The 20-year relationship between Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio as teacher and protege could be tested as both Floridians’ eye presidential bids.
In 2005, their relationship was cemented when Bush, then Florida governor, passed the torch to Rubio with a sword.
With Bush’s second term as governor soon to expire, he hoped that Rubio, a rising star in the statehouse, would carry on his legacy as the Florida House speaker. At the ceremony marking Rubio’s new title, Bush presented him with the sword of “Chang.”
“Chang is a mystical warrior,” Bush explained, according to a report in the Gainesville Sun at the time. “Chang is somebody who believes in conservative principles, believes in entrepreneurial capitalism, believes in moral values that underpin a free society.”
”I’m going to bestow to you the sword of a great conservative warrior,” Bush told Rubio, and Rubio took the saber and held it high.
“A lot of people saw that as a transition between the two,” said Brian Ballard, a Florida Republican lobbyist.
Nearly a decade later, however, the political fortunes of Bush and Rubio are as intertwined as they have ever been. Bush announced this week that he is “actively exploring” a bid for the presidency in 2016, a course Rubio has appeared to chart over the past two years.
“Marco’s decision on whether to run for president or re-election will be based on where he can best achieve his agenda to restore the American Dream — not on who else might be running,” Rubio’s spokesman Alex Conant said.
Two presidential candidates from one state is not unheard of. Indeed, two Texans, Gov. Rick Perry and Sen. Ted Cruz, are both expected to vie for the Republican nomination in 2016.
But the relationship between Bush and Rubio, forged over nearly two decades in Florida politics, is unique.
“Jeb’s the mentor, Marco’s the protege,” said Mac Stipanovich, a Bush ally who advised Bush’s 1994 campaign for governor.
Their relationship began even before Rubio served in the Florida statehouse. On Election Day in 1998, a young Marco Rubio had just been elected to the West Miami City Commission, when the phone rang.
“It was Jeb Bush himself, calling to congratulate Marco for winning our little race,” former Vice Mayor Enrique Gonzalez told the Miami New Times in 2010.
Within a few years, Bush and Rubio were on the same team; Bush, the governor, relying on Rubio, the Florida House majority leader, for support.
“All of Jeb’s priorities, Marco as majority leader was responsible for trying to get through,” said Evan Power, who worked for Rubio in the statehouse.
In Tallahassee, Bush and Rubio bonded personally over a shared affinity for football and professionally over their pursuit of what Bush called “BHAGs”: big, hairy, audacious goals.
Rubio “wanted the House to become a vibrant laboratory of ideas, a place that conceived and pursued big, bold policy ideas,” he wrote in his 2012 memoir American Son.
“In that endeavor,” Rubio wrote, “I was most influenced by the creativity and daring of Gov. Jeb Bush, who was a one-man idea factory and had used his intelligence, innovation and the authority and bully pulpit of the governor’s office not just to improve the status quo on the margins, but to overcome it and change it.”
When Rubio crafted the book 100 Innovative Ideas for Florida’s Future, a roadmap for his tenure as speaker, Bush wrote the foreword. Rubio would be entrusted to carry on Bush’s legacy in Tallahassee: Eight weeks after Rubio took the reins as speaker of the House, and accepted the sword from Bush, Bush’s second term was over.
The two men’s paths did not diverge for long. In 2008, Sen. Mel Martinez announced he would retire in 2010, setting off a round of posturing among Florida Republicans to decide who would run to succeed him.
Rubio was interested, but so was Bush. Publicly at the time, and again later in his memoir, Rubio deferred to Bush, insisting the opportunity was Jeb’s to seize or decline.
“If he were to run, no one would challenge him in the primary — certainly not me,” Rubio wrote. To Rubio, after all, Bush was the “man I most admired in Florida politics.”
Impatient for Bush’s decision, Rubio drove to Bush’s Miami office in late 2008 to ask him what he planned to do. They met for an hour.
“I left the meeting convinced he would soon announce he was running for the United States Senate,” Rubio wrote.
But, in January, Bush called Rubio’s cell phone.
“I’m not going to do it,” Bush said, according to Rubio’s account.
When Rubio decided he would run, he was decidedly the underdog — but Bush nevertheless became a visible presence for Rubio on the campaign trail, and he was active behind the scenes. When the National Republican Senatorial Committee planned to endorse Charlie Crist, the governor of Florida and Rubio’s Republican primary opponent, Jeb called Rubio’s campaign with the news.
On Nov. 2, 2010, when Rubio was named the winner, it was Bush who took the stage in Coral Gables, Fla., to introduce his protege.
“Marco Rubio,” Bush told the crowd of supporters, as tears welled in his eyes, “is the right man at the right time.”
This time, however: maybe not.
If their personal and professional history will not dictate whether both run in a Republican primary for president, as Rubio’s team has indicated it won’t, political realities might.
“I don’t see a primary between the two of them,” said Ballard, who served as Mitt Romney’s finance co-chairman for Florida. “I don’t think Marco could successfully mount a national campaign without the donor base of his state locked up.”
But Rubio’s allies already are downplaying the significance of Bush’s and Rubio’s shared history — a hint that, perhaps, the student will aim to overtake his teacher.
“I think it’s a mistake to think Marco wakes up in the morning and thinks, ‘I need to check in with Jeb,’ or Jeb thinks, ‘Marco owes me,’” said Rick Wilson, a Florida Republican operative with ties to Rubio. “If you observe Marco even from the beginning of his political career, while he certainly acknowledges the influence Jeb had on him, it’s not like he was Jeb’s little apprentice or his mini me. He has a set of life experiences very much his own.”
