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From Yellow Dog Democrats
to Red State Republicans: Florida and Its Politics Since 1940, by David R. Colburn
(University Press of Florida, Hardcover, 272 pp. $29.95)
Reviewed by Lynne Barrett
The reader of this book soon thinks of Florida
as a map of conflicts, some open, some patched over till their uneasy alliance attains power and then splits apart.
For fifty years, Republicans from the Midwest moved into Southwest Florida, and established a sort of Cincinnati-on-the-Gulf
in an otherwise Democrat-dominated state. When the Yellow Dog Democrats (those willing, that is, to vote for a “yellow
dog” if he was a Democrat) of North Florida turned Blue Dog Democrats (defined here as former Yellow Dog Democrats who
choke “blue” on national Democratic party stands on civil rights and social issues) started voting Republican,
too, the joined-up groups could prevail. But when it came time to govern (as in, say, the administration of Republican
Bob Martinez in the late 80s) the rural, hard-scrabble Panhandle Blue Dogs and the business interests in the state split over
Martinez’ advocacy of a tax on services. So things fell apart for Martinez, as Lawton Chiles (ex-Senator, folk-hero)
ran for office, pulling the North Floridians back across the Democratic line, rejoining them with the more liberal Democrats
in the Southeast part of the state—temporarily.
David R. Colburn concentrates on Florida
governors in his narrative. Gubernatorial elections put the factions on display, and whoever wins is then tested by the difficulty
of getting anything done in a state with a fiercely defended, not very rich tax structure and what look like irreconcilable
social and economic differences. A state, too, in which legislative districting has been a game played ruthlessly.
The state legislature delayed throughout the 1950s doing constitutionally mandated redistricting per the 1950 census to avoid
giving to South Florida and West Florida the representation they should have had because of the many who had moved there after
World War II. In the mid 1990s, Republicans struck a deal with African-American Democrats to craft some oddly shaped
districts with large African-American populations, allowing more black politicians to hold state office (a deal the white
Democrats were unwilling to give them), but also thereby constructing lots of majority conservative, Republican districts,
with almost no spot left where an election would be a real contest. In either set-up, a governor faces a legislature
owing nothing to him.
Something I have watched but never understood before reading this book
is the ordeal of a Florida gubernatorial campaign. In both parties, multiple contenders run, each, usually, from a different
geographical base, that very strength in one spot causing them to be suspect or resented at the state’s opposite extremes.
They scrap and fight, through an elimination contest which often includes not just a primary but a run-off, too. This
can leave the victor damaged and exhausted, too weak to prevail in the general election, or, if he does make it, too saddled
with ill-will to govern. This system was developed in the years when the Democrats had a monopoly in the state, so that
the Dem. nomination made the governorship a done deal, but as the Republicans grew in numbers, they adopted the same trial
by fire. (Recently-arrived Floridians will have seen this during the election of 2006 which offered plenty of nasty infighting,
augmented by Jeb Bush’s attempt to settle some scores on his way out of power.)
The size and divisions in the state requires large personalities—people who can do well on television, and, interestingly,
who know who they are and do not waver—to get elected with any hope of success thereafter. A fascinating pattern
Colburn describes is that it has often been better to come in second in the first round of the primary and then amass the
following of the others eliminated to beat the “front runner” and so gain momentum rising towards the actual election.
Once elected, the governor often gets in trouble when pandering to any one part of his base--no interest is strong enough
to hold off the wrath of the others. Those who have succeeded in the post have done so by being forceful individuals
who could articulate their own strong views, whatever those views were, to the most people, as well as being able at dealing
with legislators on an individual level. Gov. Leroy Collins stands out as a figure of great interest. First elected
in 1955 as the issue of desegregation heated up, he took stands against the pro-segregationists (Dixiecrats) and was able
to argue that in Florida racial conflict such as that going on in neighboring states would damage the state’s tourism
business and the increasing movement of new people from the north to Florida; the business community responded. Collins spent
a good deal of his energy and clout on vetoing measures from the legislature, and essentially held those who opposed integration
to a kind of standstill (no public school in Florida was successfully integrated during his tenure as governor, but the state
was not plunged into the turmoil of neighboring Alabama and Georgia). But the infighting pulled the previously all-powerful
Democratic Party in the state into pieces. He was succeeded by a Republican, Claude Kirk, Jr., in the late 60s.
