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Florida's Katherine Harris won the Republican primary despite dismal poll numbers, a subpoena in a bribery investigation and droves of campaign deserters. Her victory may be sweetest for Democrats.
By Michael Scherer

Sep. 06, 2006 | Rep. Katherine Harris, America's patron saint of partisanship, looked as radiant as ever. She stood Tuesday night amid her adoring fans, in "Harris for Senate" T-shirts, with a bevy of television cameras rolling, and a victory in her pocket. Despite a disastrous and humiliating campaign, Florida's Republican voters had selected her as their nominee to the United States Senate.

For the moment, it didn't seem to matter that little things were still going wrong. She had timed her victory speech just as Charlie Crist, Florida's Republican nominee for governor, took over the networks to accept his nomination, all but ensuring there would be no live coverage of the event. And though she was reading from a script, she accidentally accused her opponent, the incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson, of squandering his time in the Florida Senate, instead of the U.S. Senate. Then there was the repetition of words, which suggested either nervous improvisation or lousy speechwriting: "It's a great victory because it shows each of us that we can overcome adversity to achieve an extraordinary victory."

But, for the moment, the adversity had been overcome, and that was the important part. All year, her campaign staff has been deserting her in waves and giving nasty backstabbing quotes to the press. Many in the Republican leadership, including Florida's Gov. Jeb Bush, had all but pronounced her campaign a dead letter. The Justice Department had even issued a subpoena to her campaign, as part of an ongoing bribery investigation of a convicted lobbyist. Public polls showed her trailing Nelson by anywhere from 15 to 35 percent, with statewide favorability ratings below 30 percent. But here she was, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Florida, not six years after she was introduced to the nation as Florida's secretary of state during the 2000 presidential recount.

"Make no mistake, it's not going to be easy," she told the fawning crowed of about 50. "But standing here tonight is proof positive just how we can courageously beat the odds."

So far this year, nothing has been easy for Harris. Wherever she goes these days, car crashes -- both literal and figurative -- seem to follow. Just a day earlier, on a campaign tour through Miami, she had just pulled into a gas station to wave at traffic, when two cars collided behind her. A stolen compact sedan smashed into the back of a Chevy Tahoe, which was carrying two small children. The driver of the stolen car sped off, and a local traffic policeman who had been escorting the congresswoman flipped on his siren in hot pursuit. Before long, the gas station was swarming with police from at least four jurisdictions, firemen, the occupants of the Tahoe, and, eventually, the captured perpetrator, who sat shackled in the back of a patrol car.

But Harris overcame this adversity as well. Without missing a beat, she darted back and forth between waving at traffic and tending to the collision. She rushed over to the occupants of the Tahoe to make sure they were all safe. "How are the children?" she asked, referring to the two young girls, ages 4 and 8, in the back seat. They were fine, so Harris gave them both campaign stickers. "Kids like stickers," she explained, a bit apologetically. She even made her way to the squad car to take a look at the perp. "I wanted to see who the jerk was," she said. Someone told her that a traffic officer from the town of Sweetwater had captured the alleged car thief. "That's fantastic," she exclaimed. "Good for the Sweetwater officer."

When she returned to the road, her wrist rotating in a pageant wave, the traffic greeted her with an equal measure of honks of support and jeers of derision. "Boo Harris," screamed one passing passenger. "Harris sucks," yelled another. "I hate Harris." But her wrist rotation never faltered. Her wide smile never slackened. "We don't pay any attention to the polls," Harris explained to me, as the cars continued to rush by. "I think some of the liberals try to ... well they can make polls say whatever they want to."

One-on-one, Harris can exude optimism that is infectious and unending, even if it has no clear connection with the grim reality of her situation. She is a case study of positive thinking, a Tony Robbins clone with mascara and black pearls. When she campaigns, her force of will is so intense that reality seems to bend and distort around her. The press corps follows a few steps behind, caught in the bubble of her self-confidence. They try to pierce through with questions filled with pesky facts. What about all the polls that show she has almost no chance to win against the Democratic incumbent? "We are going to win. Whenever we turn out our base, all the data shows we will beat Bill Nelson," she says, with a perfect smile and flared nostrils. What about the GOP heavies who have predicted her defeat? "The elite is tiny, at the top. All we want is the masses." How have you enjoyed the primary campaign so far? "It's been fantastic. On the trail, people have been extremely supportive."

