Is "Marco for Governor" a wolf ticket?

Sen. Marco Rubio says ihe doesn’t have a “date in mind or a time frame in mind” for making his decision, “but certainly soon.” ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE PHOTO

I admit it, I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. But so, too, did Marc Caputo of Politico and Adam Smith of the Tampa Bay Times.

The con? That U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio has developed an elaborate fall-back plan to run for Florida governor in 2018 if he a) runs for president and does not win or b) chooses not to run for president and runs for re-election to the Senate in 2016.

Caputo, Smith, myself and the rest of the political media have made Rubio sound more like a high school senior deciding which college to attend rather than the Machiavellian political operator we all know him to be. “Well, if I don’t get into Swarthmore, I can always go to Brown, but Dartmouth is my backup.”

As if.

Not that Caputo and Smith don’t have sources telling them Rubio is, in fact, thinking about one day running for governor, but my band of sources is saying this is a wolf ticket, one perpetrated by Jeb Bush’s camp to diminish Rubio’s standing as a presidential aspirant.

“It does not come up in discussions,” says a well-known Republican strategist who is close to Rubio’s decision-making process.

And about those media reports to the contrary? “Everyone rolls their eyes.”

In early January, devout Rubio-watcher Caputo wrote that there is “increasing political chatter that Rubio is well-positioned to run for governor in 2018 … And then, if he wins, there’s a good chance Gov. Rubio will run for president — 2020 would be attractive if a beatable Democrat is president. The next presidential year, 2024, an open-seat year, would be more likely. He’ll only be 52.”

Smith doubled down on this analysis, writing recently that GOP activists’ recent snubbing of Gov. Rick Scott’s choice for chair of the Florida GOP “could be the first big power play by Rubio’s political team to position him to run for governor in 2018.”

The chatter Caputo refers to, and the chess-boarding Smith describes, is background noise, my Rubioworld sources contend.

Instead, they point out, look at what Rubio is actually saying and doing.

— He’s planning trips to Iowa and Nevada, and not to sell books, by the way. Rubio’s supporters admit his second book is not selling very well, so even if they quadrupled sales of “American Dreams: Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone,” they’d barely crack 10,000 units. Yippee.

• He’s making significant hires, including this week’s splashy retention of Jim Merrill. Jonathan Martin of the New York Times writes Merrill, who directed both of Mitt Romney’s New Hampshire primary bids, is joining Rubio’s political action committee as a senior adviser, a position that would put him at the helm of the Rubio’s campaign in the first-in-the-nation primary state. In landing Merrill, Rubio has not only brought on a strategist with deep experience organizing in New Hampshire, but also someone who was being pursued by other Republican presidential hopefuls. Merrill, who is based in Manchester, was sought out by a number of potential candidates, including Bush.

• He’s making the intellectual case for why he can run in a primary that also has Bush in it. “I wouldn’t be running against Jeb Bush,” Rubio said Monday on the Hugh Hewitt Show. “If I ran, I would run because I believe I’m the right person for the right time in our country’s history.”

I won’t pretend to know whether Rubio is going to pull the trigger on running for president or if he will one day run for governor, but his people are insisting that what’s being sold right now is a wolf ticket. Caveat emptor!