Democrats, still in control of the state legislature, united against Kirk whose term included various debacles from his meddling
in busing battles to dubious personal actions. (To fight organized crime in Dade County he “hired the Wackenhut
Corporation, a private detective agency, to handle the investigation, instead of the State Bureau of Investigation”
and then claimed that the underworld had a price on his head.) All of which helped to hand things back to charismatic
Democrat Rueben Askew. One small, irresistible example of their political battle: When Kirk in 1970 called Collins
a “mama’s boy,” Askew, in front of an audience in South Miami Beach, said “I just wanted you
to know that he is correct, because I love that mama of mine” and got a standing ovation from an audience in which,
as he put it, “the vast majority...were Jewish mamas.” Askew swept to victory. Lawton Chiles in the
same year came from nowhere to win the Senate seat by walking 1,000 miles across Florida speaking to the grass-roots voters
of the state, while television coverage turned him into a household name. Askew, Chiles, and Askew’s successor
Bob Graham, admired Collins and learned from him. They understood how to reach out via the media to the people of Florida
and to speak across their divisions, to find the common denominators on the personal level. Jeb Bush—the most
dominant figure the Republicans had ever had—lost to Chiles in '94, but after softening his image some on issues
of race and education, took office in '98 and set about, as he had promised, dismantling much of the state government
bureaucracy, undoing the state university Board of Regents and privatizing much of the civil service, while at the same time
taking the lead on two issues on which the whole state seems to agree, hurricane preparedness and protecting the Everglades.
All through these years, below the gubernatorial level, local and legislature elections showed
an inexorable shift to the Republicans (helped by a court ruling forcing redistricting in the late 1960s to unlock the Democrats’
control). This, and waves of arrivals, from the Midwest, from the Northeast, from Cuba and then from the Caribbean
and Latin American, bring us to the point where the book reaches its natural climax, our category 5 political hurricane, the
Presidential election of 2000.
Whole books—among them Jeffrey Toobin’s Too Close to Call and Julian Pleasants’ Hanging Chads—have
been written about this event alone, but Colburn concentrates on how this spectacle resulted from the political state of the
state. The splits in parties and partisanship play out, as does the way the state had grouped into distinct political
bastions of the like-minded, so that the Palm Beach “Butterfly Ballot" alone undoubtedly changed the result of
the election, in a way that might not have been true somewhere where the political groups were more thoroughly shuffled.
The change (made in the late '90s) from having a powerful set of elected members of the governor’s cabinet to just
a few, with the other positions becoming gubernatorial appointments, gave us Secretary of State Katherine Harris (whose ignorance
of the election laws was matched by the partisanship and ineptitude of many, on both sides, at lower levels), a State Supreme
Court largely made up of Chiles appointees, and a State Legislature now majority Republican and eager to wind things up in
Bush's brother’s favor.
One small correction that should be made: In 2000 when the absentee
ballots from the military became an issue we were not, as the author says, at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s
been a long war, but not that long—and the course of the wars of this decade are in part the result of what happened
in those few weeks after election day.
In his acknowledgments, the author thanks a succession of people
who offered advice in making his book more readable and conveying the story, and I thank them, too. Colburn clearly
knows lots about demographics, but the book is accessible, the prose and points vivid, even to this non-wonk.
The book ends with the election of 2006, which is covered briefly, concentrating mainly on Charlie Crist becoming governor.
(Here at FBR we await with interest Congresswoman and 2006 Senatorial-candidate Katherine Harris’s promised memoir,
and where is the book on Mark Foley?) One lesson for the future is clear. While the book speaks of yellow, blue and red, we
are purple, with the fulcrum of our seesaw now the I-4 corridor across the middle of the state: new people moving into and
around Orlando are mixed in age, race, and ethnicity and their votes are unpredictable. We have one Republican and one
Democratic Senator, and a Republican governor who soon after taking office made clear that we need voting machines as reliable
and verifiable as our gas pumps and automated tellers. We in Florida know that every vote counts. Everyone who
leaves the state (don’t you know someone who has taken a vote to the mountains of North Carolina or Tennessee?) matters.
And so, most importantly, does each new voter, whether young Floridians coming of age here, fresh arrivals from Minneapolis
or Mississippi, or newly-made citizens from Peru. Few know or understand the state’s history; books like this
should be required reading.
Lynne
Barrett is Editor of The Florida Book Review.
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“A compelling look at demographic trends that
could affect every corner of U.S. business.” —BusinessWeek
adv.
