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Quiet Passion: A Biography of Bob Graham
Jeremy Tarcher All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
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An
Excerpt from Quiet Passion, by S.V. Dáte ©
2004, All Rights Reserved To
understand Graham – or more accurately: to appreciate Graham – it is
important to remember the place he comes from. Politically,
it’s easiest to think of Florida as if it were the Balkans, albeit with
somewhat less violence. North Florida is the South, South Florida is like New
Jersey with palm trees, the Panhandle may as well be lower Alabama while the
Southwest coast is Ohio with better golfing. Candidates
who run for statewide office find that these geographical distinctions are far
more important than traditional party labels. For example, Republicans dominate
in both Naples and Leesburg, but the similarities end there. The latter is
located squarely in the Bible Belt, and the local version of the Christian
Coalition and similar groups exert tremendous power in primary politics. The
Midwestern retirees of Naples up through Sarasota are also Republicans, but
aren’t fanatics about it, often electing pro-choice, anti-school voucher
candidates to county and state offices. Democrats,
meanwhile, have similar chasms of sensibility separating the retired
northeastern union workers of Broward County’s many condominiums and the
remaining “Yellow Dog” Democrats of the state’s Panhandle. The former will
reliably vote for the most liberal candidate running; the latter believe in
school prayer, guns and the flag. When
all the factions’ various jealousies have been thrown together, the result has
been a state has tended toward Republicans in recent presidential elections.
Florida went for Nixon in 1968 and 1972, Carter in 1976, Reagan in 1980 and
1984, Bush in 1988, Bush, barely, in 1992, Clinton in 1996 and, depending on
where you stand, Bush by 537 votes or Gore by 2,500 to 25,000 votes in 2000. ■□■ The
above, of course, is old hat to political pros and utter gibberish to the tens
of millions of Americans each year for whom Florida remains the location of
sanitized and safe Walt Disney World, and little else. From
airport to theme park to hotel to theme park to airport is visible the remnants
of pine forest and semi-tropical scrub, congested roads and – depending
whether the visitor is staying on Disney property or off – miles upon miles of
garish tackiness. The
more adventuresome might day-trip over to Universal Studios or Sea World or even
the Kennedy Space Center on the east coast or Busch Gardens on the west. Few
bother with natural wonders like the Everglades or historical sites such as St.
Augustine. So
it is small wonder that much of what makes the national television news from the
Sunshine State bewilders the rest of the nation. From Anita Bryant’s anti-gay
crusade to Ted Bundy to the fad of murdering European tourists to Elián
Gonzales and his Miami Relatives to the butterfly ballot that changed an
election to the preferred flight training locale for Islamic terrorists. This
is a state where entire quorums of the Hillsborough County Commission, the Lee
County Commission and the Escambia County Commission have been arrested and
hauled off to court. Where five sitting and recently retired state legislators
have, in a seven-year span, been convicted of felonies. One Miami state senator
went down for Medicare fraud after inventing patients out of whole cloth for the
purpose of bilking millions from the federal government. Another was a former
Senate president, a wily old coot who used to sell loose diamonds and various
other trinkets to lobbyists who would then appear before him in committee. He
was convicted – only after his departure from the legislature because of term
limits – of bribing a fellow Escambia County Commissioner with a cook pot
filled with $200,000 in cash.[1] This
is the state where a single state legislator cast a single floor vote that
spelled the beginning of the end of the tobacco industry’s stranglehold on
American politics – only to resurface seven years later as the congresswoman
who suggested exhuming the bodies of the American soldiers buried in France and
bringing them home to protest French foreign policy regarding Iraq. This
is the state whose top elections official, 20 months after helping deliver the
presidential election to the candidate she supported, was disqualified from
office because of her failure to understand the state’s election laws when she
ran for Congress.[2]
This
