Today's Katherine Harris Campaign update, 6/21/02

Some big news this week. Chester Flake, Katherine's primary main opponent had to drop out of the race because he forgot to file an affidavit needed to collect signatures, Kim posted about it earlier.

Frankly, I would have liked him to be able to stay in so Katherine could have the satisfaction of crushing him come September ;0)

Katherine is almost sure to have raised $2 million by the time the next report comes out.

The Herald ran a huge story on her that I'll post here at the risk of repetition:

SARASOTA — Katherine Harris came to her political senses slowly.

She might not have at all, except for some leisurely Saturday morning breakfasts nearly a decade ago.

Back then, Harris and friends would shop for fruit and flowers at the Farmer’s Market, then sit down at the First Watch in downtown Sarasota to talk.

“It wasn’t really breakfast,” Harris said, “it was solving all the problems of the world.”

Immersed in volunteer work and selling real estate, Harris didn’t think about such chatter leading anywhere, until the topic of the beleaguered John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art came up.

Harris sat on the board that ran the Sarasota institution. Breakfast pal Graci McGillicuddy also loved the arts and the Ringling.

And it galled them that the man who should be getting more money out of the state Legislature for their museum was State Sen. Jim Boczar, who disdained art. A Reubens, Boczar had said, was just a sandwich.
Somebody, the women decided, ought to run against Boczar. Only who? Most of them had family and commitments to worry about; one didn’t.

“We said, ‘Katherine, you’re it,’” said McGillicuddy, whose brother-in-law is former U.S. Sen. Connie Mack. “You’re smart, you’re single, you’ve got passion. Let’s do it.’”

From that casual beginning, Harris, at 45, has advanced to where she almost certainly will be the next U.S. Representative from Southwest Florida. She has national fund-raising clout and worldwide recognition.
With voting still five months away, some politicians are referring to the 13th Congressional District as “Katherine’s seat.” Political experts talk about her as a future governor or U.S. senator.

Her ascent is all the more stunning because less than two years ago, she seemed destined for oblivion, a lame duck in an obscure state post that had been stripped of its elected status.

The 2000 presidential election changed everything.

As Florida’s top election official, Harris played a pivotal role in delivering the presidency to George W. Bush. The recount transformed her into a Republican Party hero and role model for women.

Critics knock it as the latest break for a politician they consider intellectually shallow, ethically shady and easily manipulated by power brokers.

Harris is a lightning rod for angry Democrats, who count her as little more than a wealthy opportunist.

“She’s been a good servant for Katherine Harris, but not a good servant for the public, and that’s a big difference,” said Florida Democratic Party Chairman Bob Poe.

To supporters, she is sincere, upright and astute, a relentlessly hard worker who is charming and outgoing, yet politically tough. Harris may have gotten breaks, they say, but she’s made the most of them.

“You have to congratulate her on a meteoric rise in politics,” said state Rep. Nancy Detert, R-Venice. “She must be doing something right.”

The candidate waves off the criticism and deflects the praise. She can repeat and laugh at the late-night comedy show jokes she inspired after the election. All she did was “follow the law,” she insists, and all she wants now is to win in November.

Harris said she never set out to make a career in politics. “It’s sort of been an evolution.”

Privileged, but driven

She has political roots. Her grandfather, Ben Hill Griffin Jr., served in the Florida Legislature and ran for governor.

Harris took an early dislike to politics herself, though, after working as a summer intern in Washington, D.C., when she was 19.

Rep. Porter Goss, who got to know Harris in 1988 when she worked for his first campaign organizing cocktail parties and beach get-togethers to raise money, also remembers how much she hated politics.

“She didn’t think it was a great avocation,” Goss said. “There was a lot about it she found distasteful. I have no idea what prompted her to change her mind.”

Born in Key West, Harris grew up in rural Polk County, where her family dominated. Her father was a banker and Griffin was the citrus and cattle baron whose name graces the University of Florida’s football stadium.

Always Katherine — never “Kathy” — Harris loved sports and drawing. She kept a horse named Cracker in a pasture a few blocks from home and loved riding.

Harris learned how to handle a gun, too, a talent that served her well when she reached the Senate. She played tennis, went canoeing and loved being outdoors.

