At Home with Marco Rubio's Modern Family

Meet the rising star of the Republican Party: a Cuban-American, Roman Catholic Gen Xer with four young kids, a passion for football, and a powerful drive to achieve what his parents couldn’t.

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has been called “a Latino Barack Obama” and “the Republican savior.” But to his wife, Jeanette, he’s more like Tom Hanks. On Valentine’s Day 1997, Rubio planned to propose to Jeanette atop the Empire State Building, an idea inspired by her love of the movie Sleepless in Seattle. But it was so cold that day that she didn’t want to go to the observation deck. “I had to lure her there,” Rubio recalls. “I told her, ‘I love King Kong. I’ve always wanted to climb the Empire State Building!’”

“I was like, ‘Seriously, Marco?’” Jeanette says.

But up they went, 102 stories above Manhattan, where Rubio got down on one knee. The moment was just as sweet as it sounds, right up to when Jeanette said yes and accepted the ring.

“Then he took it back,” she says.

“I was afraid she would drop it over the edge of the building,” Rubio explains, laughing. “I said, ‘Let’s wait until we’re on the ground. Then I’ll give it back to you.’”

Not terribly romantic, maybe, but it’s just the kind of cautious pragmatism that has helped propel Rubio, 42, from his local city commissioner’s office to the U.S. Capitol in 12 years. His willingness to take such great leaps is balanced by a careful, thoughtful temperament. As Al Cardenas, the chair of the grassroots American Conservative Union, describes it, Rubio has that rare ability to “think through a number of things at the same time. He’s like those young guys in tech, like Mark Zuckerberg, only he’s in the political arena.”

This spring Rubio took the biggest calculated risk of his political career when he helped steer comprehensive immigration reform through the Senate. He was criticized by his conservative base for flip-flopping on the issue (during his 2010 Senate run, he’d earned Tea Party support by opposing an earned path to citizenship), but Rubio defends his change of heart. “It’s one thing to consider immigration reform as a theoretical policy issue,” he says, “and another to meet real people whose lives are impacted by it. As a senator, I interact with people who flat-out tell you, ‘Look, my kids were hungry. And I am going to do what it takes to feed them.’ You think, ‘If I had been in that position, would I have done something different?’”

Despite Rubio’s leadership, the Senate bill failed to find support among many of his fellow Republicans in the House, and it’s unclear what will happen with immigration reform this fall. Meanwhile, Rubio’s been busy adopting more conservative stances (a government shutdown over the Affordable Health Care Act; a Senate bill banning abortions after 20 weeks), which have helped maintain his credibility with right-leaning voters.

A Quinnipiac University “thermometer” poll taken in August to measure voters’ attitudes toward the nation’s major political figures found the charismatic and youthful Rubio ranked third in popularity among Republican voters, after Paul Ryan and Ted Cruz. (Chris Christie came in eighth among Republican voters, but first among all voters.) The results make Rubio someone to watch as the 2016 presidential race shapes up, especially with the Republican Party trying to attract the increasingly important Latino vote.

Rubio, whom Mitt Romney considered as a 2012 running mate (“Frankly, it probably wasn’t the right thing for me,” he says), is quick to dismiss the idea that he is the GOP’s Great Hispanic Hope: “I don’t think you can nominate someone with a last name that ends in a vowel and expect that all of a sudden Hispanics will flock to them. Voters choose the candidate who stands for what they stand for, and who stands with people like them. And I don’t mean like them ethnically; I mean like them in terms of understanding what they’re going through.”

Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, points out that Rubio must also convince non-Hispanics that he represents their interests, too: “Rubio won’t run as a Latino candidate; he’s going to run as an American.”

If so, the senator’s up-by-the-bootstraps success story should help with all working-class voters, Latino or not. He is the third child of Mario and Oria Rubio, who grew up poor in Cuba and immigrated to Miami in 1956 in search of economic opportunity. (Rubio once claimed his parents were exiles who fled their homeland after Fidel Castro came to power; he revised that story after researching his 2012 memoir, An American Son.) But it was tough for Rubio’s parents to find steady jobs to support a growing family—Mario was a bartender, Oria a cashier— so in 1979, the family decamped to Las Vegas, where three of Oria’s sisters lived.

Rubio’s memories of that period are fond ones: Pop Warner football (he would later play defensive back for a year at Missouri’s Tarkio College), family dinners at the Circus Circus Hotel’s all-you-can-eat buffet, and Sunday services at the nearby Mormon church. “My mom was really attracted to its wholesome family environment,” says Rubio, who returned to his Roman Catholic roots a few years later.

