The Wilderness Read online

  By senior year, his varsity football credentials were his only ticket out of a high school where just 14 percent of the last graduating class had gone on to college. His shot at a scholarship made him one of the luckiest kids in his school, but his small frame and mediocre 2.1 grade point average meant he was not headed for a powerhouse state university. He ended up at a tiny 550-student religious college in Missouri that was on the verge of losing accreditation. Here, too, he struggled academically, and he loathed the static nature of small-town life. He left after a year, and following a short-lived stint at a community college, he finally landed at the University of Florida. The high tuition and absence of a scholarship meant that he constantly struggled with money, sharing a tiny one-bedroom apartment and turning down invitations to join fraternities because he couldn’t afford to pay the dues. At one point, he was so hard up for cash that he nearly had to drop out.

  But even as he barely managed to eke out a degree in political science, Rubio refused to settle, or to stay put. He wasn’t yet sure where he was going, but he knew he needed to keep moving his feet to get there.

  A few days before Christmas in 2012, Rubio glanced at his iPhone and noticed a voice mail from his mom. He tapped play.

  “Tony,” she said, speaking in Spanish and calling him by the nickname—short for Antonio—he had gone by as a kid. “Some loving advice from the person who cares for you most in the world: don’t mess with the immigrants, my son. Please, don’t mess with them… They’re human beings just like us, and they came for the same reason we came. To work. To improve their lives. So please, don’t mess with them.”

  Of course, Rubio thought. It was only appropriate that it had come to this.

  Once contained to a small contingent of pesky politicos in Coral Gables, the lobbying campaign to get him on board with the Senate’s big immigration overhaul had become inescapable. When Rubio was in Washington, Senate colleagues like Dick Durbin were cornering him at the Capitol gym during early-morning workouts and bathing him in flattery as they talked about how honored and overjoyed they would be to have him join the gang of lawmakers drafting the legislation. Meanwhile, that hundred-yard call sheet maintained by his aides was filled with queries from reporters who wanted to know what he was going to do about immigration. And now his own mother was twisting his arm.

  Rubio knew he had no choice but to join the fray. It might end up being a political loser for him—in fact, he thought it probably would be—but if he sat out this fight, he worried that he wouldn’t be able to look his mom in the eye (or himself in the mirror, for that matter). He really did care about the immigrants suffering in America’s shadows—los pobrecitos, his mom called them—and he figured this was as good a hill as any to risk dying on. The next month, he announced his desire to tackle immigration in a splashy interview with the Wall Street Journal.

  Navarro and her Biltmore compatriots were elated. “Marco’s very smart and very astute, and he has a deliberative process that he goes through, but he has a strong internal compass that tells him where north is,” she gushed after learning the news. The reaction from the national news media was even more laudatory.

  One day in February, Rubio got his hands on a copy of the new issue of Time magazine and tried to contain his euphoria as he studied its cover. There was the familiar red border around the edges, the tall lettering of the title across the top, and—right smack-dab in the middle—a beautifully lit, masterfully choreographed portrait of him (yes, him!) striking a square-shouldered pose that exuded power and authority.

  He adored the photo, but even better was the imposing, bright-yellow headline stamped across his torso with the force of a gavel-pounding verdict:

  THE REPUBLICAN SAVIOR:

  HOW MARCO RUBIO BECAME THE NEW VOICE OF THE GOP.

  Chapter Three

  Battle Hymn of the Bleeding Heart Conservatives

  While the news cycle gods were busy anointing a new Republican savior, Paul Ryan returned to Washington in a punishing fall from grace.

  It had been weeks since the end of the 2012 election, but the stink of defeat still clung to him. The typically genial congressman was churlish and irritable—gloomily stalking the Capitol with headphones in his ears to avoid unwanted conversation, and sarcastically snapping at colleagues without warning. Before Mitt Romney had tapped him as his running mate, Ryan existed in the collective Washington mind as the bright, conservative budget wonk with a reputation for seriousness. Now? He was the plucky little sidekick who had ridden shotgun on a campaign that came to define all that was wrong with the modern Republican Party.

