gun laws, and helping turn the Republican Party of Florida into an unstoppable force. By the time he left office in 2007, he had consolidated GOP gains in the state and spawned an entire generation of new conservative leaders—Rubio included—all of whom had Prince Jeb’s righteous reign to thank for their success.

  These days, Jeb could often be seen eating lunch at one of the Biltmore’s restaurants, or holding court at a poolside table surrounded by admirers, or chatting warmly with service staff in Spanish. This was the man that Florida Republicans had wanted to see in the White House ever since… well, since Jeb’s dull-witted older brother had unjustly landed himself in the Oval Office instead.

  And compared to Jeb, with his quiet confidence, commanding presence, and DNA-encoded gravitas, Rubio looked—and sometimes felt—like a scrawny kid drowning in his dad’s oversize sport coat, struggling to fit in at the grown-ups’ table.

  None of Miami’s Republican elite would risk saying such things outside their little Biltmore circle, of course. These were early days, and they didn’t yet know how 2016 would shake out—no use in publicly declaring allegiances before they even knew if there would be a civil war. Instead, it had become a matter of social survival to develop a pithy, sometimes playful nonanswer when asked who they would support in the event that both men decided to run for president.

  “If they both run? I think it would be a great ticket!” South Florida congressman Mario Diaz-Balart liked to exclaim. (If pressed, he’d insist, “That’s my quote, and that’s as much as I’m gonna say.”)

  “All of their mutual friends are hoping and praying this thing sorts itself out, including myself,” Al Cardenas, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, offered.

  And Ana Navarro, the grande dame of the Biltmore herself, encapsulated the approved message by declaring a hypothetical Rubio-Bush face-off “the nightmare scenario for everyone here.” As the longtime girlfriend of the hotel’s owner, Navarro had a built-in perch at the center of Miami’s political world that she had leveraged over the years to gain proximity to both Rubio and Bush—as well as a regular gig on CNN, where she weighed in on the day’s political news as a “Republican strategist.” Navarro, a zaftig brunette with a taste for designer labels and bright colors, generally responded to questions about the potential intra-Biltmore rivalry by jabbering theatrically—to the delight and amusement of all within earshot—about the unthinkable inhumanity of such a Sophie’s choice.

  “I’d get into the fetal position and lock myself in a room for nine months!” she exclaimed to me. “If we have to all lock ourselves in the Biltmore until white smoke comes out and we pick one, that’s what we will do!”

  But even as members of Miami’s political class busied themselves asserting friendly neutrality, Rubio knew where their loyalties lay at the end of the day—and it wasn’t with him. This reality was laid bare in a Tampa Bay Times survey of Florida’s most “plugged-in political players” in December; it found that an overwhelming majority—81 percent—believed Jeb would be a stronger candidate than Rubio. And despite all the national media coverage and 2016 hype he was enjoying, most of the Florida insiders didn’t even believe Marquito would get a chance to enter the presidential race.

  As one of the paper’s anonymous respondents put it, “Rubio will make 2016 noises and preparations to increase his profile and lay the stage for himself in case Jeb doesn’t run. But if Jeb does decide to run, he will step aside… Jeb Bush is heads and shoulders above Rubio, literally.”

  For the Biltmore crowd, the contrast between Jeb and Rubio had been thrown into particularly sharp relief in recent weeks, as postelection Washington was arriving at a rare moment when it actually seemed politically feasible to pass a bipartisan overhaul to America’s broken immigration system. With Republicans smarting from their electoral rout in 2012—a year in which their presidential nominee had the worst showing among Latino voters of any election in decades—even right-wing mouthpieces like Sean Hannity were suddenly trumpeting the need for the GOP to embrace a pathway to citizenship for the country’s eleven million illegal immigrants.

  The conservatives in Miami-Dade didn’t need any convincing. Their county was probably the only cluster of zip codes in the country where immigration reform had long been a top priority for Republican voters. Sixty-five percent of the county’s nearly three million residents were Hispanic, and the local conservative movement was dominated by Cuban Americans. While exiles from Castro’s regime had special privileges carved out for themselves in U.S. immigration law, they still overwhelmingly supported overhauling the system to make room for their Latino brothers and sisters. Now, for once, it looked as though the Republicans in Washington were ready to get on board. And where was their bright young senator—so brimming with promise, so hungry for the spotlight—at this exciting moment in national politics?

  Paralyzed by indecision.

  Rubio hemmed and hawed and hedged and hesitated every time one of the local Republican players raised the issue with him. He had waded into the festering cesspool of national immigration politics before, and as far as Rubio was concerned, it had been a disaster. During his Senate race in 2010, the Arizona legislature had passed a bill that allowed law enforcement officers to demand proof of residence from anyone in their custody who they suspected of being an illegal immigrant—and if they didn’t have it, the officers handed them over to Homeland Security. Rubio found the legislation appalling, and thought it would quite clearly lead to racial profiling. But when he said so, he faced an immediate backlash from the Tea Party voters he was trying to court. He then backpedaled, saying that while he didn’t think states should be crafting their own immigration laws, he understood why Arizonans—facing gunrunners, human traffickers, and drug cartel violence on their southern border—supported such a crackdown. That little show of deference, in turn, got the pro-immigrant activists up in arms. “I had managed to unite both sides against me,” Rubio later wrote.

  Rubio dipped his toe back into the immigration policy waters in 2012, proposing a bill that would have granted residency to some undocumented immigrants who had been brought to the country by their parents when they were young. But then the Obama administration took his legs out with an election year executive order unilaterally giving legal status to the same group—and Rubio spent the rest of the year stumping for a presidential nominee whose primary immigration proposal was to incentivize “self-deportation.”

  I can’t win with this issue, Rubio tried to explain to the Biltmore arm twisters. The game is rigged.

  But they simply urged him to man up, take heart, and bravely convert his convictions into action.

  Ten valor, Marquito! came the refrain from the Biltmore chorus. Have courage!

  “What’s the point of ha
ving political capital if you’re never going to use it?” an exasperated Navarro demanded during a conversation with Rubio.

  Navarro was one of the most persistent lobbyists agitating for Rubio to start leading on immigration. Born in Nicaragua to a father who fought against the leftist Sandinistas, she had come to Miami at age eight to escape the political violence in her country. At the time, Ronald Reagan’s fierce anticommunism had placed the Republican Party firmly on the side of Nicaragua’s “freedom fighters,” and she remembered as a little girl hearing the president declare, “They are the moral equal of our Founding Fathers.” She decided right then and there that she was a Republican. Back then, the GOP understood the plight of the immigrants and wanted to assimilate them into American society. “But somehow, somewhere, it turned into this,” she lamented. “The inmates have taken over the asylum.” Rubio, she believed, could finally steer the party back to its Reaganite roots, and bring the message of conservatism to a whole new generation of Latinos like her.

  But even though he clearly agreed with her on the immigration issue, he couldn’t bring himself to commit to anything concrete. He went back and forth, talking through an endless loop of pros and cons, agonizing over every potential pitfall. It was classic Marquito.