But Rubio’s strongest recollections of Las Vegas involve his maternal grandfather, Pedro Victor Garcia, an autodidact and history lover who often lived with the Rubios. “He would sit on the porch in a folding aluminum chair, smoking a cigar, and I would sit at his feet,” Rubio says. “He was a big fan of both Roosevelt and Truman for winning World War II. And he also loved Ronald Reagan. He believed that America was the only thing standing between communism and the rest of the world. He really thought America needed to be strong. He had a big influence on me.”

Garcia died in 1984, and the next year, the Rubios returned to Miami—this time seeking greater opportunity for their kids. “You could make a decent living at a young age working at a hotel in Las Vegas, and they worried we’d end up doing that,” recalls Rubio, who was 14 at the time. “They wanted their kids to have a professional career, the kind they couldn’t have.”

That meant going to college. Rubio’s parents never finished high school, and he remembers that homework was one thing they were painfully unable to help him with. “You see that today with immigrant communities. Parents struggle to help their kids because it’s stuff they never learned,” he says. “That’s something I’m sensitive about when I see it in others.”

Rubio earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Florida, then went on to the University of Miami School of Law. After graduating with more than $100,000 in student loans, which he finally paid off in 2012, Rubio planned to “become a really good lawyer, and stay engaged politically.” He was serving as a commissioner of his small city of West Miami (“I joke it’s like a condominium board without the power”) when Florida called a special election for an empty seat in the House of Representatives in 2000. Rubio was just 28. “I figured it was a good chance to run,” he says.

By 2006, Rubio became the first Cuban-American speaker of the Florida House, a distinction that caught the eye of top Republicans, including Jeb Bush, Florida’s governor at the time. Bush, whom Rubio considers a “trusted friend,” later backed Rubio in his Senate run.

But Rubio’s rise was not always easy. His Senate race against Florida’s incumbent Republican governor, Charlie Crist, was so bruising that Rubio almost dropped out. It was Jeanette who pushed him to stay in, as she has throughout his career. “I’m not a political person,” she says, “but this was something I knew he wanted. And once you’re in, you’ve got to go through with it.”

The decision to run for president in 2016 will also be a joint one. The couple has already had “little discussions here and there,” she says. “At some point late next year,” he adds, “I’ll sit down with my increasingly opinionated children and my wife and we’ll have the conversation: ‘What do I want to do?’”

Right now, the Rubios have more pressing things to worry about—namely, how to better balance work and family life, given that he’s in Washington, D.C., most of the week while Jeanette is at home in the family’s middle-class West Miami neighborhood with their four kids. “My family helps me a lot,” she says. Her three sisters and Rubio’s mother and older sister live nearby, along with 20 nieces and nephews. (Rubio’s father passed away in 2010.) Jeanette says she spends much of her time in her Buick Enclave, shuttling the kids from one activity to another. Dominick, 6, and Anthony, 8, play football and basketball. Daniella, 11, rides in horse shows. And Amanda, 13, is a competitive stunt cheerleader. (Like mother, like daughter: Jeanette once cheered for the Miami Dolphins.) All that driving “is bad for our car lease,” Rubio jokes. “We’re always over on the miles.”

In the midst of their busy schedules, the Rubios are attempting to teach the kids Spanish. Although both grew up speaking it at home, they speak English to each other today. “It’s our first language now,” Jeanette says. Adds Rubio: “We have to force the Spanish with the kids. We try really hard. That’s one thing I hope we get better at.”

Jeanette describes herself as a strict mom. She has vetoed Amanda’s request to wear platform shoes and crop tops and made Daniella sign a pet care contract before she brought home a shih tzu puppy, named Manna after the phrase “manna from heaven.” “The most important thing for me is that they learn respect,” Jeanette says. “They have to make their beds. They have to read during the summer. I can’t stand them being on those video games—they only get to play one hour on the weekend.”

When the family has time off, they like to take trips to the Florida Keys on their 24-foot fishing boat. In the future, they hope to be together more often. The Rubios have put their four-bedroom home on the market with the goal of moving the family to Washington. A spokesperson says no decisions have been made, but Rubio clarifies that “it’s not about moving out of Florida; it’s about being able to go home to your family at night. My most important job isn’t senator. It’s father.”

In that role, Rubio hopes to be an example—not only by showing his kids how far they can go, but also by helping them remember where their grandparents came from, and by protecting the unique opportunities this country offers. “I do believe that the essence of the American dream is a vibrant middle class and upward mobility, the ability not just to do better yourself but to give your kids the chance to do everything you could not do. That dream is very prevalent in the Hispanic community. To the extent that people view the Republican party as a defender of this dream, I think that’ll be very positive—not just among Hispanics but among all Americans.”