  Worst of all, Ryan seemed eternally doomed to relive one of the most gut-wrenching experiences of his life, because everywhere he went people kept asking him the same question about the campaign: what did you learn?

  Any honest answer to that question would necessarily take him back to perhaps the worst moment of the race.

  It was late one afternoon in September 2012, and Ryan’s DC-9 campaign jetliner was about to take off when the links began landing in his aides’ inboxes. “SECRET VIDEO,” the headline shouted from the screens on their smartphones. “Romney Tells Millionaire Donors What He REALLY Thinks of Obama Voters.” As the plane’s engines revved, campaign staffers began frantically forwarding the MotherJones.com article to one another and hunching over their colleagues’ shoulders, squinting to get a better look. By the time the video loaded, the plane was ascending into the sky and a sense of panic was settling in among the Republican vice presidential nominee and his team.

  The clandestinely recorded video, taken at a Boca Raton fund-raiser, showed an impatient-sounding Mitt Romney, his voice taking on a metallic quality as he laid out what appeared to be his unfiltered view of the electorate to a room full of donors.

  “There are forty-seven percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” Romney hissed. “All right, there are forty-seven percent who are with him, who are dependent on government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…”

  The video cut off before its conclusion as smartphones and portable Internet air cards on board lost service in the sky; Ryan and his team would have to wait until the in-flight wireless kicked in above ten thousand feet before they could fully assess the damage done to their campaign. But everyone could already tell it would be devastating: the video had gone viral on Paul Ryan’s own airplane within minutes of its appearance on the Internet. There was no telling how fast it was traveling down on the ground

  “Paul was fucking livid,” one Ryan aide who was on the plane later told me. “He was apoplectic. He couldn’t believe it. Obviously, it was a dumb thing to say and obviously it was bad politically.” But there was another reason for the good-natured Wisconsinite’s rage.

  Since joining the presidential ticket in August, Ryan had been working on a major campaign address about poverty in the tradition of Jack Kemp, his onetime political idol and a self-proclaimed “bleeding heart conservative.” For inspiration, his staff had asked the Jack Kemp Foundation to send them every speech the former congressman and vice presidential nominee had ever given on the subject, and Ryan had one of his speechwriters, Stephen Spruiell, working on a draft. Ryan’s vision was to make the poverty address the grand finale of a gutsy campaign swing through poor, urban neighborhoods that the GOP hadn’t reached since the Depression-era shantytowns that lined the Hudson River were named after Herbert Hoover. He thought it would send a message that a Romney administration would not forget about the poor once it reached the White House.

  But as the election wore on, and Ryan found himself ping-ponging from one identical Midwest swing state stop to the next, it became increasingly obvious that the campaign commandos had no interest in letting him stray fro
m the poll-tested, focus-grouped, statistics-soaked schedule they had him on. The number crunchers in Boston believed that every hour spent on inner-city photo ops would be a lost opportunity to rally middle-class suburbanites who might actually vote for them. And whenever Ryan tried to get Romney’s consultants to sign off on his idea for a big poverty speech, they treated him like an irritating six-year-old who kept asking for a unicorn for his birthday.

  Now, with this “47 percent” video threatening to define their entire campaign, Ryan knew that any chance he had of getting out his desired message in a genuine, pathbreaking way had evaporated. Even if the campaign did green-light the speech, it would seem like a cynical stunt performed as an act of repentance for Romney’s rhetoric.

  “It’s going to look totally reactive now,” Ryan seethed to his staff. “It’s going to look totally insincere.”

  And there was nothing Ryan hated more than looking insincere.

  There was a part of Ryan that wanted to ream out the Boston operatives with a big fat “I told you so,” to tell Mitt that this was amateur hour, and to insist that he get a seat at the strategy table going forward. But then the running mate received his damage control instructions for the next day. He was to don a blazer, perch himself in front of an appropriately patriotic-looking backdrop in Reno, Nevada, and do a series of local news interviews in which he would repeat the talking points he was given: Mitt’s comments may have been inarticulate, but his broader point was that “under the Obama economy, government dependency is up and economic stagnation is up.”

