The talk at the Miami hotel, where Jeb Bush works and Marco Rubio works out, is of the next president. But can the young senator get out from under Jeb’s shadow?
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Image by John Gara/Buzzfeed
CORAL GABLES, Fla. — As a teenager in the late 1980s, Marco Rubio's favorite place to get drunk with his high school buddies was the golf course surrounding the Biltmore Hotel, a towering Mediterranean-style structure at the center of town. A decade later, the young lawyer and his wife Jeanette spent their wedding night in one of the Biltmore's suites. On election night in 2010, Rubio celebrated his unlikely election to the United States Senate in one of the Biltmore's ballrooms.
And sometime this year, the swirling circle of donors, activists, and politicos who spend their evenings gossiping at the Biltmore's bar will decide whether Rubio gets a chance to become president in 2016 — or whether that honor should be given to Miami Republicans' other favorite son, former Florida governor Jeb Bush.
In the months that have followed the 2012 election, the Biltmore, a 400-room luxury resort surrounded by banyan trees, has emerged as a national center of gravity for Republican politics: a must-stop for campaign fundraisers, and a favorite vacation spot for retired presidents. Bush runs his foundation out of an office at the hotel, and Rubio, who lives just a few miles away, has been spotted at the hotel gym's morning spin classes.
It has become a matter of social survival here to develop a playful non-answer when asked which candidate one would support if both men decided to run for president in 2016, something Ana Navarro knows better than anyone. A high-profile Republican strategist, longtime girlfriend to the Biltmore's owner, and an avowed friend and ally to both Rubio and Bush, Navarro described a Rubio vs. Bush face-off as "the nightmare scenario for everyone here."
"I'd get into the fetal position and lock myself in a room for nine months," she said. "That just cannot happen… 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."
Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, who represents Florida's 25th district and considers both Bush and Rubio friends, had his own quip ready when asked how he'd react.
"If they both run? I think it would be a great ticket!" he exclaimed. When his joke was met with a beat of silence, he insisted, "That's my quote, and that's as much as I'm gonna say."
But not everyone is so bashful about stating loyalties.
On a sunny Sunday afternoon in December, Jeb Bush Jr. sat at a poolside table a few hundred yards from the office where his father plots his political future, and, between sips of Diet Coke, offered his view of the immigration landscape, eagerly name-checking high-profile Republicans he expected to work on the issue.
"You've got the old guard — Lindsey Graham, John McCain — but what will be really interesting to see is where [Texas Senator] Ted Cruz comes out on this issue," Bush said. "He's a Tea Party guy, but he's really nice. I mean, he's, you know, really bright, very intelligent, and also comes from Cuban descent."
Conspicuously missing from his list: another Cuban-American Tea Party star who happened to live a few miles away. Wouldn't Rubio be a leader on immigration?
"I hope so," Bush said. "He's got to actually execute and get something done rather than just talking."
In the political soap opera that is today's Republican Party, the younger Bush's not-so-veiled swipe at Rubio could be viewed as a juicy plot twist in the winding narrative arc that leads to the 2016 presidential primaries. (Rubio declined to comment on the jab.) But Bush was also giving voice to a sentiment that had been growing in his hometown ever since Rubio took office in 2010.
On the cover of Time magazine, Rubio is the "Republican Savior." On Capitol Hill, he is the lynchpin holding together a potentially historic effort to overhaul the nation's immigration system. And on Tuesday night, he will be his party's anointed standard-bearer when he goes on live TV and delivers the GOP's response to President Obama's State of the Union address in two languages.
But at the Biltmore, Rubio is just "Marco," a baby-faced freshman senator with lots of potential — and a maddening reluctance to live up to it.
While the senator's top-notch handlers have worked overtime to cast his recent foray into immigration reform as a courageous move by a conservative visionary, the portrait painted by his more impatient constituents is that of an overly cautious politician acutely aware of his national profile, and desperate not to tarnish his impeccable brand.
No man is a prophet in his own land — especially when he hails from the Biltmore Hotel.
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"Do you want to see my Bush shrine?"
Navarro gestures toward the far end of her ornately decorated living room, where a shelf displays about half a dozen framed photos of her with various members of the Bush family.
Ana Navarro laughing on a tarmac with 41.
Ana Navarro posing in a group shot with Dubya.
Ana Navarro grinning alongside Jeb.
And one in the back, mostly covered by the rest, that stands out: Ana Navarro smiling at the camera next to Bill Clinton.
"We only bring that one out when Gene has Democrats over," she says.