Her mother Harriett, a Girl Scout leader, limited television.

“We had to make our own entertainment,” said Harris, who rode her bike to feed Cracker. “Growing up in Bartow was magical. We had a neighborhood that everyone came to play in.”

The unflagging drive her supporters often mention showed up early. Bartow High teacher Beverly Conner recalls Harris and a small group of students coming to her home once a week to learn more than what they could in class.

Still, when she graduated in 1975, a homecoming sweetheart and Miss January in the school calendar, Harris’ future was far from set.

The Harris children all chose their own paths, and slowly, without a push from either parent.

“I don’t remember any discussion of politics at all, really,” said Katherine Harris’ 39-year-old sister Fran, of Franklin, Tenn. “I’m sorry we weren’t more like the Kennedys.”

The sisters studied abroad, Katherine after attending the all-girls Agnes Scott College in Georgia. She studied art and Spanish in Madrid, philosophy and religion in Geneva.

Fran worked in her brother’s restaurant, wrote a society column for an Aspen newspaper and worked briefly in Hollywood. Eventually, she married Wes King, a contemporary Christian music singer.

Harris’ brother, George Walter “Walt” Harris III, 42, guesses that she “just fell into” politics the same way he did the restaurant business. “It wasn’t like a conscious decision,” he said. He runs a place in Aspen named Syzygy, a tony, word-of-mouth-only stop for local luminaries like Hunter S. Thompson and Ed Bradley.

“Syzygy” is a scientific term for what happens when celestial bodies perfectly align.

“When everything just sort of comes together,” Walt Harris said.

Things fell apart for Harris not long after she moved to Sarasota with Thomas R. Arnold, an attorney she met while working for IBM in Tampa. He went to work for Sarasota lawyer Lamar Matthews, but within a year, abruptly divorced Harris.

Arnold, now living in Summit, N.J., and working for ING Realty in Manhattan, said only that he has “a tremendous amount of respect for Katherine.” Their 3-page divorce file holds no clues to their breakup and is mostly a listing of who got which piece of furniture.

After the breakup Harris could have moved back to Bartow but didn’t.

She stayed in Sarasota. She earned a commercial real estate license and jumped into volunteer work, including preservation efforts at historic Spanish Point.

Gov. Lawton Chiles appointed a 27-year-old Harris to the Ringling Museum board. Early on, she turned a money-losing fund-raiser party called the Ungala Gala into a profitable event.

“What was immediately evident was that she took being a volunteer at the museum very seriously,” said Arland Christ-Janer, a museum trustee with Harris who is now cultural center director for the Florida State University-Ringling Center for the Cultural Arts. “The other thing is, she did her homework.”

The early 1990s were not good for the museum. Attendance slipped, and state lawmakers looked for ways to end its taxpayer funding.

Boczar, an iconoclastic Democrat, paid little heed to Sarasota’s arts supporters. Harris, who once traveled to Tallahassee to talk to him about the Ringling, was offended by a sign on his door.

It said “that he did not see lobbyists, and since I was coming to ask for support, for funding, he considered me a lobbyist,” Harris said.

It made her want to knock him out of office, though she first tried to recruit some other challenger.

“The more I spoke with people and I was trying to encourage them to run, the more they all said, ‘You’re the one that needs to run,’ ” Harris said.

She lined up support early, defeating Republican doctor Bob Windom in the primary. Then she beat Boczar in the most expensive race for the Florida Legislature at that time.

Though a novice, Harris matched Boczar blow for blow in a nasty campaign.

He mocked her as an airhead with few accomplishments trying to buy her way into office.

“You’ve got to have some experience other than being able to raise a half a million dollars and run for office,” Boczar, now deceased, said then.

Harris fired back with negative ads painting Boczar as the quintessential tax-and-spend, soft-on-crime liberal. After he lost, Boczar sued Harris for libel, but later dropped the suit.

The race helped finally give the Republican Party a majority in the Senate, which had been briefly split 20-20 after years of Democratic domination.

Learning to fit in

Harris made an early impression on the male-dominated Tallahassee culture. A lobbyist invited her and other new lawmakers to his rural north Florida estate for a hunt. Harris, however, was politely directed to the house with the lawmakers’ wives.

