Introduction — The Heir
For an instant, she hurtled toward the floor. A slender, delicate right shoulder knifed downward, a cane flipped sideways. Nancy Reagan, tiny, fragile as a china figurine in an ivory-colored suit, was crashing.
Many in the capacity crowd at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, couldn’t see what was happening. They clapped lovingly, oblivious. But before their applause gave way to gasps the synapses of the young senator escorting the former first lady to her seat fired perfectly. Marco Rubio, his hair parted just so, a valedictorian’s smile on his face, tugged the aging icon toward him. He leaned right and swung a hand beneath her left arm, catching the ninety-year-old just as she slanted forward, almost parallel to the floor and bound for a bone-chipping thud.
Rubio, a forty-year-old who looked a decade younger, moved with the sure agility that he once flashed on the high school football fields of Miami. He wasn’t fast, but he was quick, his high school athletic director, James Colzie, always thought. On the football field there’s a difference. Fast means you run at high speed; quick means you react at high speed. Quick means you get to the right spot on the field at precisely the right time.
Sometimes being quick is better than being fast.
It was August 23, 2011. The figurine didn’t shatter.
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Soon it was clear that this was a moment. A Los Angeles Times blog published a frame-by-frame sequence of photographs beneath the headline “Marco Rubio to the Rescue!” They showed Nancy and Marco smiling at each other, then Nancy happily looking into the audience, then starting a slow-motion tumble as the senator reaches over to pat her hand, then Rubio saving her. The former first lady’s anxiety at that second is written on her face as she grimaces and closes her eyes. Later ABC World News dedicated a segment to what the guest anchor George Stephanopoulos introduced as “that video that made so many of us gasp today.” He brought in the network’s medical expert, Dr. Richard Besser, to soberly explain the dangers of falls for the elderly.
Conservative bloggers and their readers, who had been reliably laudatory about all things Rubio during his quick ascent in the Republican Party, praised him. “Hero! Marco Rubio Saves a Falling Nancy Reagan,” said conservativebyte.com. The headlines might just as well have read “Marco Rubio Saves the Republican Party.” “This feels like an omen,” a commenter on The Blaze website wrote. “Saving Reagan I think is a sign from above,” a Human Events reader observed. Another asked, “Now will Marco Rubio SAVE AMERICA from its DOWNFALL? Is this a sign or what? ‘Ronnie’ saved the world from the Communists. Rubio can save America from its leftover Communists.”
Rubio, in a sense, was viewed as a political son of Reagan’s, an heir to his legacy of conservative principles. One of Reagan’s real sons, a cheeky liberal, reacted to the news more like a son worried about his mother than as a political enthusiast. Watching the video of Rubio escorting his mother before she tripped, Ron Reagan fumed: “He’s playing to the cameras. He’s not paying attention to her!”
Reagan, who calls Rubio “the guy who dropped my mom,” planned to lay into the senator if someone from the media called. But, he told me, no one called.
Nothing was going to shatter this moment.
Rubio’s reflexes had only sharpened the impression that a party looking for heroes had found a figure with great promise, an idol touched by serendipity. Rubio’s team couldn’t believe its luck. “We joked in the office that he tripped her,” a top Rubio political advisor told me not long after the greatest interception of Rubio’s career.
Extraordinary political careers can build momentum from an accretion of perfect moments, and this was just one more for Marco Rubio. American politics had never seen anything like him: a young, made-for-YouTube Hispanic Republican with realistic national prospects, establishment backing, and electoral appeal that extended well beyond his ethnicity. There had been Hispanic stars before. But they tended to be Democrats and they tended to fizzle like Henry Cisneros, the suave Mexican American housing secretary, or plateau like Bill Richardson, the Mexican American foreign policy maestro with the decidedly un‑Hispanic-sounding name.
Rubio had arrived on the national scene at a time when both parties were—again—forced to confront the enduring and growing power of Hispanic voters. Could they be wooed with promises of immigration reform alone, or must they be courted with some mix of social issues and religion, and promises of jobs? Might Marco Rubio be the solution?
Good timing matters, but it isn’t everything. Execution counts too. And each time Rubio’s timing has been good, his execution has been even better.