"Gene" is Gene Prescott, the Biltmore's proprietor and the Democratic fundraiser who shares an expensive Spanish revival — along with a Mercedes and high-end golf cart parked out front — with Navarro in the palm-lined Miami suburb of Coral Gables. Prescott bought the shuttered Biltmore, which had once hosted the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, and Al Capone in 1992. Within four years, he had convinced Bill Clinton to hold a summit of Latin-American leaders at the hotel, and kept luring him back for vacations and fundraisers; now he and Navarro have turned it into a bipartisan hub of the political money circuit, and the collection of Beltway boldface names that have graced the hotel's guest list over the years is among the couple's proudest achievements, and Navarro — who co-chaired Senator John McCain's Hispanic Advisory Council in 2008 — takes obvious pleasure in showing it off.
"It's not uncommon to go down to the breakfast area and see Nancy Pelosi meeting with someone, or John McCain holding court in the lobby," she boasts. "One time, George W. Bush and Harry Reid were here on the same night for different events. I thought I was going to have a heart attack."
The hotel's political relevance is only likely to increase in coming months, as it stages one of the most crucial plots in the Republican resurrection story: the awkward 2016 tango performed by Rubio and Bush.
With their shared passion for immigration reform, overlapping donor networks, and long, healthy alliance, Rubio and Bush have put Miami's political class in the improbable position of having two "favorite sons" in the top tier of 2016 speculation — and sources say both men are actively mulling it.
More than one Republican operative in the state said a Rubio vs. Bush face-off could engulf the south Florida GOP in a civil war that would take years to fully recover from.
Both men know that, of course, and their many mutual friends expect them to negotiate an arrangement in some remote corner the Biltmore well before announcements are made. What's less clear is which man will end up standing at a podium two years from now announcing his candidacy, and which man will be standing in the background, clapping politely.
To the national punditocracy, the question seems almost absurd. Of course Rubio, with his magazine covers, well-delivered hip-hop references, and youthful charisma, will beat out the old, fat, white guy who's been out of office for five years and shares a last name with one of the most unpopular presidents in modern history.
But the Biltmore crowd isn't so sure. Spend some time chatting with the local politicos here, and you get the sense that Rubio is still viewed as the kid straining to fill out an oversized suit, not quite ready for the grown-ups' table.
Late last December, the Tampa Bay Times polled a bipartisan group of the state's most "plugged-in political players," and, strikingly, most of them believed Bush would run and Rubio would sit 2016 out. What's more, an overwhelming majority — 82% — said Bush would be a stronger candidate.
"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," one Republican wrote in the survey.
Similarly, a Democrat wrote of Rubio, "He's done the canned policy speeches at Heritage, done the roundtables at National Review. What is unclear is how he accumulates gravitas between now and 2014 when the GOP race will formalize. That is not a problem for Jeb."
Their predictions could be wrong of course, and any number of signs — including a report last week that Bush recently tried to buy the Miami Marlins — would seem to indicate that Rubio is taking this somewhat more seriously than Bush. But hometown perceptions matter in national politics, especially when you hope to raise enough money there to kick off a serious presidential campaign.
And even Navarro — while insisting "we're not going to have to pick between Jeb and Marco" — seemed to suggest that, if she did, she'd choose the former.
"It would be as painful as picking between two of your children," she said. "But time is a factor. Marco has plenty of time. Jeb doesn't. There's stopping Marco from being ready by 2016. Jeb is ready now. He's been ready for years, and we've been ready and waiting."
The prevailing complaint among Rubio's Republican critics here is that he has allowed an obsessive preoccupation with his public image to keep him from growing into the leader they want him to be.
One exasperated Republican recalled spending close to an hour listening to Rubio agonize over a National Journal article that criticized how his leadership PAC was spending its funds. The Republican tried to reason with the senator that "no one outside D.C. will care about this," but it was useless.
"He just lets these little things get to him, and he worries too much," the Republican said. "I'm just like, 'Marco, calm down.'"
Jeb Bush, on the other hand, has managed to adopt a certain cavalier, politics-be-damned attitude in the years since he left the governor's office that's endeared him to the insiders, vocally championing liberal immigration reform, lobbing bombs at his own party when he thinks they deserve it, and responding to media speculation about his presidential aspirations with a too-cool-for-school shrug.
"I think Jeb laid low on purpose when his brother was president because he understood that anything he said would ricochet back to his brother, or vice versa," said Navarro. "But in these last few years, we've had Jeb Bush unplugged, and it's so fun."
This contrast hasn't escaped Miami's Republicans, one of whom compared Rubio's meticulous care for his public image to Bush's apparent indifference by describing a pair of recent visits by New York Times reporters.
"When Jim Rutenberg came down here to do a profile, Jeb blew him off. When Mark Leibovich came down, Marco took him to a Dolphins game," the Republican said.
Bush's son, Jeb Jr., seemed to relish the distinction when asked about it in December.
"Marco's gotta be careful," he explained. "My dad can kind of say whatever he wants because he's not running for anything."
Not yet, anyway.
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