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Interview of Richard Grayson, author of Write-In: Diary of a Congressional Candidate in Florida’s Fourth Congressional District
(Dumbo
Books, Paperback, 105 pp., $9.95)
Interview by Tom DeMarchi
In 2004, fiction writer Richard Grayson campaigned as the Democratic write-in candidate against incumbent Republican Ander
Crenshaw for Florida’s 4th Congressional District, a move roughly akin to Harvey Fierstein crank calling Evander Holyfield
for the Heavyweight Boxing Title. (In the end, Crenshaw received 255,448 votes; Grayson received 1,167.) Grayson’s
hilarious, informative account of his 2004 campaign first appeared as a blog on McSweeneys.net.
In 2007, Grayson compiled his blog entries and
published them as Write-In: Diary of a Congressional Candidate in Florida’s Fourth
Congressional District, through his own press, Dumbo Books. He plans on publishing books by other authors later
this year. Write-In might be a collected blog, but it unfolds like much of Grayson’s
fiction. On display we find suspense, humor, self-mockery, absurdity, telling details, deep knowledge of the subject
matter, and a narrative voice informed by humility, fierce intelligence, and compassion. It makes you wonder what Grayson
could accomplish if he took his campaign more seriously. Grayson has campaigned for Congressional office multiple times.
A lifelong political activist, he’s currently running as the Democrat against incumbent Republican Jeff Flake for Arizona’s
6th Congressional District.
Florida Book Review: Are you a fiction writer who campaigns or a candidate who writes fiction?
Richard Grayson: Yes.
FBR: Throughout Write-In you admit that your chances of winning
are slim and none. Your chances against Flake are equally bad. Why invest so much time, money and energy toward
running in unwinnable races?
RG: For the same reason I write books of short
stories that are unwinnable in the marketplace, I guess. Because I enjoy doing it.
But I really
believe that contested elections are important in a democracy. One of the reasons we tend to have a partisan war with
hysterics on both sides in Congress is that the vast majority of districts are safe seats. I testified at the state
commission that did the redistricting in 1991, following the 1990 census, when they met in Gainesville. Karen Thurman,
the current Democratic party state chair, was on that commission, and surprise, one of the districts created was one that
centered around her state senate district and she got elected to Congress (a seat she lost after the 2000 redistricting).
The Ocala Star-Banner, Orlando
Sentinel and Gainesville Sun ran stories on my testimony. I showed some
drawings I'd made of my proposed districts. For the Orlando area, I'd created a Congressional district in the
shape of Mickey Mouse ears. For Brevard County and the Space Coast, my district was shaped like a rocket ship.
I had a gator-shaped district centered around Gainesville and a palm-tree-shaped district in Palm Beach County.
I was in my first semester of law school, and one of the members of the redistricting commission, former House speaker Jon
Mills, director of UF Law's Center for Governmental Responsibility, asked for my drawings so that they could have them
for the official record. Three years later, Jon became my boss when I went to work as a staff attorney at CGR, but he
made sure he kept me out of any work we did on the electoral process!
John Anderson, whom I
voted for in the November 1980 election for President—the only time since 1972 I didn't vote for a Democrat—and
whom I mention in my book, is now a Nova Southeastern law professor whom I got to know during my four years as an administrator
at the law school John has studied the issue with colleagues, and they've done some brilliant scholarly writing
on the problem of the gerrymandering that has turned the vast majority of U.S. House seats "unwinnable," as you
say, for one party or the other. He's also proposed several innovative solutions that work in other nations, such
as multi-member districts (which we used to have in the Florida legislature when I moved to the state in 1980) and preference
voting.
It annoyed me that so many Florida incumbents in Congress were "elected" on that
day in May when they filed for reelection and no one bothered to oppose them. In 2002, living in Davie, I got a ballot
I had gotten several times in the past: there's not even a spot for the U.S. House race. You'd think at least
you could vote for the incumbent or not vote for him or her. But Florida doesn't do that, and I find it sad.
As a hopeless candidate, I don't have to worry about fundraising, currying favor with anyone or avoiding
saying what I think for fear of losing votes. It's an ideal situation in many ways.
FBR: You open Write-In with a frightening statistic: "Over 90 percent of Americans live in congressional districts that are essentially
one-party monopolies." These monopolies are maintained though a variety of tactics and conditions: redistricting,
voter apathy, and patronage, among others. How do parties establish these monopolies in the first place?