  Ryan bit his tongue and dutifully agreed. He was happy to do it.

  In the days following the “47 percent” leak, Ryan felt lost—adrift in his own campaign. The void of vision in Romney’s operation had always bothered him, but now it was proving to be poisonous to their prospects. They were so busy attacking President Obama all the time that they had failed to articulate a positive message of their own—and now they were being defined by off-the-cuff comments made behind closed doors.

  Frustrated and restless, Ryan sent a note to Peter Wehner, a prominent Republican speechwriter and an old friend. When Ryan had first joined the ticket Wehner had emailed him with some friendly advice: “You may only get one bite at the apple. Make it count.” Now, the disgruntled veep candidate vented to his friend that he feared he was squandering his time on the national stage by parroting political platitudes. Ryan expressed particular exasperation with his repeated, failed attempts to get buy-in from campaign headquarters for a big poverty speech.

  Wehner responded with a suggestion: “Just do the speech, and make them stop you.”

  So Ryan did. He informed Mitt’s band of consultants that he was moving forward with his plan, and would be giving a speech in October centered on poverty. If they had any thoughts on the event, they were welcome to share them. It was a relatively mild act of rebellion compared to Sarah Palin’s 2008 antics, but it was as close to “going rogue” as Ryan would get during the campaign.

  As it turned out, though, Ryan didn’t need to do much convincing. As he had bitterly predicted when he first saw the video, the campaign was much more enthusiastic about the idea of a poverty speech in the aftermath of “47 percent,” and they were now eager to work something out. A big inner-city campaign swing was out of the question, but they proposed a compromise to Ryan: he could give the speech in Cleveland, and hold an off-the-record roundtable with community leaders who worked with the poor—but the campaign would have to vet all of it.

  To put together the event, Ryan enlisted the help of Bob Woodson, a seventy-five-year-old civil rights leader and community organizer whom he had met when he first moved to Washington. Woodson went to work compiling a list of black ministers, homeless shelter volunteers, and halfway-house owners that he thought Ryan should meet. It was a motley lot, and most of them, Woodson later acknowledged with some pride, were “ex-something: ex–drug addicts, ex-alcoholics, ex-convicts.”

  When the list was turned over to the Romney campaign and the Secret Service for approval, “it was like the machines exploded,” a Ryan aide later told me. “There were so many red flags—guys that had multiple felonies in their background. And they kept coming back and picking out names, saying, ‘Absolutely not, we cannot have this person.’”

  Woodson, who was no fan of Romney’s and felt he was doing an unappreciated favor to the campaign, quickly grew tired of the meddling. At one point, when an operative was inquiring about one of his friends’ criminal record, Woodson exploded.

  “Do you guys know anything about poverty?” he demanded. “This is where these guys come from! They are working with the poor because they had hit rock bottom.”

  The substance of the speech itself was also caught in a tug-of-war between Romney’s campaign strategists, who wanted to turn it into a sharp indictment of President Obama’s failure to help the poor, and Woodson, who thought the speech should be forward-looking and nonpartisan.

  “They were sending me copies of Paul’s speech, and it was standard campaign stump, bashing Obama… And I said, ‘I’m not going to bring my people there to sit and listen to them trash Obama, because they may have voted for him!” Woodson told me. After several frustrating drafts, he considered pulling the plug on the whole thing. “I said, ‘Man, forget it.’”

  Finally, Ryan called him up and begged for patience. “Look, work with me here,” he pleaded. Woodson relented, and in the end the final draft of the speech contained just one polite jab at the president by name.

  “There was always tension between Romney and Ryan,” Woodson later told me. “Paul won’t say it, but I know firsthand there was tension there. Paul wanted to do more events going to lower-income communities, but according to Romney’s campaign, that would have taken them ‘off message.’ The whole message of the Romney campaign was to demonize Obama. That’s why they lost—thank God.”