Instead, she went with the hunters. She beat them all, bagging her limit of doves.

“I think that was good for the North Florida boys, and the good old boys in Florida (to see) that I wasn’t this little frail, young woman,” Harris said. “They didn’t expect a woman to go out there and shoot, period, much less do well.”

Assessments of her four-year Senate career conflict.

Harris became chairwoman of a committee handling commerce and business issues, and she boasts that she guided 100 bills through the chamber. Some peers contend she had no clout and didn’t grasp the details of effective legislating.

Her nickname was “Princess Katherine,” reflecting her affinity for the trappings, not the drudgery or niceties of making laws.

In 1996, she took an amendment from a lobbyist for the insurance company Riscorp — one she admitted she didn’t understand — and sponsored it on the floor of the Senate. To her embarrassment she later found that the amendment would have forced a business ally, the president of a large lobbying firm, to resign as head of a trust fund.

Sen. Don Sullivan, R-St. Petersburg, said criticism that Harris didn’t get complex issues or that she made mistakes out of ignorance is unfair. All lawmakers take time to adjust, he notes. With more time, he said, she would have improved.

“She was a very dedicated person who worked her issues hard,” Sullivan said. “She maintained contact with her community and the public at large. Doing bills is not the biggest thing we do. There’s a time to talk and a time to keep your mouth shut. She was maturing nicely.”

Harris’ cousin, Rep. J.D. Alexander, R-Lake Wales, agrees, though he and Harris are hardly on speaking terms because of a family legal fight over their grandfather’s estate.

“She’s a very talented, hard-working person. She doesn’t do anything halfway,” he said. “If she decides she wants to do it, she’ll do it.”

Dennis McGillicuddy, Graci’s husband, likens Harris to his brother, Connie Mack, who also came to politics late.

“She’s comfortable with not knowing something and learning about it,” McGillicuddy said. “If she doesn’t know something, she says, ‘I’ll go find out.’ ”

Matthews, the Sarasota lawyer who has represented Harris and has become a close friend, said she doesn’t get enough credit for her intelligence in part because of her style.

“I think there’s sort of a bias about women in public service. There’s not a presumption of intellect,” he said. “Southern culture is deferential for women. They come across that way and don’t assert their intellect.”

Regardless of her achievements, Harris’ acceptance of illegal contributions from Riscorp during the 1994 campaign stained her tenure. Disclosure of the contributions came in 1997, as Harris launched her campaign for secretary of state.

Riscorp had asked its employees to contribute to candidates such as Harris, then paid them back with “bonus” checks that also covered the costs of Social Security and income tax withholding. The scheme got Riscorp in trouble with tax laws, and state and federal election laws. Five Riscorp executives were indicted; one went to federal prison.

In a key piece of evidence, a memo to Riscorp’s chief financial officer showed that Harris’ campaign was sensitive to the appearance of impropriety.

“Katherine’s office called and asked if we could give them different addresses to list for each of the checks,” the company memo stated. “All the checks show the P.O. Box 1598 address, and if we submit these, the newspaper will probably make the connection and track them all to Riscorp.”

Harris gave back more than $20,000 in Riscorp contributions and insisted that she did nothing wrong. She noted that several other prominent politicians were similarly ensnared.

“There was no way any of us could have known what was going on behind the scenes,” she says now. “Many of those were seasoned politicians.

“It was my first run, and I was the only candidate who paid back those donations.”
Then Harris turned her first scandal to advantage.

She had declared her bid for the secretary of state seat early. At the time, it appeared she would have smooth sailing, because gubernatorial candidate Jeb Bush had named the incumbent, Sandra Mortham, as his running mate.

But questions about ethical lapses and financial management at the Department of State short-circuited her run for lieutenant governor.

She dropped off the governor’s ticket and decided to run for re-election as secretary of state.
Harris defeated her easily in the GOP primary, using Riscorp’s contributions to Mortham as ammunition.
She won the general election, campaigning on a theme of cleaning up elections and restoring faith in government.

The race cemented Harris’ reputation as an unexpectedly dirty fighter.

Opportunities in disguise

But she doesn’t have the thick skin of a brawler.

