Jeb Bush Ups Stakes In Attacks on His GOP Rival Marco Rubio Former Florida governor continues to hammer away at missed Senate votes by his one-time protégé By Beth Reinhard and Patrick O’Connor
http://www.wsj.com/articles/jeb-bush-ups-stakes-in-attacks-on-his-gop-rival-marco-rubio-1446772399
PORTSMOUTH, N. H.—In a Republican primary filled with intense rivalries, none is more personal than the one between Jeb Bush and his one-time lieutenant Marco Rubio.
Mr. Rubio got the better of his former governor in the last GOP presidential debate, undermining Mr. Bush’s standing in the primary and thrusting the Florida senator to the head of the pack of candidates with elected experience.
That raises the stakes heading into a critical week in which they will appear at the next GOP debate in Milwaukee Tuesday and a forum in Florida on Friday before a hometown audience both will eventually need to keep their presidential hopes alive.
“You have two people from the same state, the same county, literally neighbors who have spent so much time together and been on the same page politically, and when one of them starts attacking the other, it becomes personal,” said former state Rep. Gaston Cantens, who served with both men in Tallahassee and is backing Mr. Rubio. “It is the ugly side of politics.”
Next week’s showdowns put particular pressure on Mr. Bush to pull off what he failed to accomplish at the third GOP debate in Colorado: put his former political understudy in his place for missing Senate votes and raise doubts about Mr. Rubio’s readiness to do the job. Mr. Rubio has his own challenges; his rise in the polls has heightened scrutiny of his candidacy, including renewing questions about his use of a Florida GOP charge card for personal expenses.
“I don’t like criticizing people,” Mr. Bush said in an interview Thursday with The Wall Street Journal aboard his campaign bus in New Hampshire. “But I do think that Marco, and any other United States senator and any other congressman, needs to show up, and so, Marco’s fair game.”
Mr. Bush’s debate scolding of Mr. Rubio’s Senate absenteeism backfired when the senator cast the attack as petty politics. Mr. Bush and his allies, however, haven’t stopped talking about it.
A super PAC backing the former governor took Mr. Rubio to task on Twitter Thursday afternoon for missing a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing about the possibility of a bomb downing a Russian airliner over Egypt. “He’ll go through the wringer, just like I’m going through it, and he’ll have to defend himself,” Mr. Bush said. “There’ll be scrutiny on him, just as there should be for everybody.”
Mr. Rubio, 44, has said he won’t criticize Mr. Bush, 62. Yet he has repeatedly characterized the 2016 election as a generational choice, casting himself as fresher face in a party desperate to appeal to younger Americans.
Next week’s “Sunshine Summit” serves as a precursor to their showdown in the March 15 Florida primary, a winner-take-all contest in which the loser will face the almost-certain death of his presidential ambitions—assuming one of them wins in a state where they are currently overshadowed by Donald Trump and Ben Carson.
Thirteen of the 15 GOP candidates are expected in Orlando, but the spotlight will linger on Mr. Bush, who helped build the state’s Republican Party into a political juggernaut, and Mr. Rubio, who rose through its ranks to become House Speaker and won election to the U.S. Senate in a major upset.
ENLARGE Mr. Rubio is often referred to as Mr. Bush’s “protégé,” and the former governor his “mentor.” The reality of their relationship is a little more complex. They teamed up to oppose casino-style slot machines in Miami-Dade County in 2005. But the former governor vetoed at least $14 million in earmarks Mr. Rubio sponsored during their shared time in Tallahassee, including $2 million for a breast-cancer research center financed in part by one of Mr. Rubio’s top political benefactors.
Both Republicans supported the construction of a stadium for the Florida Marlins baseball team; then Mr. Bush threatened to veto a $4 surcharge on cruise-ship passengers that Mr. Rubio supported to help pay for it. Mr. Bush also vetoed money Mr. Rubio requested to help finance college football bowl games.
Over the years, the partnership has taken on a symbolic importance for both men. Mr. Rubio has touted his ties to Mr. Bush to bolster his credibility as a rising star inside the party, while Mr. Bush once bragged about Mr. Rubio’s political success to burnish his own legacy as governor.
“The whole protégé-mentor story between Marco and Jeb is based on the fact that Jeb really did lay the foundation for the conservative movement in Florida,” said Nick Iarossi, a Republican lobbyist in Tallahassee who was an early backer of Mr. Rubio. “You could say that about any successful elected Republican who came after Jeb Bush. However, Marco Rubio is clearly his own man.”
In July 2009, during the early stages of Mr. Rubio’s long shot Senate bid against the state’s sitting Republican governor, Charlie Crist, former Florida GOP Chairman Al Cardenas urged Mr. Rubio to quit the race and run for attorney general instead. Down by 30 percentage points in the most recent poll and lagging $4 million behind Mr. Crist in fundraising, Mr. Rubio asked him to run the idea by Mr. Bush, Mr. Cardenas said in a recent interview.
Mr. Bush encouraged Mr. Rubio to stay in the race, and he won handily.
The next time Mr. Rubio ran for higher office, he didn’t ask the former governor for his approval. Instead, the freshman senator announced his presidential bid in April, well after it became clear that Mr. Bush would enter the field as the front-runner. Allies to both had hoped Mr. Rubio might step aside rather than clutter Mr. Bush’s path to the nomination.
“That Marco wanted to have Jeb’s blessing when he ran for the Senate shows that he had enormous respect and admiration for him,” said Mr. Cardenas, who is supporting Mr. Bush’s campaign. “I always thought there would be that deference.”
Rubio allies point to the fact Mr. Bush didn’t endorse Mr. Rubio in the Senate race until he had effectively locked up the nomination. Mr. Crist eventually left the party to run as an independent.
The party establishment in their home state is rallying to Mr. Bush. The majority of Republican members of the congressional delegation, eight former House speakers, and 20 out of 26 GOP state senators are backing him over Mr. Rubio. Most of the state’s major Republican donors are also lined up behind Mr. Bush.
Legislators who served with Messrs. Bush and Rubio in Tallahassee describe them working closely together to push through a sweeping conservative agenda of massive tax cuts, an overhaul of the public schools and protections for gun owners.
“Jeb was the leader and all of us were followers,” said former state Rep. J.C. Planas, who is backing Mr. Bush. “Now you see it going from a whisper campaign to a full blown rivalry. I do believe Jeb has reason to feel betrayed.”
The polls tell a different story about how the GOP base views the race. Mr. Bush is running in fourth place in three recent surveys, behind Mr. Rubio, with Messrs. Trump and Carson leading the pack in Florida.
Now that Mr. Rubio is gaining momentum, his supporters are pointing to the major churn in the electorate since Mr. Bush served two terms in office. Of the 4.4 million registered Republicans in Florida as of April 2015, about 48% came on the rolls since the last time Mr. Bush was on the ballot in 2002, according to an analysis by Daniel Smith, a University of Florida political science professor.
Mr. Bush is using this week’s bus tour—and an earlier swing through Florida—as a chance to reset his campaign ahead of next week’s debate.
On Thursday, he brushed aside polls that showed him lagging many of his rivals, including Mr. Rubio. “I’m not worried about it,” he said on the bus.
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