is the state whose House speaker recently gave a former Hooters waitress one of
the top jobs in his office – notwithstanding her lack of requisite
qualifications, like college degree or experience.[3]
The voters in his district were so indignant about this that they promoted him
to Congress. This
is the state whose central ingress point, Interstate 75 at the Georgia border,
has as its first attraction a Confederate flag. A huge Confederate flag. An
enormous, parking-lot-sized Confederate flag. The biggest Confederate flag, in
fact, in the whole world. Among the speakers at its dedication in 2002 was a
sitting Democratic member of the state House of Representatives as well as the
only lawmaker to preside over both state House and Senate. The first Union flag
of comparable size does not show up along the highway for nearly a hundred
miles. Naturally, it marks an all-nude eatery. And,
speaking of which, this is the state where a U.S. Attorney, after losing a big
drug case, bought a $900 magnum of champagne at a strip club and reportedly bit
one of the dancers. He resigned not long afterward. Naturally, he later wound up
on the Miami Relatives’ legal team. How,
the rest of the nation must wonder, can a state with a place as nice and clean
as Disney World be so … well, so weird? ■□■ It
should be noted, in fairness to Florida’s current citizenry, that this
weirdness is nothing new. Students
of history will recall that recounts and vote disputes affecting the
presidency was not something invented in the year 2000. No, pretty much the
same thing happened 124 years earlier. Allegations of voter intimidation and
fraud were rampant in three southern states: Louisiana, South Carolina and
– where else? – Florida. Politicians
and the national press thronged to Tallahassee until, in 1877, the
congressionally appointed Electoral Commission awarded, by a one-vote
margin, the three states to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who thereby
defeated Democrat Samuel Tilden by a single vote in the Electoral College
despite having lost the popular vote. The deal with the devil then was that
federal troops would be withdrawn from those three states, thereby appeasing
white segregationists and opening the door for the Jim Crow era that
followed. No,
Florida has pretty much been the red-haired stepchild of the rest of the
nation since it was acquired as a territory from Spain in 1821. In 1824,
Congress gave Frenchman Marquis de LaFayette $200,000 and a township to
settle the nation’s debt to him from the Revolutionary War. Of course, the
land we gave him was in Florida, the moral equivalent of recycling an
unwanted wedding gift. LaFayette was given thirty-six square miles, centered
around what is now the northeast quadrant of Tallahassee. He never came to
Florida, but sent over several dozen Norman peasants to set up a plantation
of vineyards, olive groves and mulberry trees in a Quixotic attempt to prove
that free labor could outperform slave labor. The idea went bust and his
land was eventually sold for $103,000. A city park and its surrounding
neighborhood in the middle of the original grant now bear his name.[4]
In
1827, Ralph Waldo Emerson visited the territorial capital city – a town
chosen because it was halfway between the two original settlements,
Pensacola and St. Augustine. He wasn’t impressed, writing in his diary
that the place had been “rapidly settled by public officers, land
speculators and desperadoes.” [5] Old
Ralph pretty much nailed it. As to the land speculators and desperadoes, he
could have been talking about any part of Florida going forward the better
part of two centuries. The land, and how to get rich off of it, and the
characters who’ve been drawn to the nation’s southern frontier have been
and continue to be central threads in the state’s storyline, even from
before official statehood in 1845.[6]
[1]
As this went to press, his appeal was pending. It’s not clear why a
cook pot. [2]
Yes, that would be Katherine Harris. [3]
Admittedly, one way of looking at this is: If as House speaker you
can’t put a Hooters waitress on staff at public expense, then what the
heck point is there to being House speaker? [4]
Allen Morris, The Florida Handbook, 1971-1972, Peninsular
Publishing Co., Tallahassee, 1971, p. 5 [5]
Ibid., p. 7 [6]
English explorer and privateer (that would be a euphemism for
state-sanctioned pirate) Sir Francis Drake, for instance, sacked and
burned the Spanish settlement of St. Augustine in 1586. Why? Well …
why not?
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