Rubio embarrassing Bush

How Marco Slew His ‘Mentor’

It's seen as one of the great political betrayals of our time. But for Jeb, insiders say, the truth may be even more embarrassing.

By Michael Kruse

A little more than a decade ago, before they started running for president at the same time, before they started firing shots at each other at campaign stops and across debate stages, and before their respective super PACs started launching attack ads, Jeb Bush gave Marco Rubio a weapon.

“Marco,” Bush said on September 13, 2005, in a ceremony at the Florida State Capitol, “could you please come up here? I’m going to bestow to you the sword of a great conservative warrior …”

The moment was significant, looking to observers like an anointment, a conferring of almost fatherly approval, a permanent linking of political lives. But today this long-term, now-strained relationship is hurtling toward a high-stakes climax. Saturday’s Republican primary in South Carolina is shaping up to be the death of the presidential candidacy of Bush. The collapse of the campaign has something to do with the yoke of the Bush family history and a historically tumultuous, unforeseeable race—but the failure is particularly painful because it comes also at the hands of Rubio, the Cuban-American up-and-comer in whom Bush once identified potential and invested political capital.

It is widely believed that Bush and Rubio are mentor and protégé, a tie even approaching familial. Based, though, on dozens of interviews with people who know them well—colleagues and contemporaries in Florida politics, many of whom consider both men friends, almost all of whom over this past contentious year have had to pick sides—that is a simplistic, incomplete and flawed characterization of the true nature of the relationship, which is less close and more transactional than previously reported. Perhaps no one misunderstood this more than Bush himself, and that misunderstanding is at the root of the anger and sense of betrayal that Bush, his staffers and his army of loyalists feel toward Rubio, from whom they had expected more deference.

“The truth is,” said Dan Gelber, the minority leader of the state house of representatives when Rubio was the speaker and Bush was the governor, “Jeb wasn’t a father figure, and Marco was going to be a star notwithstanding Jeb’s support.”

“It wasn’t brothers, and it wasn’t close friends,” said a Bush backer who—like many Bush backers—has a history with Rubio as well.

“It’s definitely not father-son,” said Ralph Arza, one of Rubio’s best friends. “I never saw or witnessed this mentor-mentee relationship.”

“These guys weren’t social buddies,” another Bush supporter said. “These guys were political friends.”

“I don’t doubt that Marco Rubio respected Jeb Bush as a leader, but I don’t suspect that he viewed that relationship nearly as personally as Bush and Bush people did,” said Steve Schale, a Florida Democratic strategist who directed Barack Obama’s campaign in the state in 2008. “Marco got out of the relationship what he needed.”

Less Shakespearean psychodrama, more a blind spot or a basic error in political math: There, back in 2005, it turns out, was Bush’s first mistake in the failure of his White House bid of 2016. Recast, the sword ceremony that fall no longer looks like a gift exchange or a symbolic gesture. It looks like a transfer of power. It looks like the beginning of the end for Bush, and the end of the beginning for Rubio. There were people seated that day in the house chamber in Tallahassee who detected a whiff of noblesse oblige on the part of Bush and wondered, too, if he quite knew what he was doing by giving Rubio a sword. They worried that Rubio would one day use it—even against Bush.

***

Before the sword, the first time Rubio ran for office, Bush gave him money. It was March of 1998, Bush was running for governor—he had run in 1994, and lost—and Rubio, 18 years younger, was running for a seat on the city commission of little West Miami, and they had a mutual friend. Al Cardenas was an ardent Bush donor who also employed Rubio at his Miami law firm. Cardenas gave the Rubio campaign $250. Bush gave $50.

“Jeb was genuinely interested in helping people he agreed with—solid conservatives,” said Nelson Diaz, who has known Rubio for 20 years and worked for him as his chief legislative aide in Tallahassee. “Jeb did that a lot.”

“He kept an eye out for talented, energetic men and women who could be the future of conservatism in Florida,” said Tom Feeney, Bush’s running mate in 1994, who later would be the state’s speaker of the house.

When Rubio won his West Miami election, Bush called him to congratulate him. The next year, in 1999, Rubio won a spot in the state legislature. His baby face softened but did not conceal his obvious ambition.

“He was immediately tagged as a guy who was going places,” said Renier Diaz de la Portilla, who was elected to the legislature the same time as Rubio and shared an apartment with him early on.

Guzzling Mountain Dew, Rubio raced from Republican floor leader to majority whip to majority leader. By late 2003, he already had positioned himself to be speaker. His oratory in particular made him stand out. As a speech-maker, fellow lawmaker Dudley Goodlette said, Rubio was “spell-binding.” Said Frank Farkas, another legislator: “When he would give a talk on the house floor, people just stopped.” Rubio’s predecessor in the speaker’s role, Allan Bense, sometimes would attempt to gavel members to order but then turn to Rubio for help. “He’d speak,” Bense said, “and he’d calm the waters.”