RG: Through the redistricting process, which is first and foremost incumbent protection
and sometimes ridiculously partisan. I recall being in Fort Worth in 2003 while Tom DeLay was getting the Texas legislature
to redistrict the Congressional seats in a naked Republican power grab. The Democratic legislators fled to Oklahoma
and New Mexico to avoid the vote, but they couldn't do it forever and the GOP could gerrymander state to create several
more Republican safe seats Of course Tom DeLay's own seat wasn't safe after he was indicted on corruption
charges.
FBR: One of Write-In's real triumphs is your humorous handling of the surveys you received from all those special
interest groups and organizations. When the first one landed in your mailbox—from Gun Owners of America—you
wrote, "Surveys from interest groups are fun to fill out and can help the campaign." Within two months "questionnaires
[were] coming in at a rate of about one a day," many of them exhaustive and tedious. Right-leaning Eagle Forum,
a group that opposes same-sex marriage (their website's mission statement proclaims "We support constitutional amendments and federal and state legislation to protect
the institution of marriage and the equally important roles of father and mother," and “Eagle Forum successfully led the ten-year battle to defeat the misnamed Equal Rights Amendment with its hidden
agenda of tax-funded abortions and same-sex marriages") bludgeoned you with 69 questions; when their final question asked
you to describe how you'd "support traditional marriage," you answered, "Kill Liza Minelli."
Why is same-sex marriage such a polarizing issue?
RG: I think it's
fading a bit. In 2006, Arizona became the first state to vote against an anti-same-sex-marriage amendment to the state
constitution after that issue seemed to work everywhere else.
I was shocked last month when Jeff Flake,
the very conservative Arizona Republican I'm now running against—someone with a very poor record on gay rights (organizations
like the survey-happy ones you mention but on the left, like Human Rights Campaign, had consistently rated him a zero based
on his votes)—ended up as one of the 35 GOP House members to vote for ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.
Flake, a religious Mormon, said it was the hateful rhetoric against gay people that made him inclined to vote for the bill.
Now, I happen to be one of those happily single people who, like Ralph Nader, believe that same-sex marriage
is a crafty plot to force us all of into matrimony and couplehood. I was 18 and hanging out in Greenwich Village the
summer of 1969 during the Stonewall riots, and to some of us back then, the only advantage of being gay was that you couldn't
get married.
But I support choice, and there are really good policy reasons that we need same-sex
marriage. Teaching in a religious high school a couple of years ago in Phoenix, I discovered that just about all the
kids, including the kind of straight jocks you'd think would be very homophobic, just couldn't understand why there
isn't same-sex marriage yet.
This issue will eventually fade as an electoral hot-button;
right now people are more interested in demonizing immigrants.
FBR:
Which presidential candidate do you support for '08, and why? Who do you think
has the best chance of winning?
RG: I have no preferences among the Democrats.
Due to a staff mix-up, I am actually listed as a candidate for President in the February 5 Arizona presidential preference primary: I'm where I was back in 1988, when I
headed a political committee called Florida Democrats for Undecided. In the Florida primary that year, "uncommitted"
was listed along with Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas, Jesse Jackson and the other candidates, and I was one of those championing
the unsure and the uncaring. I got publicity in the Florida Times-Union and
other state papers and got on several radio shows, like Debbie Elliott's show on WNWS in Miami. I think 2008 will
be a Democratic year no matter who the presidential nominee is.
FBR:
You've been politically active since you were a teenager in the 1960s. What first
sparked your interest in politics?
RG: My parents and grandparents talked
about it a lot, I guess. My grandfather Herb Sarrett had been a big supporter of Eugene V. Debs, the five-time Socialist
candidate for President. I just found politics interesting. When I was in kindergarten, I wore a Stevenson/Kefauver
button with pictures of the Democratic candidates. Elections seemed like a lot of fun. Despite its ostensible
serious concerns, politics is basically a comic enterprise.