When the Herald-Tribune prepared to publish stories detailing Harris’ involvement with Riscorp, a reporter called to get her version of what happened.

Harris drove to the newspaper to see the executive editor, Diane McFarlin, whom she knew growing up in Polk County. She pleaded that the story not run.

“How can you do this to me?” she asked.

McFarlin told her their past acquaintance wouldn’t get the story killed.

Harris left in tears but soon bounced back and won the secretary of state job.

“Between Riscorp and the last election, you’d think she has tons of baggage,” Detert said. “But I don’t know, she’s really good at turning lemons into lemonade.”

Harris was a perfect fit as secretary of state.

The office carries an eclectic mix of duties, from oversight of the state’s cultural programs, libraries, historic preservation, concealed weapons licensing to, not incidentally, elections.

Harris tried to broaden the secretary of state’s role promoting international trade and more ties with foreign countries. She says the effort has helped increase Florida’s international trade to almost $74 billion, resulting in more jobs.

But early in her tenure, she made headlines for traveling more than any other Cabinet member or the governor.

Published reports in 2000 showed that she stayed in luxury hotels and even billed the state for her gas from the Capitol to the airport in Tallahassee. Last year, Senate President John McKay, R-Bradenton, and the Senate tried to cut her travel budget.

Eventually, McKay got the House to agree to name a committee to look into her travel and to study smoothing the transition of the office from an elected to an appointed position.

The panel asked for travel records from Harris, including an explanation of how much she spent on each trip, who went and what she accomplished.

Harris’ office gave a lump sum for travel expenses over the past three years — $201,394.60. There was no detailed list of attendees or assessment of results.

At the panel’s most recent meeting in May, Sarasota lawyer and former state Sen. Bob Johnson, appointed to the committee by McKay, fumed.

“I think this has been a fairly useless endeavor,” he said.

“We haven’t gotten answers; we aren’t going to get answers.”

Harris said the media have blown her travel all out of proportion with “extraordinary misrepresentations.”

In the report to the state committee, Harris said the department’s travel represented four-one-hundredths of 1 percent of the agency’s total expenditures. Harris personally has averaged less than $12,000 per year for travel.

Besides, she added, travel is essential to building international trade.

“You cannot not travel to build these relationships,” she said. “As for expensive hotel rooms, yes, I have stayed in hotel rooms for $300, but it was for two people. There’s been an inordinate return on taxpayers’ dollars.”

The independent auditor general’s office has raised other questions about Harris’ administration. One examined use of trust fund money from the department’s weapons licensing division while another said the agency had no adequate safeguards to prevent taxpayers from paying for personal calls on government cell phones.

Last year, the agency’s internal watchdog, the inspector general, concluded that Harris improperly had the official report to her deputy, rather than the secretary herself, as required by law. Shortly afterward, the inspector general, Dwight Chastain, was fired.

Chastain sued Harris, claiming he should be protected as a “whistle-blower” reporting wrongdoing.
Harris’ office says Chastain is a disgruntled employee.

Roy Hunt, a historic preservation adviser to Harris and retired University of Florida law professor, defends her record, including the travel. She persuaded legislators of the value of arts and historic preservation in our state, he said.

“I think she should be praised rather than damned,” said Hunt, a Democrat.

Her critics contend other state officials, like McKay, did much more for the arts. The Senate president rescued the Ringling Museum by engineering the transfer of its administration from the secretary of state to Florida State University.

Harris claimed the museum would “disappear under a university mantle.” But she ducked a direct confrontation with McKay in 2000, telling Ringling board members she feared his clout.

After the plan passed, McKay used his Senate presidency to steer tens of millions of dollars to the Ringling for construction and improvements.

“Actually, the only person totally dedicated to helping us was John McKay,” said museum trustee Marlow Cook, appointed to Ringling’s board by Democratic Gov. Chiles. “Whatever credit anybody else takes is faint in comparison.”

‘We know you: CNN’

Supporters and critics alike say Harris surrounds herself with smart people, such as long-time Chief of Staff Benjamin McKay. She delegates responsibility and gets people to work for her ideas.

She’s signed up volunteers for her congressional campaign by the hundreds, and the next campaign financing disclosure will likely show her contributions at more than $2 million.