Even so, the man in charge in Tallahassee was not Rubio—it was Bush. At the time, he was the son of a former president, and the brother of the current president, and a workaholic, activist governor with a Republican-dominated legislature. As the executive of the state of Florida, Bush almost always got his way.

Rubio, Gelber said, was “obviously a superior political athlete,” but Bush was “the king of the hill.”

“Jeb,” he said, “was supreme.”

There was then and remains now a vast contingent of Republicans in the capital city, and around the state in general, who owe to Bush their jobs, their positions and their influence. The word that comes up frequently in conversations with Florida politicos describing Bush: a “cult” of loyalty. Bush grew to expect loyalty, not just because it has been a basic political tenet of his family, but because in Tallahassee he so readily and regularly got it.

By the end of 2005, though, nearing the last full year of his two-term reign, Bush didn’t see in presumptive next governor and then-Republican Charlie Crist a like-minded conservative. Bush needed someone to carry on his policies and to protect what he was beginning to view as his legacy.

He emailed his staff. “I need to get a sword for Marco.”

***

Some 170 of Rubio’s family members and friends flew from Miami for the ceremony in which he would be the first Cuban-American in Florida history to be designated as the speaker of the house. The floor passes that dangled from their necks, according to the St. Petersburg Times, sported a quote from Ronald Reagan. “There’s no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.”

“Throughout my career in public service,” Rubio said in his much-anticipated speech, “a number of people have taken the time to invest in me.” He listed 10 names. He mentioned Cardenas. He mentioned Feeney. He mentioned the woman who was the mayor of West Miami when he won his first election. He mentioned state speakers, state senators, state representatives and congressman Mario Diaz-Balart.

He turned to Bense, the speaker at the time. “I have learned a lot about true leadership just by watching you,” Rubio said.

Bush sat in the front row, off to Rubio’s left, wearing a black suit and a fleshier face. Rubio thanked Bush, too, but in a different way—not personally, but “on behalf of the people of Florida.”

“Governor Bush,” Rubio said, “we are honored that you have joined us here today. For the last eight years, you have been the driving intellectual force behind our movement. Your ideas have profoundly impacted the future of this state. And on behalf of the people of Florida, I thank you for your vision, for your commitment, and for your political courage. Thank you.”

He pivoted quickly.

“But now,” he said, “this chapter in our history sets to close …”

He asked the members of the house to open packages he had left at their desks. It was a book, to be called 100 Innovative Ideas for Florida’s Future. The pages were blank. “Our ideas,” Rubio told them, “should be about tomorrow.”

The speech, which is worth watching, because it’s a precursor for so much of what he still says today, elicited a sustained standing ovation—including from Bush, who clapped and clapped and then shook his hand and gave him a hug and then followed Rubio at the lectern, speaking into the microphone, stumbling over his words.

“Wow,” Bush said. “I cannot—I can’t think back on a time where I’ve ever been prouder to be a Republican, Marco.” His left hand awkwardly reached for a pocket of his suit jacket. “I, uh, you know, I don’t know how I’m gonna talk now. I really—I think that, uh, he capsulized exactly what the mission here is.”

Bush looked up into the crowd at Rubio’s parents. He smiled and said, in Spanish, “I know you’re very proud of your little son”—using the diminutive for son, not hijo but hijito. And then Bush said this: “I’m 52 years old. I used to think I was young in this business. Now I see the incoming speaker of the Florida house, 34-year-old Marco Rubio, and I say, ‘It’s time.’”

And then he gave Rubio the gold and silver sword.

“When Jeb gives Marco that sword, it’s sort of like, ‘Listen, man, I’m leaving, I don’t know who the heck is going to be governor, and you have to keep up the mantle when I’m gone,’” said J.C. Planas, a former legislator who’s now an attorney back in Miami.

“It was a big deal,” former state representative Mike Haridopolos said. “Who’s he kind of passing the baton on to? This guy.”

“Marco was there to carry on the legacy of the policies he had put in place,” Arza said. “Jeb needed Marco.”

Rubio hung the sword in his office, next to a framed Miami Dolphins jersey decorated with the autograph of former coach Don Shula, according to Rubio’s spokesman at the time. “When the governor of the state makes a big deal of introducing you as really the standard-bearer to lead Florida in terms of conservatism,” Jose Fuentes said, “you’re not going to toss that sword away.”

In 2006, Rubio traveled around the state holding what he called “idea-raisers,” as opposed to fundraisers, to fill the 100 Ideas book—and to get out and bolster his statewide network of contacts.

