Reno Enters Race to Try to Unseat Florida’s Bush

MIAMI —  Janet Reno announced Tuesday she would campaign for the Democratic nomination for governor of Florida, possibly setting up a dramatic, expensive showdown in 2002 between the Clinton administration attorney general and Gov. Jeb Bush, the president’s brother.

“I have decided I can best serve the people of the state of Florida by seeking the office of governor,” Reno told reporters outside her home in southwest Miami-Dade County.

“I’ve spent the last three months talking to people all across Florida, and I think they share my vision for Florida--building the best educational system in the country, preserving our environment, managing our growth and standing up for our elders,” Reno said.

Reno’s long-awaited announcement means tremendous scrutiny will again fall on the politics of the Sunshine State, where President Bush captured the White House by a disputed 537-vote margin in November.

“It’s clearly the national headline race; nothing even comes close, not even the California governor,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Governmental Studies at the University of Virginia. “It involves the president’s brother and may become a referendum on the president.”

For Republican Party operatives, the gubernatorial contest will be an opportunity to prove that November’s results were no fluke or court-engineered flouting of the people’s will. For Democrats, the election will be payback time for what they say was the theft of the rightful victory of their presidential candidate, former Vice President Al Gore.

“We’re very turned on about this race,” said Tony Walsh, a Florida Democratic Party official.

Many Republicans and Democrats will also view the contest in the country’s fourth-most-populous state as a dress rehearsal for the 2004 presidential election. To put their standard-bearer in the governor’s oak-shaded mansion in Tallahassee, the two parties will probably spend a total of $40 million, predicted Susan MacManus, professor of political science at the University of South Florida in Tampa. That would set a Florida record.

“Each party has a lot to prove, both to voters in this state and outside,” MacManus said.

“It will certainly be one of the most heavily spending gubernatorial elections in American history,” Sabato said. “For Florida, it will be a truly shocking total. Money will be pouring in from all over the country and from both party committees.”

In Tallahassee, the paperwork allowing Reno to seek contributions and hire staff was filed at 9 a.m. Tuesday by Gary Barron, her newly appointed campaign treasurer.

“We don’t anticipate there will be any problem raising the amount of funds required,” Barron told reporters. “We’re off and running.”

Bush, 48, was elected in 1998 and is seeking to become the first Republican governor to win reelection in Florida history. At his Tallahassee campaign headquarters, officials professed indifference to Reno’s announcement.

“The governor is not focused on any of the prospective Democrat candidates,” campaign manager Karen Unger said. “He is focused on doing his job and being the best governor he can be for this state.”

At a Tallahassee news conference, Bush joked that if Reno checked with police to confirm the double-digit drop in violent crime registered during his governorship, “she might vote for me too.”

To meet the Republican incumbent head-on, Reno, 63, first must win her party’s primary next September. Polls have indicated that she is the clear front-runner in a field that includes former Ambassador to Vietnam Douglas “Pete” Peterson, state Sen. Daryl Jones, Florida House Minority Leader Lois Frankel, Tampa lawyer Bill McBride and U.S. Rep. Jim Davis.

No other Florida Democrat can match the name recognition of the only woman ever to serve as attorney general. To beat Reno, other Democratic candidates will have to raise enough money to campaign in a state with 10 media markets, a very tall order.

Privately, though, some officials of Reno’s party have expressed fears that she is too liberal, and too linked in the public mind to her eight years of service with President Clinton, to have the middle-of-the-road appeal needed to beat Bush in a general election.

Cuban Americans, a large voter bloc in South Florida, vehemently oppose Reno for her role last year in returning Cuban shipwreck survivor Elian Gonzalez, then 6 years old, to Cuba. Other voters question her earlier actions as head of the Justice Department, including the 1993 assault on the Branch Davidians’ compound near Waco, Texas.

“Republicans are saying, we want her [as the Democratic nominee] because she stuck up for Clinton during all those scandals for eight years,” John Wehrung, a political consultant affiliated with the GOP, told Sunshine Network, a Florida news channel.

“The biggest problem for Janet Reno is that people seem to have their minds made up,” MacManus said. “Election 2002 will boil down to how each candidate appeals to the independent voters, [who now number] 1 in 5. And polls indicate she isn’t making inroads with independents.”

During a Democratic candidates’ forum last week in Gainesville, the more centrist Peterson, a prisoner of war in Vietnam, did not mention Reno by name but insisted he was the lone Democrat “who can send Jeb Bush into retirement.”

An often-cited July opinion survey by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research found that Reno would win her party’s primary by a landslide, getting as many votes as all other candidates combined, but that she would lose to Bush in the general election, 54% to 39%.

“All things considered, it’s not an even race,” Sabato said. But he added that as the president’s younger brother, Bush is “uniquely vulnerable.”

“If the economy is bad, Jeb Bush could easily be a one-termer,” Sabato said. “I don’t care what the polls say now.”

A similar unknown factor for Reno is the concerns voters may have about the Miami native’s age and health. She has Parkinson’s disease but says it did not hamper her work as a member of the Cabinet nor slow down a vigorous lifestyle that includes kayaking and hiking.

In an interview last month, she told The Times that her physicians had assured her the disease would not impair her ability to serve out a four-year term as governor.

According to analysts, Reno appears politically vulnerable in the “I-4 corridor,” the central Florida communities of young, upscale, politically uncommitted professionals that stretch along Interstate 4 from Orlando to Tampa.

If she cannot win over those voters, she may lose to Bush. Her only hope, MacManus said, lies in her ability to energize two voter groups: young people and African Americans. To win, the political scientist said, Reno must whip up enough interest so that as many Floridians turn out to the polls as during a presidential election.

“She is counting on the fact that her sort of unconventional way of approaching politics will be a welcome change in a world where everyone thinks politicians are programmed,” MacManus said.

According to Sabato, there are so many variables, local and national, in the Florida governor’s race that predicting Reno’s chances now is impossible. “Conventional wisdom has it already wrapped up. She’s unassailable in the primary and will get walloped in the general. I’ll bet at least one half of the forecast is wrong, but I’m not smart enough to know which half. It’s my gut talking.”

Reno’s chances in the Democratic primary received an unexpected boost by the GOP-dominated Florida Legislature this spring. The legislators eliminated runoffs between the two highest vote-getters, giving someone like Reno, with her celebrity, a decided edge.