People seek her out after speeches for autographs, or photographs with her.

Her support crosses party lines. But then, so do her detractors.

Tellingly, some influential Republicans refused to comment for the record about Harris, saying there is little point, given her formidable lead.

McKay, a senator for 12 years, said, for example, only, “My mom always said, ‘If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.’ ”

As for her bid to represent all or parts of Charlotte, Sarasota, Manatee, DeSoto and Hardee counties in Congress, he added, “We could do better.”

Harris said she hasn’t been tainted by problems that might have crushed other candidates “just by the grace of God.

“I know my motives are pure,” said Harris, who grew up a Presbyterian and still attends church regularly.
Motive was a big theme in the turmoil of the last presidential election. Of all the duties associated with Harris’ secretary of state job, elections figured to be the least troublesome.

It’s largely an administrative job. Still, Harris put herself in a compromising position by agreeing to co-chair George Bush’s Florida election effort.

Harris became the subject of scathing TV and print commentary, much of it focusing on her appearance and make-up.

The worst, she said, was a line accompanying footage of disputed ballots being trucked to Tallahassee with cameras in helicopters following, a la O.J. Simpson.

“America waited in hopes that O.J. Simpson had murdered Katherine Harris,” comedian Bill Maher said on the show Politically Incorrect.

“The personal criticism was tough,” Harris said. “It was fascinating seeing how, as a woman, they would concentrate on my appearance instead of my actions, because that would never occur with a man.”
Before her first nationally televised statement on the election, Harris learned of death threats against her. She was assigned a 24-hour guard.

As the recount got more out of hand, Harris passed the time watching late-night news and reruns, and decorating her home near the Capitol for Christmas.

“I just couldn’t sleep,” she said.

On a trip to the local Target, a cashier asked if she was really THE Katherine Harris.
“I’m only wearing one layer of make-up,” Harris replied. “I’m traveling incognito.”
Harris is writing a book, set to come out just before the fall primary, about her life after the election. The lofty working title: “Center of the Storm: Practicing Principled Leadership in Times of Crisis.”

Critics choke on Harris’ insistence that she acted on principle, rather than party interests. At best, they say, Republican Party leaders used her as a puppet to make Bush president. At worst, they believe she prevented some voters’ ballots from being counted.

“Clearly, she was their person on the inside,” Democratic state party chairman Poe said. “Those paybacks will be very generous.”

But Harris is resolute. “I know before God, before my family, my friends, we operated with integrity, with honor,” she said. “I think there must be some sense of that across the country.”

Her handling of the election renewed criticism that Harris doesn’t do well without a script. She turned questions at press conferences over to deputies.

But her general counsel, Debby Kearney, assumed blame for that perception.

“We were responding to 54 different lawsuits. We were in court most days,” she said. “I said, ‘You can’t be out there every day. Every nuance of every word comes back to me (in court). I told her it’s better to stick to the facts of the statements.”

Harris admits that early in her political career she was literally a shaky public speaker.

“There was a reason I was terrified: I was terrible,” she said. “I hope I’ve gotten a little better. I’m a little more comfortable speaking.”

Clearly, she’s not the most polished public speaker.

For example, at a recent press conference on a program to recruit reading tutors, she told the audience, “I especially thank you, and please thank each and every one of you — thank your legislators because we can have wonderful ideas and you can all dream big dreams, but I’m very grateful to the Legislature for actually funding this. And over the, during the course of this administration in the last four years they put over a million dollars into our illiteracy program.”

Some say her mind runs ahead of itself, an offshoot of the frenetic pace she keeps. One-on-one, she’s at ease, greeting people with both hands. She knows how to work a crowd and demonstrates a common touch, sprinkling conversations with “y’all.”

She’s gets on the floor and crawls around with her friends’ children, and hops on a horse while visiting dignitaries in Argentina.

Harris is recognized in airports and on the streets in foreign countries. After the election, members of Mongolia’s new parliament sought her out to get a photo while visiting Tallahassee to observe state government. Huddling around her, they exclaimed, “We know you: CNN.”

“It’s astonishing that spotlight was so searing and had such a carryover effect in our state or nationally,” said Harris.