Bush wrote the foreword to the book. In it, he recalled “listening with bated breath” to Rubio’s sword ceremony speech. Rubio, meanwhile, wrote the introduction. Of the 100 ideas, he said: “Through my partnership with Speakers Ray Sansom and Dean Cannon, we will spend the next six years striving to move them forward …” He did not mention Bush.

***

In December of 2008, Mel Martinez, Florida’s incumbent junior United States senator, announced he wouldn’t be running for re-election in 2010. Bush considered running for the opening. Rubio deferred. He waited.

“If he were to run, no one would challenge him in the primary—certainly not me,” Rubio would write in his 2012 memoir, An American Son.

But Bush decided against it.

“Not running does not preclude me from being involved in these things, and I will be,” he told the Associated Press in January of 2009. Bush said his brother’s low Oval Office approval ratings hadn’t factored into his thinking. “People know that I’m Jeb Bush, and I don’t think that would have been a problem.”

Rubio entered the race the first week of May. His opponent, of course, was Crist, Bush’s successor, the sitting governor, then hugely popular. Three weeks later, Jeb Bush Jr. endorsed Rubio. The elder Jeb Bush wouldn’t make the same public pronouncement for another year, finally endorsing Rubio in May of 2010, but he nonetheless worked backchannel against Crist. Republican leaders in Florida and Washington got the message, which was, according to lobbyist Ed Rogers, a longtime Bush family ally: “Charlie Crist is not Jeb’s guy—stand by—there’s going to be a Jeb guy.”

“Everyone knew behind the scenes Jeb was pushing Marco,” Haridopolos said. “He didn’t endorse until late, but everyone knew Jeb was giving him encouragement.”

“He’s got all the tools,” Bush told National Review in August of 2009. “He’s charismatic and he has the right principles.”

And after Rubio beat Crist so soundly, not once but twice—chasing him from the Republican primary, from the Republican party, then besting him in the general election after he switched to independent status—Bush giddily introduced Rubio at the victory celebration on November 2, 2010, at the swank Biltmore hotel in Coral Gables.

“I’m so proud of Marco,” Bush began. “I’m so proud of his high-voltage energy. I’m so proud of his enthusiasm. I’m so proud of his eloquence. And I’m so proud that he will be a part of a next generation of leaders that will restore America. Marco Rubio is the right man at the right time.”

He had to catch himself.

“Bushes get emotional, so I’m going to try my hardest,” he continued. “My wife has told me, ‘Don’t cry. Don’t cry.’ But Marco Rubio makes me cry for joy!”

He called to the stage “our new leader, Marco Rubio.”

People cheered, music played, and Bush started chanting.

“Marco! Marco! Marco!”

Rubio spoke for nearly 20 minutes. He thanked his family.

***

The possibility of Rubio running for president with Bush running as well loomed for a couple years. People talked.

“I think the general consensus at the time was that Marco was, you know, being a little too big for his britches,” said Mac Stipanovich, a lobbyist in Tallahassee and a Bush backer.

“There was a lot of ‘Wait your turn, boy,’” said Florida Republican strategist Rick Wilson, a Rubio backer. “A lot. A lot, a lot, a lot.”

“When you would talk to Jeb people about Marco running for president against Jeb, they’d be like, ‘Well, there’s no way he’d do that,’” said Schale, the Democratic strategist who ran Obama’s Florida campaign. “Their response was, ‘Well, he wouldn’t do that.’ They were almost indignant about the idea that he’d get in. How dare he?”

“You have to understand their psychology, which is: They’re entitled to this—he’s the rightful heir to this throne,” an inner-circle Rubio confidant said.

Arza, Rubio’s close friend, talked with him in his office in Washington. This was shortly before Rubio made his decision. He was weighing the pros and cons of a run. “If he decided not to run because of Jeb, and you let this thing play out the way it’s played out, Marco would’ve felt, ‘I should’ve ran,’” Arza said. “He goes to me, ‘Look, it would kill me for me to be home watching this unfold, and I didn’t run because of Jeb, and here Jeb is imploding.’”

“I never understood why anybody ever thought that Marco Rubio would do anything other than run for president,” Schale said. “For Marco, it’s just a basic political calculation: Does it make sense or not? And he made the right decision.”

“It’s just how Marco is,” said Fuentes, his former spokesman. “There’s no intent to betray—it’s just that he has a plan in his head and he’s not going to wait. He’ll do what’s best for him.”

“I would not say it surprised me” that Rubio ran, said Goodlette, the former lawmaker, who got to know him by sharing an office suite with Rubio in Tallahassee. “I would have no reason to assume that Marco would have deferred for Jeb.”

