One day, Boehner was back in town for a meeting and decided to pop into Ryan’s office unannounced. Ryan was cheered momentarily—only to wag a finger in Boehner’s face, warning him not to dare light up a cigarette, explaining that it had taken months to get the smell out of the office. Then Ryan looked at him wearily. “This job is a lot harder than I thought,” he said, sighing.
Boehner laughed so hard that he spent the rest of the day coughing.
Recalling the conversation later, Ryan added, “And I wanted to say, ‘You ass, you stuck me with this sh—’” He swallows the rest of the sentence.
The new Speaker did find a way to exact revenge. Having inherited his predecessor’s security detail, Ryan let the agents grow unruly, Navy SEAL–style beards and texted photos of them to Boehner. This was a serious affront to the Rat Pack sensibilities of the former Speaker, code name “Tan Man,” who had demanded that his detail be freshly shaven every day. Boehner was not amused.
As Ryan wrestled with his new role, he struggled also with the trajectory of the GOP race. Trump’s crowds and poll numbers were growing by the day, while the Speaker’s preferred horses were falling hopelessly far behind.
Walker had abruptly dropped out after the September debate in California. Things weren’t going much better for Bush, whose “joyful” candidacy offered all the pleasure of a root canal. Having once led the field, registering at 18 percent in the RealClearPolitics average as of mid-July, Bush had dropped below 4 percent by December. The “low energy” tag from Trump had proved debilitating, capturing the caricature portrayed on Saturday Night Live of Bush as docile and disinterested. Strangely, nothing could have been further from the truth; Bush was known to barely sleep, to answer hundreds of emails per day, and to work with a metabolism that exhausted staffers half his age.
But it wasn’t just the nickname that hurt Bush; nor was it just Trump’s bullying. Coming off two poor debate performances, Bush’s campaign telegraphed a coming attack on Rubio, his old protégé, in the October 28 debate in Colorado. When Bush began by criticizing Rubio’s missed votes in the Senate, Rubio flipped the script. “Jeb, I don’t remember you ever complaining about John McCain’s vote record,” he said, recalling Bush’s support for the 2008 nominee. “The only reason why you’re doing it now is because we’re running for the same position, and someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.”
The audience cheered, and someone whistled loudly. Bush folded his hands together and smiled timidly. He began to respond, but Rubio wasn’t done, and the senator again overpowered his old friend. “Here’s the bottom line,” Rubio said. “My campaign is going to be about the future of America. It’s not going to be about attacking anyone else on this stage. I will continue to have tremendous admiration and respect for Governor Bush. I’m not running against Governor Bush. I’m not running against anyone on this stage. I am running for president, because there is no way we can elect Hillary Clinton to continue the policies of Barack Obama.”
The applause grew louder yet. Once more Bush attempted to respond, and once more he was drowned out—this time by a combination of the audience, the moderators, and a smirking Trump proclaiming to the masses, “I told you that they did not like each other!”
Moments are the currency of a presidential campaign: the acts, the exchanges, the gaffes that break through the clutter of the news cycle and inform voters’ view of candidates. This was Bush’s weakest moment to date, one from which he could never fully recover. He spoke the least of all ten candidates onstage that night, according to a New York Times tally,10 and would continue to see his airtime fade in future debates. Bush had been castrated on national television—and not by Trump, whose harrying had become expected, but by Rubio, whom he had targeted with a premeditated, unsolicited attack.
The learner had slain the master.
RUBIO REPRESENTED THE LAST, BEST HOPE FOR RYAN AND THE REFORMICONS. With a platform heavy on vocational training, higher-ed reform, and answers to automation, Rubio urged voters to peer around the corner at the challenges of the twenty-first century.
He constructed his candidacy around the notion of an inverted economic landscape. Illustrating the scale of change Americans were living through, Rubio noted how the biggest retailer in the country, Amazon, didn’t own a single store; the biggest transportation company, Uber, didn’t own a single vehicle; and the biggest lodging provider, Airbnb, didn’t own a single hotel. This would require, Rubio argued, a foundational reimagining of the relationship between business, the government, and its citizens.
For all the talk of a historically crowded race, it was down to three horses: Rubio was in third place, at 11 percent in the RCP average; Cruz, who had surged on the strength of a behemoth grassroots operation, sat in second place, at 18 percent; and Trump had double his support, registering at 36 percent.
The wild card was Rubio’s courtship of evangelical voters. Once widely assumed to be angling for the support of centrist, business-friendly Republicans, the Florida senator had managed to thread the needle, running an everything-to-everyone campaign. However unsound strategically, this approach kept him in play for the support of social conservatives who did not trust, or did not like, Cruz.
And there were plenty. Some leading activists found Cruz inauthentic to the point of fraudulent; others complained of his social awkwardness, his struggle to make small talk or laugh in a way that wasn’t contrived. (Cruz’s aides, at the outset of his campaign, had to stress to him the importance of making eye contact with strangers in elevators.) One influential woman in the conservative movement told Cruz’s staff that she was simply creeped out by his inhuman disposition.
But these were minority views. Having spent the better part of three years tirelessly pursuing the support of activist leaders and their grassroots followings, Cruz had established himself as the clear favorite to land their support. Now it was just a matter of Tony Perkins, Cruz’s chief ally, closing the deal.
Perkins and his group of conservative movement heavyweights had met for the past sixteen months with the narrow purpose of consolidating the right’s support around a single challenger to the establishment’s favored candidate. They were closer than ever on December 7. Huddled in a boardroom inside a Sheraton Hotel just outside Washington, the group seemed to be closing in on a decision. A supermajority of the group, 75 percent, was required to bind its membership in support of a candidate, and Perkins was working like mad to line up the votes.
After four intense rounds of balloting, with lengthy prayer sessions in between, the participants were physically and emotionally drained. It looked like an impasse was at hand. Cruz continued to hold a lead but was short of the 75 percent supermajority threshold. As several groups split off into side meetings, Perkins dropped in on each of them, pleading his case. Conservatives have worked toward unity for two years, he told them. We are this close.
And then, on the fifth ballot, Cruz hit 75 percent.
The impact was felt immediately. Three prominent participants, direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie; the National Organization for Marriage’s Brian Brown; and the Family Leader’s Bob Vander Plaats, a social conservative kingmaker in Iowa, announced their support of Cruz within seventy-two hours of the Sheraton meeting.11