Inner Circle Vs. the Outsider: Florida Democrats' Dilemma
Party's Rift Over Reno Dims Hopes Against Bush
By David Von Drehle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 8, 2002; Page A01
PANAMA CITY, Fla. -- Florida Democrats have a candidate for governor with near-universal name recognition. Ordinary folks stop Janet Reno on the street to ask for autographs. Jay Leno has her on. She's a proven vote-getter from the largest county in the state, experienced and battle-tested.
But party leaders don't want her.
The former attorney general has too many enemies and too few skilled advisers to win, according to the conventional wisdom among many leading Democrats. Instead, the party establishment is rooting for Bill McBride, a promising novice candidate with a Bronze Star, a football injury and a drawl. Using endorsements, machinery and checkbooks, they're trying to boost McBride to victory in the Sept. 10 primary -- a boosting-job worthy of a Saturn rocket, given that McBride trails Reno in statewide polls by about 25 points and most Floridians have never heard of him.
This rift in Florida's battered Democratic Party is good news for Gov. Jeb Bush (R). After the bitter dispute over the 2000 presidential election, Democrats marked the president's younger brother for revenge. Though generally popular, Jeb Bush is not invulnerable; on two of his 1998 campaign issues -- education and the protection of children in state care -- Florida continues to under-perform.
But while the White House geared up to protect Bush, through fundraisers and favorable policy decisions, the Democrats have floundered. Florida's senior Democrats, Sens. Bob Graham and Bill Nelson, tried to grease the nomination for former representative Pete Peterson, a Vietnam war hero, but Reno's arrival in the race spoiled their plan. Peterson opted out of the race. Rep. Jim Davis and state house minority leader Lois Frankel also quit. Only McBride, the retired managing partner of Florida's largest law firm, and state Sen. Daryl Jones, a fiscally conservative African American from Miami, remained in the race. Now Bush enters the last months of the campaign with a huge money advantage and a double-digit lead.
"Bottom line, it's a good old boy network," said Seth Sklarey, a Reno supporter in Dade County, explaining the Stop Reno sentiments of the establishment -- union leaders, elected officials, fundraisers and so on. But in fact, the matter is more complicated than that.
It boils down to Janet Reno's unusual relationship to her party, to politics, to the public -- really to her stance toward the whole world. She is, above all, fiercely, stubbornly independent, according to those who know her best. She courts neither party leaders nor the press.
"Janet is an unusual candidate in that she didn't need the permission of the hierarchy to run," said state Rep. Nan Rich, who has broken with party elders to support a woman she has known and admired for years. "The hierarchy likes to be asked, and they like to have candidates be beholden to them."
Reno apparently made her decision to enter the race entirely on her own, and she is running the same way, sticking doggedly to a campaign strategy that many party insiders are convinced is doomed. She is, as one friend put it, stretching face-to-face politics past the breaking point. In a race that might involve more than 5 million voters in 67 counties across a state as sprawling as California, Reno relies mainly on personal appeals delivered in clubs, churches and hotel ballrooms.
"My sister said, 'If you could meet everyone in Florida in person, you'd win,' " Reno explained in a recent interview. People who know her only as the grim attorney general like her better face-to-face, she said. "They tell me, 'You're nicer than I thought you were.' "
Of course, Reno added, it is impossible to meet every Florida voter. "I can't do that," she said -- but little in her campaign so far suggests that she is adjusting to that fact. It's not clear that she will have enough money for a vigorous television advertising campaign, and she does little to exploit her huge advantage in unpaid media. Reno is one of the toughest interviews in American public life, as terse as a Magic 8-Ball. She's vague on policy.
On the other hand, the shake-up last week of her field staff -- replacing several aides with veterans of state campaigns -- leads some to believe that Reno is finally willing to mount a more professional campaign.
What makes Reno such a riddle and frustration to party elders is that her liabilities are facets of her strengths. Where the political pros see stubbornness, independence and a refusal to accept advice, Randy Fleischer sees "a candidate who is honest, speaks her mind and takes responsibility."
Fleischer was one of more than 300 grass-roots activists who gathered on a recent Sunday afternoon in South Florida to volunteer their services. It was an extraordinary turnout, even for Broward County, the epicenter of Democratic activity in the state. Reno may not have the support of most party officials, Fleischer said, but "at Democratic club meetings where we usually get 12 to 20 people out, when Janet comes there might be 400."
