Reno should bow out of the race

By MARTIN DYCKMAN

© St. Petersburg Times, published October 25, 2001

TALLAHASSEE -- Janet Reno has been a friend for some 30 years -- though she may no longer think so after reading what follows. I believe that I know her well enough to disagree strongly with those who say her candidacy for governor is an ego trip. Her ego is small. It is her love for Florida and her fervor for justice that are huge.

But love and fervor are powerful passions that can be as blinding as hubris. What she doesn't see, or won't admit, is that there are other Democrats who would have a better chance to defeat Jeb Bush, and that it would take a miracle for her to do it. So long as she stays in the race, however, any other Democrat would need a miracle to wrest the nomination from her.

Her advantage in the primary is her disadvantage against Bush. She is too well-known. Every poll so far has brought out that her negatives are as high or higher than his. It's much better to be unknown, as Reubin Askew was when he entered the 1970 governor's race against three better-known Democrats and the incumbent Republican, Claude R. Kirk Jr., whose appetite for confrontation had alienated much of his own party. Kirk had nowhere to go but down. Askew had nowhere to go but up; simply winning the primary gave him a huge boost, as it would do for any of the lesser-known Democrats next year. But even as the teachers' unions dropped a Bush-Reno question into their statewide poll on budget cuts and taxes last week, they apparently didn't care how Bill McBride or Lois Frankel or Daryl Jones might do.

Which was just as well, as the question they did ask showed Bush whomping Reno 60 percent to 26 percent with only 14 percent undecided, his best showing yet and her worst.

Bush unquestionably got a temporary bump from current events; in times of war and other crisis, Americans naturally rally behind their leaders. His father, the hero of the Gulf War and the goat of the recession that followed, can tell him how long that kind of popularity lasts.

Still, Bush is a fundamentally strong incumbent who will win unless a Democratic opponent can show voters why he should not. Making that case would be dauntingly difficult for an opponent who would first have to persuade voters to lay aside their misgivings toward her.

This is where Reno's so-called "baggage" becomes heavy. The rescue of Elian Gonzalez was hailed everywhere outside Little Havana, but it is a large liability there. If most voters understand that Reno inherited a bad situation at Waco, the outcome still troubles them, as she has said it does her. Most Floridians still like the president she served, and half of them voted for his vice president to succeed him. But that popularity won't stick to her quite as well as the animosity of the pathological Clinton-haters, which will hurt her especially in the Panhandle. Reno may be confident that she can refute those factors, but Bush will be too shrewd to give her the opportunity. He will run a "positive" campaign, leaving her to shadow-box her own ghosts and, of course, the Parkinson's problem.

Florida needs an unburdened challenger to put Bush on the defensive and give voters a realistic choice. Unlike his brother, Bush can't print or borrow his way out of the recession. Next year's budget threatens to be even harsher, and Bush won't be able to pass the dirty details off on the House and Senate as he is doing now despite his legal obligation to "provide . . . to the Legislature . . . plans of action to eliminate the deficit." See Florida Statute 216.221 (5)(a). Crime will be up, the schools will be even more crowded and understaffed, and every charity will be writhing in pain.

Whether Reno would govern more fearlessly and forthrightly is not the threshold question; it is, rather, whether she has a plausible shot at the opportunity.

She lost her first campaign, for the Florida House in 1972, when she was favored to win. She won another, for re-election as Miami-Dade state attorney in 1984, that she was expected to lose. The latter example is probably more on her mind these days, but it is the first race that comes to mine. She lost it for having worked as hard or harder on behalf of a friend, House Speaker Richard A. Pettigrew, who was challenging a powerful incumbent state senator, as for herself. His race was indeed more important, and her selflessness on that occasion served Florida well.

Such a time has come again.

-- Anonymous, October 25, 2001

Answers

She is by no means a sure thing to win the nomination, even. I would bet big money against it.

-- Anonymous, October 25, 2001