  On October 24, the day of the speech, Ryan slipped into a high-ceilinged backstage room at Waetjen Auditorium, on the campus of Cleveland State University, with a small group of aides and Secret Service agents. No reporters. About a dozen of Woodson’s grassroots poverty fighters were waiting for him. They took turns telling stories from the front lines of the losing war on poverty, recounting their own struggles with addiction and homelessness, and testifying of redemption. As the meeting wrapped up and Ryan prepared to depart to deliver his speech, Paul Grodell, a tattooed minister who had arrived at the meeting on his Harley, asked the candidate if he could lay hands on him and pray.

  Ryan looked momentarily panicked, but then he shrugged. “I’m Catholic,” he responded, smiling nervously. “But I’m cool with that.”

  Secret Service agents tensed up as the group surrounded Ryan, and Grodell placed his hands on his shoulders—inches away from the candidate’s neck. Ryan made the sign of the cross, and the minister called on the power of God to give the candidate strength, to help him fulfill his divine mission. He prayed specifically for God to help Ryan serve those who were languishing in poverty. When the group said “Amen,” they opened their eyes to find Ryan struggling to hold back tears.

  In those first, miserable weeks after the 2012 election, Ryan found his thoughts returning often to that private prayer in Cleveland. It was one of the rare memories from the campaign that evoked a clarity of purpose, rather than a sense of helpless frustration. “To me, that moment is how the things we believe in, and what we’re trying to do, can really revitalize our country,” he would later tell me.

  As people continued to ask him the same irritating campaign-related question—“What did you learn?”—Ryan soon realized that this was his answer. For a man who had spent his congressional career focused primarily on budget deficits, the idea of using his position to directly defend the cause of the poor and needy felt like a revelation. The prospect began to pull him out of his funk.

  One day, while speaking with a close aide over the phone, Ryan recounted the meeting in Cleveland and called it the most powerf
ul experience he had had on the campaign trail. He also said he felt strongly that he needed to act on it.

  “This is my next ‘Roadmap,’” Ryan told the aide, referring to the name of his career-making budget proposals. “I want to figure out a way for conservatives to come up with solutions to poverty. I have to do this.”

  Paul Ryan’s life came into focus late one morning in Janesville, Wisconsin, in the summer of 1986. He was awoken at his family’s suburban home by a frantic phone call from his father’s secretary. “Do you know where your dad is?” she asked. “He’s got clients here.”

  His mother was out of town and his brother had already left for work, so Ryan drowsily made his way to his parents’ bedroom. When he pushed open the door, he found his dad’s lifeless body on the bed.

  The loss of his father would become the defining experience of Ryan’s young life, melting and remolding his psyche in myriad ways. It shattered his faith in God, pushed him to grapple with his own mortality, and shaped his views of civil society and the social safety net. But one result of the tragedy came to define him more than anything else: it sharpened and enhanced Ryan’s sense of personal ambition.

  A few days after his dad died, Ryan went for a long, late-night run and ended up on his back in the middle of a field, staring up at the stars. “I decided right then and there that I needed to step up,” he wrote in his 2014 book, The Way Forward. “The way I thought about it was ‘sink or swim,’ and I decided I was going to swim like hell. I wouldn’t wallow. I wouldn’t let the sadness and self-pity pull me down.”

  As a perception-conscious politician, Ryan was savvy enough to recognize that overly ambitious officeholders risk summoning images of Machiavelli or Brutus. And so he took pains in his book to cast himself as a just-like-you everydude who fell into a political career only because of his nerdy interest in economics. But many who were close to Ryan as he bounded from adolescence into early adulthood told me that he had a laser-like focus on résumé building and ladder climbing. The year after his dad died, he ran for class president and won. He began closely following the conservative heroics of the Reagan era in the news, and he started taking his workouts more seriously.