![\"Pirate](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/a25397.jpg\"\/)
<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cI knew it. He\u2019s wearing a scribe.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cartoon by Paul Noth<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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. \u201cThe rural legislators got their formula, and in exchange they went with Marco,\u201d a former senior Democrat in the legislature told me. \u201cCantens was a carcass on the side of the road.\u201d Rubio won. The Florida Bulldog, a regional newspaper, later calculated that the change had cost Miami teachers nearly a billion dollars. \u201cThe one constant in Marco Rubio\u2019s career is that he has betrayed every mentor and every principle he\u2019s ever had in order to claim power for himself,\u201d a political figure in Miami told me.<\/p>\n
In Florida, term limits make it harder for elected officials to acquire deep experience, and Rubio\u2019s legislative record is relatively thin. For his first address as speaker, he placed a book titled \u201c100 Innovative Ideas for Florida\u2019s Future\u201d on every legislator\u2019s 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. \u201cGive him credit,\u201d a lobbyist working in Florida at the time told me. \u201cHe didn\u2019t have a lot of ideas himself. It was a clever thing to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. \u201cI can\u2019t think back on a time when I\u2019ve ever been prouder to be a Republican, Marco,\u201d he said afterward. He handed Rubio a golden sword, explaining that it was \u201cthe sword of a great conservative warrior\u201d: a reference to the anti-Communist leader Chiang Kai-shek, who had been part of his family\u2019s folklore since George H. W. Bush served as a diplomat in China. Rubio hung the sword in the speaker\u2019s office. In his memoir, \u201cAn American Son,\u201d he called Bush \u201cthe man I most admired in Florida politics.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the memoir, Rubio wrote about the ambition that propelled him: \u201cAll my life I\u2019ve been in a hurry to get to my future.\u201d 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 \u201ca series of terrible blunders.\u201d) 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Crist\u2019s 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. \u201cWhy would I hug someone I don\u2019t know?\u201d he asked in one, smiling broadly with feigned bewilderment. Rubio captured the Party\u2019s nomination, then the seat in the Senate. \u201cMarco got lucky,\u201d a Republican lobbyist in Florida told me. \u201cCharlie fucked himself. He governed from the left, which he could get away with, but then hugging Obama? Marco just jumped on him.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The election in 2016 is the only one that Rubio has ever lost\u2014an anomaly in a carefully managed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45629,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[121],"tags":[3384,6574,186,10728,28834,7463],"class_list":{"0":"post-45628","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-marco-rubio","8":"tag-audio","9":"tag-magazine","10":"tag-marco-rubio","11":"tag-onecolumnnarrow","12":"tag-profiles","13":"tag-splitscreenimagerightfullbleed"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116474857775624057","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45628\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}