The election in 2016 is the only one that Rubio has ever lost—an anomaly in a carefully managed ascent. In 1999, he was elected to the Florida House of Representatives, from a largely working-class area of West Miami; though he didn’t live in the district when the seat opened up, he moved there in time to campaign. Just four years later, he announced that he would run for speaker of the House. Florida had recently imposed term limits, and many senior House members were retiring. The leadership was open, and Rubio wanted it.
“I knew it. He’s wearing a scribe.”
Cartoon by Paul Noth
Many people in Florida politics felt that the time was right for a Cuban American speaker, but Rubio faced a difficult issue. For years, public-school teachers in Florida’s cities were paid more than those in rural areas, to compensate for their higher cost of living. A powerful group of legislators, mostly from rural north Florida, wanted salaries equalized across the state. No candidate for speaker had supported the change; Gaston Cantens, a Cuban American legislator who represented Miami, had refused to do so in the previous speaker race and ended up dropping out. But Rubio was amenable. “The rural legislators got their formula, and in exchange they went with Marco,” a former senior Democrat in the legislature told me. “Cantens was a carcass on the side of the road.” Rubio won. The Florida Bulldog, a regional newspaper, later calculated that the change had cost Miami teachers nearly a billion dollars. “The one constant in Marco Rubio’s career is that he has betrayed every mentor and every principle he’s ever had in order to claim power for himself,” a political figure in Miami told me.
In Florida, term limits make it harder for elected officials to acquire deep experience, and Rubio’s legislative record is relatively thin. For his first address as speaker, he placed a book titled “100 Innovative Ideas for Florida’s Future” on every legislator’s desk. The pages were blank; Rubio said that he wanted to fill them with proposals gathered from voters. This effort resulted in a few dozen successful, though mostly marginal, pieces of legislation, including one that expanded scholarships for private-school education and another that created an advisory committee to help make the government more efficient. “Give him credit,” a lobbyist working in Florida at the time told me. “He didn’t have a lot of ideas himself. It was a clever thing to do.”
The same day that Rubio presented his idea book, he was inaugurated as speaker at the capitol. He gave a speech that summoned the experience of a young single mother, arguing that the government had a moral obligation to help her secure a better life for her child. Governor Jeb Bush, a longtime booster, sat in the front row, moved to tears. “I can’t think back on a time when I’ve ever been prouder to be a Republican, Marco,” he said afterward. He handed Rubio a golden sword, explaining that it was “the sword of a great conservative warrior”: a reference to the anti-Communist leader Chiang Kai-shek, who had been part of his family’s folklore since George H. W. Bush served as a diplomat in China. Rubio hung the sword in the speaker’s office. In his memoir, “An American Son,” he called Bush “the man I most admired in Florida politics.”
In the memoir, Rubio wrote about the ambition that propelled him: “All my life I’ve been in a hurry to get to my future.” He has repeatedly evinced an instinct for seizing opportunities, sometimes in ways that angered his colleagues. (He wrote that, in pursuit of the speakership, he made “a series of terrible blunders.”) In 2009, when his tenure as speaker had ended, Rubio announced that he would run for the U.S. Senate. He was thirty-seven and mostly unknown statewide.
His main opponent was Charlie Crist, who was finishing a term as governor. At one point, Crist was thirty points ahead in the polls, and Rubio considered dropping out. But Florida’s Republicans were becoming more conservative, and the right-wing movement known as the Tea Party was gathering strength. Rubio adopted its platform, vowing to repeal Obamacare, lower taxes, and shrink the government.
Crist’s record in office made him vulnerable; he had governed as a moderate and endorsed an economic-stimulus plan that Obama passed after the financial crisis of 2008. Nearly every Republican governor had willingly accepted money from the plan, but Rubio, like many Tea Party candidates, argued that it was bankrupting the country. A pro-Rubio ad showcased a moment when Crist embraced Obama at a public event, and Rubio gleefully talked about it in interviews. “Why would I hug someone I don’t know?” he asked in one, smiling broadly with feigned bewilderment. Rubio captured the Party’s nomination, then the seat in the Senate. “Marco got lucky,” a Republican lobbyist in Florida told me. “Charlie fucked himself. He governed from the left, which he could get away with, but then hugging Obama? Marco just jumped on him.”