Rubio announced he was running last April. Bush camp stewed. Bush hadn’t announced yet, but the signs had been there for months. He was seen as the favorite, with an overwhelming base of financial support. “I think Jeb was deeply hurt,” a supporter said, describing Bush’s mindset like this: “Man, this was a guy I embraced, and this is what he did?”

Cardenas, the influential mutual friend from the very beginning, was asked if he was surprised Rubio ran. “I wasn’t surprised,” he said. “I was disappointed.” He went with Bush.

Asked the same thing, Adam Hasner, a former state representative who is a co-chair for the Rubio campaign in Florida, responded with a flat, declarative answer: “No.”

“Yesterday is over, and we are never going back,” Rubio said in his speech in Miami. “We Americans are proud of our history, but our country has always been about the future. Before us now is the opportunity to author the greatest chapter yet in the amazing story of America. We can’t do that by going back to the leaders and ideas of the past.”

People around the country thought he was talking about Hillary Clinton. People in Florida knew better.

Ever since, from South Florida to Iowa to New Hampshire to South Carolina, from debates to town halls, Bush and Rubio have crossed paths on the campaign trail. Their names have been next to each other in poll after poll, with Rubio’s above Bush’s more often than not, and increasingly so. They have exchanged jabs and barbs. Rubio’s digs typically have been more subtle. “Obviously,” he said in Iowa, “I wouldn’t run for president if I thought somebody else was a better candidate.” He told reporters in New Hampshire he didn’t know where the sword was. “Somewhere at home,” he said. Bush, on the other hand, especially as his cash-flush campaign began to break down, ramped up his assaults on the man some of his donors and staff members describe as “Judas” and diminish as “Marquito.” “I don’t want to attack Marco, but …” Bush has kept saying. He’s young, inexperienced, not as ready. “There is no coronation here,” Bush said, about Rubio, earlier this month on CNN.

And there was the debate in which Bush tried tepidly and ham-handedly to ding Rubio on his spotty Senate attendance. Rubio’s response managed to be simultaneously understated and withering, saying to Bush’s face that “someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you,” then turning back to the audience and repeating the line that his campaign—that he—is about “the future.” And there was the debate in which during a commercial break—but still caught on camera—Rubio appeared to move toward Bush to shake his hand and Bush appeared to drop his hand and turn his head.

And their PACs have warred. Bush’s Right to Rise has portrayed Rubio as an untested flip-flopper. Rubio’s Conservative Solutions has painted Bush as old—the succinct title of a recent ad: “Past”—and his campaign as a “train wreck.”

Bush, said Christian Ulvert, a Democratic strategist from Miami, “invested political capital in this young kid, who now is living out his dreams. I think it’s part of Jeb’s downward spiral. He’s campaigning in some ways with a broken heart—and a huge chip on his shoulder. Which is never the best way to campaign.”

In Iowa, Rubio did better than expected and Bush did much worse; in New Hampshire, Bush did slightly better than expected and Rubio did worse; now, in South Carolina, Rubio has regained his momentum, buoyed by the coveted endorsement of the state’s popular governor, Nikki Haley. It might have been a fatal blow to Bush.

“It’s hard for me to be lectured by a gifted young guy who thinks going to a committee hearing means you know something about the world,” he told 150 people at a town hall this week. “With all due respect, Senator Rubio, your four years or five years or whatever it is as senator does not match up to my capabilities of understanding how the world works.”

The vast majority of the Republican establishment in Florida has endorsed Bush over Rubio. It hasn’t mattered. Bush’s low polling isn’t budging. He’s running fourth and fifth in South Carolina—trailing Rubio—and lagging in single digits in the national numbers.

“Jeb’s dead,” said Wilson, the Rubio-supporting strategist. “He just hasn’t had to lay down yet.”

Those who know Rubio and Bush—those who have been watching since the sword—wonder what comes next.

“Will their relationship ever be the same as it used to be? Probably not,” said Esteban “Steve” Bovo, a close friend to Rubio, a Miami-Dade commissioner whose youngest son counts Rubio as his godfather.

Wrecked forever? “Forever is a long time,” Stipanovich said. He then started talking about American and Japanese fighter pilots from World War II reuniting in shows of peace half a century hence.

“I don’t think there’s a relationship after this,” a Bush backer said. “But, honestly, there wasn’t a real one to begin with.”

“They’re not, like, brothers or anything,” the Rubio confidant said, “where if they never talked again, it would be this horrible tragedy.”

And if Bush drops out before the Republican primary in Florida on March 15? Will he endorse Rubio in their home state? Will he, even after this campaign, offer up another anointment? “I’m going to bestow to you …”

“He’d have to be very bitter not to do that,” said Diaz de la Portilla, Rubio’s old roommate in Tallahassee. “I think it’s time for Jeb to realize that it’s time to pass the baton.” Again.