FBR:
I was born in 1969, so my sense of an author's cultural influence might be highly romantic,
but it seems that during the sixties an author's political perspective mattered on a broader level than it does today,
particularly to college students. I don't think it's a coincidence that Kurt Vonnegut was one of the best-selling
authors on college campuses during the late sixties and early seventies. It's doubtful that Slaughterhouse-Five
influenced Melvin Laird's policies, but Vonnegut's anti-war message spoke directly
to a large segment of the population. Mainstream journalists went to people like Vonnegut, Mailer and Heller for statements
about the Vietnam War. Many outspoken authors were, I think, household names, literary celebrities, even to casual readers,
the way David Sedaris and J.K. Rowling are today. Rowling has a huge cultural influence—the cape industry is booming,
kids are chowing down booger-flavored jellybeans, fundamentalist campers roast marshmallows over burning copies of Order
of the Phoenix, etc—but I can't imagine Time
asking her or Sedaris to offer a perspective on Iraq. And if Time did ask, I
wonder whether readers would notice or care. Did the era of best-selling-author-as-motivating-activist ever actually
exist? If so, what factors have led to its demise?
RG: Probably the
same cultural factors that have made serious literature a marginal enterprise. We do have celebrities testifying before Congress,
leading antiwar rallies, taking up causes—but they are all performers, since nobody but other writers know who leading
authors are.
The closest thing now is Obama backer Oprah Winfrey, who is important in literary
circles because her Book Club can move a lot of units—the term younger writers in New York now use for what we used
to call books.
The writer-as-candidate was less unusual in the 1960s: James A. Michener and
Gore Vidal ran for Congress; Mailer and William F. Buckley ran for mayor in New York.
I loved Vonnegut
from the afternoon when I was 16 and picked up a copy of Cat's Cradle at the Walt
Whitman Shopping Center in Huntington, Long Island, but it had nothing to do with politics. I don't recall him being
political. To be honest, I went to probably a hundred antiwar rallies and can't really remember any writers speaking.
I didn't go to the Pentagon in 1967, but Mailer's The Armies of the Night is
one of my favorite books, one I've enjoyed teaching.
Today nobody cares what fiction writers or
poets or playwrights think about politics...or anything else. Arthur Miller is dead.
FBR: Has your activism informed your fiction writing?
RG: I wouldn't think so. But it has taken time from my production of
short stories, so it's been a boon to lovers of good literature all over the United States. I can perform a civic
service and please discerning readers of fiction at the same time.
FBR:
Between a crushing teaching load (seven classes!), campaigning, and blogging regularly, where
do you find time to write fiction?
RG: Well, the seven classes
was a one-time thing, and I'll hardly be teaching much in 2008. But I write fiction only when I enjoy it.
I wrote a lot of stories in the fall of 2004, when I was running the campaign in Write-In,
had a job as associate director of student services at Nova Southeastern University's Shepard Broad Law Center and taught
two undergrad classes at night.
Right now I've stopped writing fiction with no plans to go back
to it. My last couple of books got some nice notices, but they didn't sell many copies—to put it mildly!—and,
as at other times in my fiction writing "career," usually after a book comes out, I get discouraged and decide that
nobody's interested.
I did not write any fiction for years at a stretch—for example,
between 1991 and 1994, when I was studying at UF law school and beginning my faculty job there, and most recently between
2001 and 2003, my first years on the job as director of academic resources at NSU Law before I took a lesser position that
freed up my time.
There's no point in writing fiction unless it gives me pleasure. For
now, I don't have anything to say in the genre. With almost 300 published stories and a bunch of books, I've
probably written enough bad fiction for this lifetime—as some perceptive critics have suggested.
That said, I probably will one day decide to write another story.
FBR:
What unique political challenges did Florida face in 2004 that it still faces in 2008?
RG: Probably there are more challenges now. In 2004 the economy was good
and growth was still vibrant. At the Center for Governmental Responsibility back when I worked there, Jon Mills and
other and the state's other policy institutes were working on how to manage the phenomenal growth.
But in the year ending July 1, 2006, Florida slipped to the 19th-fastest growing state, a huge drop from the 9th-fastest growing
the previous year. Retirees now are more likely to head for the Southwest, Georgia or the Carolinas. The insurance
cost crisis didn't exist in 2004. With the mortgage crisis and housing industry in a recession, Florida's can't
rely on growth anymore.
There are other problems. Florida's educational system never
really caught up; I remember Gov. Bob Graham's goal from the early 1980s of getting us into the top quartile of states
in education spending, but Florida never made it.
My own feeling is that the constitutional bar to
a state income tax has been a real detriment to Florida—I once headed a state political action committee called Floridians
for a Personal Income Tax that went nowhere.
But the weather's great and Florida
is breathtakingly beautiful. That's why I plan to buy a condo in a Sunrise senior citizen community now that I'm
age-eligible.
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