It was a blessing for him to come into Florida’s House of Representatives just when term limits were clearing away much of the competition for leadership spots. But then Rubio did something with his good fortune, strategizing behind the scenes and impressing his elders so that he could ascend. It was fortuitous for him to encounter a Republican primary opponent in a U.S. Senate race who had alienated the Republican Party. But Rubio also capitalized on that opportunity. He overcame polls that showed he had no chance and pulverized the once popular Florida governor Charlie Crist so effectively that Crist was forced to quit the Republican primary and run as an independent. Then Rubio found himself in a vote-splitting, three-way Senate race, and again he made the correct call, sweeping wide to the conservative right and finishing off Crist by trapping him on the left sideline.
In 2010 a national narrative evolved around the idea that Rubio was a product of the tea party, an amorphous movement of discontented Americans who wanted to wipe Washington clean. It was as if Rubio had sprung whole from a town hall meeting. Of course, nothing could have been further from the truth. His rise had actually been as conventional as they come. He’d climbed the staircase methodically, touching each step along the way rather than leaping from the landing to the top floor. In that same election season, there’d been a gusher of out-of-nowhere tea party successes. Christine O’Donnell, who had never won a major election, and Joe Miller secured Republican U.S. Senate primary victories in Delaware and Alaska before losing in the general election. Rand Paul, the son of Ron Paul, a Texas congressman and Republican presidential candidate, was elected to the U.S. Senate in his first attempt at political office.
But Rubio had been running for—and winning—elections for most of his adult life. West Miami city commissioner, Florida state representative, Florida house speaker, U.S. senator. Step, by step, by step.
A letter from Nancy Reagan inviting him to speak at her husband’s presidential library only confirmed what everyone knew: Rubio had arrived. “You’ve been identified as someone to watch on the national political scene,” the letter read. “I’m looking forward to watching you in your new role.”
The Reagan Library speech was a prestige gig, a way for Republicans to walk their finest past the gallery for inspection. With Rubio’s invitation to speak came an invitation to dinner, and as ever, he did not fail to impress. The meal was served in the library’s personal quarters. Gerald Parsky, a trustee of both the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation who had served in five Republican administrations, watched approvingly during the dinner as the young senator charmed the former first lady. “Very relaxed. Easy dialogue. Not nervous at all,” Parsky said of Rubio. “I was impressed.”
Rubio, who has a knack for a kind of self-effacement that draws him closer to his audience while simultaneously showing off his importance, later shared an intimate moment from that meal. “Mrs. Reagan,” he said—a bit formally, ever the polite young man—turned to Rubio’s wife, Jeanette, and told her that “Ronnie” used to “send [her] mom flowers” every year on Nancy’s birthday. The flowers were always accompanied by a note from Ronnie thanking Nancy’s mother for giving birth to her. “And he’d written over 700 love letters or something like that,” Rubio continued. “And I’m just thinking, man, I am in a deep, deep hole. I’ll never catch up to the Gipper.” Rubio was careful to note that he wasn’t calling Ronald Reagan by the diminutive “Ronnie”—that would be disrespectful.
In his speech at the library, Rubio positioned himself as a Reagan for the twenty-first century. Reagan had wanted to properly define the role of government; Rubio wanted to properly define the role of government. Reagan understood that Americans wanted a nation that aspired to prosperity and compassion; Rubio understood that Americans wanted a nation that aspired to prosperity and compassion. Reagan had his Morning in America, an image of a country growing stronger and prouder; Rubio promoted American exceptionalism, the notion that the United States is greater than any nation on Earth and has a solemn responsibility to maintain that status. It was one of Rubio’s mantras during his U.S. Senate campaign and it played well at a time when the housing market was a disaster, unemployment was soaring, and Wall Street chieftains were flying away in private jets with tens of millions of dollars in golden parachutes while their banks were collapsing.
Here was this young, Cuban American politician with dark brown eyes and a huge smile telling everyone that things were going to be okay in a manner that sounded off the cuff, like he really meant it.
On a phone call before his Reagan Library appearance Rubio explained to Parsky that he preferred to speak from notes rather than a full written text. “He made a point of that in the prediscus-