Friends attribute some of Harris’ increased confidence to her marriage nearly six years ago to low-key Swedish businessman Anders Ebbeson. They met on a blind date at the opera.

“He has been her rock and a wonderful support,” Graci McGillicuddy said.

A photorealist painter, Harris occasionally takes a sketch pad when she and Ebbeson go boating. (She considers herself a technician rather than an artist.)

The couple used to have a routine before the campaign interrupted it: eating at Mediterraneo and catching a movie on Fridays, cooking out with friends on Saturdays and ordering Chinese take-out on Sundays.
Some political observers suspect that once she gets to Washington she’ll quickly tire of the House politics, where even celebrities have to pay their dues in a seniority-dominated institution.

But others believe she’ll continue the upward rise that’s characterized her political career.

Things will be different compared with her early Washington internship under then-Sen. Chiles and Rep. Andy Ireland, Harris vows.

“I really didn’t like the political side,” she said. “So I left D.C. — ran, thinking I would never look back.”
Now Harris said she isn’t looking beyond the November election.

“If you do a good job,” she said, “the future takes care of itself.”

- Staff writer Chad Binette contributed to this article.

There were some nasty letters in the SH-T after that so I wrote a response you can find here: MY LETTER

Katherine takes a picture with campaign supporters Margaret Wise, Dianne Belk and Larry Calder. Dianne and Larry hosted a BBQ for Katherine at their home on Manasota Key.

Katherine and her husband Anders thank friends and supporters for their commitment to the campaign

Katherine is excited to talk with longtime friends Wendy Resnick and John Abbott.

Katherine enjoys the sunset with the campaign’s youngest supporter, Michala Fortney.

Katherine talks with Siguard Johnson and Mary Lou Merrill. Mrs. Merrill hosted a “Coffee with Katherine” gathering at her Sarasota home, inviting friends and neighbors.

Katherine appreciates Cay and Don Phillips volunteering and hosting a “Coffee with Katherine” gathering at their home in Osprey.

Yes, I believe you forgot me again! But it's okay...Yes, I think it's hilariously funny that Flake forgot to sign the papers..can we say stupid, but it would have been great to see Katherine humiliate him. Anywho, Katherine rocks! I always love her pictures especially the one of her and baby Michala, can we all say a big Aaaaww!!

Thanks for the ping...I'd missed seeing this article. Enjoyed learning more about KH's family & early years.

Go Katherine Go!

Congrats on this fantastic thread and all the photos are great. This is what a grass roots campaign is all about. "We the People". Thanks for the ping and bttt!

Julie, this picture comes from Katherine's brother in laws album (Christian music guy Wes King)
somehow Meredith wrote him months ago and he said all the pics in the album were either from his family or his wifes (Katherine's sister.) And he has a large family.

I think this is KH in the back, her brother Walt next to her and sister Fran in the front. (Note the palm trees.) My best guess is circa 1964.

You asked about family LOL.

Go Katherine the Great! I think she's beautiful, feminine, and graceful - so take that you ugly feminazi democrats and your wimpy "male" counterparts!

Are you sure your not Summer, because these, "Repubicans foreever" threads, just smack of worship.

PS
What has KR done for the Conservative in the last 10 yrs.?

Certainly. I love and admire this great woman. On another thread I nominated Linda Tripp if Vice President Cheney doesn't isn't on the next ticket, but I should have requested Katherine Harris! I will always be thankful to her for doing what was RIGHT, not what would have been politically correct. Even though she wasn't a democrat, you know she was under tremendous pressure from them, and as we've witnessed with Jeffords, McCain, et al, most buckle under that intense heat, but this heroic woman did not and would not!

This is why I support Katherine Harris:

She is pro-gun
She supports vouchers
She is pro-life
She stood up during the election
She supports tax cuts
She supports military spending
She is pro-Israel
She supports the embargo on Cuba.

So, you want that I have no life? Re: the Jeb thread. LOL I hope you visit my MAGNUS JOHNSON thread. Just type in that name and it will pop up. Takes awhile to load. Afraidfortherepublic worked on it too, not-alone,ragtimecowgirl,luis gonzalez and others. It's worth a peek if you haven't seen it yet. Magnus is my great grandfather. He would have LIKED Katherine Harris IMO.

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