The message they hear is brief, delivered in a sharp, flat voice with vigorous gestures. Reno's Parkinson's disease, diagnosed in 1995, was scarcely in evidence during three recent encounters with her, beyond an occasional waver in a thrusting hand. She never mentions McBride, just as he never mentions her in his stump speeches. Nor does either candidate give a very clear indictment of Bush. Instead, they offer general assurances that they can, indeed, whup the president's brother.
"They say I can't beat Jeb," Reno told her Broward County volunteers. "Well, I'm gonna beat Jeb, because he hasn't done anything for the people of Florida!" (McBride's version of this line goes: "I know Jeb Bush. I've been on trips with him. I've sized him up, and I can take him!")
Reno's appeal mixes a lifetime in South Florida -- including nearly 40 years in and around politics -- with a quirky new star power. Early last year, after one of the longest tenures as attorney general in U.S. history, Reno made a cameo appearance on "Saturday Night Live" alongside an actor known for his unflattering impersonations of her. That skit, called "Janet Reno's Dance Party," led to guest spots on "The Tonight Show" and elsewhere, and helped make her a darling of the Hollywood liberals.
Now, she says, her "name identification and recognition is just amazing to me -- people coming up and saying they will vote for me." She said this between sips of latte at a South Florida Starbucks -- a latte poured by a star-struck teenager who confided to a bystander how nervous he was. "It's got to be extra good." As Reno drank her coffee, she was repeatedly interrupted for pictures and autographs by goateed youths, young moms and stylists from the Hair Cuttery just up the strip mall.
Suffice it to say that Bill McBride drinks his coffee in peace.
Last week, McBride caught a fresh gust of establishment support when Peterson, the former front-runner, campaigned alongside him through the Florida Panhandle. "I have been sitting on the sidelines for several months," Peterson said, "and have clearly determined that Bill McBride is the one candidate that shares my values on the issues most important to the future of Florida."
Peterson holds the widespread official view that McBride matches up better against Bush than Reno does. His life story is a saga of Southern centrism: small-town boyhood, football scholarship, Marine Corps, Chamber of Commerce. McBride likes to tell audiences that, if he debates Bush in the fall, he will be "the only one on stage raised in Florida . . . whose kids went to public schools . . . the only one with military service . . . whose parents still live here."
"Bill will bring the state together," Peterson said after one campaign stop. "I see Bill McBride as a unifying candidate. Janet, as wonderful as she is, has the potential to bring disunity."
Translation: She has "baggage." Reno's years in Washington made her a lot of foes: libertarians outraged by the raid at Waco, anti-Communists angered by the return of young Elian Gonzalez to Cuba, Republicans who thought she improperly shielded the Clintons from independent counsel investigations, Democrats who believe she fed the Clintons to the wolves.
"She would not do as good up here," said Halley Frye, former chairman of the Calhoun County Democrats. McBride politely concurred: "Everybody already knows her and has got an opinion about her." The rural counties of north and central Florida are full of nominal Democrats who would rather vote Republican than vote liberal. They are the key to McBride's strategy.
There is just one flaw in this approach, and it was plainly evident last week. McBride made four campaign stops during a long day with Peterson, including one in Peterson's hometown of Marianna. The candidate gave away lunch at a noontime rally and offered dinner at a rally later on. The local teachers union organized his stop in Panama City, where the mayor himself did the introduction. In spite of it all, fewer people attended McBride's four events, put together, than showed up at Reno's single meeting of volunteers in Broward County. No Democrat has been nominated to run for governor of modern Florida without significant South Florida support. And that is Reno's turf, the region where she won five straight elections as Dade County's chief prosecutor before moving to Washington in 1993.
So McBride must build a base in the south, and he has to do it in two months. He's counting on television to do it. McBride said that spots touting his biography and his education plan will begin airing around the state "before the end of the month." The state Democratic Party will also run ads on his behalf, he said.
The clash of Janet Reno and Bill McBride is a reminder that this huge state was a lot smaller not so long ago. Though they come from different regions, they share an early sponsor: Chesterfield Smith, dean of the Florida bar.
Over latte and between autographs, Reno recalled the first time she saw McBride, thirty-some years ago, back in the days before Disney World. Reno had been appointed to a panel by Smith, who was then president of the American Bar Association. McBride was Smith's personal assistant. The great man invited both young people to join his law firm, Holland & Knight, an invitation that spelled access to the inner circles of Florida power. McBride accepted, and worked his way up to head the firm. He became a star fundraiser for Democrats across the state. In other words, he joined the team. Reno didn't. And that has made all the difference.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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