Life Without Florida: No One Thought It Would Be So Hard

PALM BEACH, Fla. —  Ten days ago Leone Theobhil, a Haitian immigrant and professional cook, was shouting at the top of her lungs, “No special session! No special session!” on the steps of the Florida Legislature in Tallahassee.

Now she’s back to quietly stirring pots of purple borsch at a Jewish school near South Beach.

In Fort Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Tallahassee and Miami, the streets are clear. Police barricades have been lifted. Rallies have split into a thousand parts.

In Palm Beach County, where it all began, where complaints election day of a confusing “butterfly” ballot hinted at the saga to come, Democratic Party headquarters feels like a high school gym the day after a prom. Streamers are still up but the storefront office is empty. So is the parking lot. Gone are lines, cameras, sherbet-colored Cadillacs piloted by angry seniors.

Goodbye, Florida.

You’ve given us a great story. It’ll be hard to turn on the television and not see you anymore.

Who can forget the images of that Ryder truck motoring up the Florida turnpike with the “rent me” sticker on the windshield and the hanging chads in back? Or the midnight ballot-counting sessions? Or the Rev. Jesse Jackson inspiring crowds across the state with a fist in the air and a voice trembling with civil rights-era conviction?

“We’ve cut too much sugar cane. We’ve picked too much cotton. We’ve died too young.”

Sure, there will be a few more updates--election reform, the review of disputed ballots by private organizations, the inevitable where-are-they-now pieces on Katherine Harris, Florida’s secretary of state, and Charles Burton, the Palm Beach County judge famous for squinting at dimples.

‘What a Trip We Had’

But the adventure in the Sunshine State is over now. And it almost feels like we’re being discharged from summer camp after six life-changing weeks.

“Every morning since this ended I keep waking up thinking of something new from Florida,” said Matt Iversen, a 23-year-old who crisscrossed the state the last six weeks for the Democratic Party. “It’s nice to get on with life. But what a trip we had.”

And what a spot for it. Florida is best known for oranges, hurricanes and low taxes, great football, great beaches and great strip clubs. Or at least it was before election fiasco 2000. The state is home to the National Enquirer, the space shuttle, the Palmetto bug, Evel Knievel and now O.J. Simpson. Its 15 million people are as jumbled a mix as anywhere: freshly arrived Haitians, rednecks, alligator wrestlers, Yiddish-speaking Jews, Cuban Americans, cattle farmers and thousands of folks simply looking for a fresh start, drawn like a magnet by a season-less clime and cheap living.

The election story provided a wonderful tour of a state that feels like seven rolled into one as the news moved from West Palm Beach to Fort Lauderdale and Miami, up through Seminole and Martin counties and then finally to Tallahassee, the Panhandle capital draped in Spanish moss and Southern charm.

But Florida took a beating in the process. And not just for its Votomatic ballot machines. Many people here are still sore about the “Flori-duh” T-shirts, the stickers that labeled Palm Beach County a banana republic and the insults hurled at seniors by late-night comics.

“We were tarred and feathered,” said Kartik Krishnaiyer, a political consultant from Palm Beach.

Tourist officials say they’ll take it.

“We couldn’t buy publicity like this,” said Tom Flanigan, a spokesman for Visit Florida, the state’s nonprofit tourism promoter.

True, news crews from Finland, Holland, Sri Lanka, Australia and a hundred other places beamed back pictures reinforcing the image of Florida as a sunny, spirited slice of Americana, albeit a dysfunctional one.

And you couldn’t beat the characters. Take Harris, the Southern belle secretary of state. She found herself in the awkward position of certifying the vote for George W. Bush after serving as the co-chairwoman of his Florida campaign. While Republicans lionized her, Democrats ridiculed everything about her down to her lipstick.

Then there’s Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the president-elect’s younger, more serious brother. He quickly extracted himself from the election drama but never overcame suspicions that he was still pulling strings, especially over the Florida Legislature.

Such Characters, These Voting Boards

The county canvassing boards were rich studies in social dynamics themselves. In Palm Beach, the cameras alternated between Burton, the wise-cracking judge, and depressed-looking Theresa LaPore. She is the Democratic election supervisor who designed the butterfly ballot thought to have cost Al Gore the presidency because it was confusing and many voters mistakenly cast their ballots for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan.

In Broward County, no character loomed larger than Judge Robert Rosenberg. His intense visage was suspiciously akin to Marlon Brando’s character Kurtz in “Apocalypse Now.” You almost expected Rosenberg to utter “the horror, the horror” as he held up the thousandth ballot to the light and swept his hand menacingly across his large forehead.

Of course, a lot of election action unfolded in Florida’s courts. The most interesting jurist to watch was Leon County Circuit Judge N. Sanders Sauls, a creature of the Panhandle. Born and raised in rural Jefferson County, Sauls was 100% country.

That’s “a little bit like getting nibbled to death by a duck,” he said one day during Gore’s election contest trial when a lawyer asked him to read yet another report. Panhandle-speak, actually, was quite wide-spoken.

John French, a lobbyist who took to educating reporters from behind a forest of Bud longnecks at Clyde’s, a Tallahassee bar, once said about the Florida Legislature: “You can dress up a dog and even put lipstick on it--but it’s still a dog.”

Whatever. It sounded good.

And then there were the masses, given fresh energy by a photo-finish presidential race and the deeper issues about voting rights and fairness it stirred up. No doubt the political parties and special interest groups helped mobilize supporters. It was all masterfully done--the moving songs, the stirring rallies, the bus trips and T-shirts and Saran-wrapped sandwiches and the sense of camaraderie and belonging all that brings. But many people said they really did feel like they were experiencing a political coming of age.

Theobhil, the Haitian immigrant, boarded a bus at midnight in Miami. She had never been to a political rally before and eight hours later she was hollering in front of the Florida Legislature, a “Stop racism now” circular sign on her chest like a giant button. Like others, she was outraged that state lawmakers were considering directly appointing a slate of Bush electors, a process that began but evaporated after Gore conceded.

“Power,” Theobhil said, “should be picked by the people. I am a voter in this country. My voice should be heard.”

In Delray Beach, 15,000 people, most “seasoned” citizens, came to lodge complaints in the days after the election about the voting process.

“I’m so angry, I could kick somebody,” said Estelle Berlin, a 79-year-old retiree from Delray Beach.

Yes, election tumult could have happened anywhere, for the voting systems in several other states are now thought to be vulnerable to the same sort of statistical dead-heat breakdown.

But for a straight-into-the-history books election drama, the Sunshine State delivered a flawless script that only it could author. Months before Nov. 7, pundits predicted Florida voters would pick the president.

Nowhere else, in one state, could thousands of elderly Jews mistakenly vote for Buchanan, large immigrant communities complain about getting mistreated, a conservative legislature battle a liberal state supreme court, the president-elect’s brother become a factor and the streets fill with protesters two weeks before Christmas.

Think about it. Would all those folks have come down and dragged this out if it were 20 degrees outside and sleeting?