This last answer omits any mention of the three campaign managers, two press secretaries, the pollster, the media advisor and the campaign consultant, among others, who have all quit the Harris campaign in the last year. Ed Goeas, the pollster, told a reporter his parting words were: "Get out." Ed Rollins, a former Reagan advisor who resigned as her campaign consultant in April, told the St. Petersburg Times: "My counsel was she could not possibly win. She didn't listen to anyone." Other former aides have been even less kind, describing her repeated behind-the-scenes "meltdowns," her obsessive micromanagement, her loose relationship with the truth, and her "Devil Wears Prada" demands for Starbucks coffee -- "extra hot venti triple latte, no fat, no foam, one Sweet'N Low." Jim Dornan, her first campaign manager, has called the Harris campaign "one of the most disastrous ever run in the United States."

Harris has managed to repeatedly botch and bungle her candidacy. She was quoted by a religious journal saying that the separation between church and state is "a lie," and that non-Christian candidates are likely to "legislate sin." She once peddled the unfounded rumor that former Rep. Joe Scarborough played a role in the death of one of his interns. More recently, she made a failed attempt to conceal from her staff -- and the voters -- a Justice Department subpoena for campaign records related to her dealings with Mitchell Wade, the military contractor who admitted to bribing the imprisoned California Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham. (Wade has admitted to funneling Harris illegal campaign donations; Harris claims she was not aware of any impropriety and is not a target of the investigation.) Personal obstacles have also interrupted the campaign. In January, her father, a close confidant named George Harris Jr., died at the age of 71. Then this summer, she had surgery to remove an ovarian mass.

"If I was a psychiatrist I could probably retire on trying to explain and figure her out," says Chris Ingram, her former press secretary, who left the campaign this summer and now works for a rival GOP candidate. "I feel sorry for her. I don't think she knows how to trust people."

But that Katherine Harris, the one of talk-show parody and Beltway derision, is completely absent when you spend time with her on the campaign trail. There she overflows with giddy energy and optimism, and an always-keen sense of fashion. Despite a Florida sun that felt like an open oven, she wore a black skirt, blouse, stockings and 3-inch heels as she crisscrossed Miami on Monday. Her makeup, tastefully toned and liberally applied, did not bleed. "Your suit matches your eyes. You are so lucky," Harris gushed on Monday, upon greeting Marisa Tinkler Mendez, a local circuit court candidate, at the Versailles Bakery in the heart of Miami's Little Havana. Fox News and CNN were there for interviews with Harris, and a handful of print reporters followed just in case she made another campaign gaffe. Even one of her GOP primary opponents, Peter Monroe, was lingering about in the hopes that her media attention would rub off on him. "Her trick is always to appear as a celebrity," Monroe explained, looking anonymous in a blue suit and red striped tie.

Harris' husband, a stately and bemused Swedish businessman, also followed her a few steps behind. When I asked him if he knew what he was getting into when he married Harris, he smiled and replied in a Swedish accent, "I always thought anything could happen with Katherine."

Contrary to liberal mythology, Katherine Harris did not magically spring into existence, a full-fledged apparatchik of the Bush campaign, on Nov. 7, 2000. That was when everyone who owned a television suddenly found her in the living room, the garishly painted face that served as Florida's secretary of state. She made decisions that outraged Democrats and won allegiance from Republicans, initially forbidding the state's counties from holding their own recounts and delaying a process that eventually ended prematurely when the Supreme Court awarded President Bush the White House.

She was in fact born in April 1957, the daughter of a wealthy banker and the granddaughter of Ben Hill Griffith Jr., a citrus and cattle magnate, whose legacy includes a failed run for governor in 1974 and the naming right to the University of Florida football stadium. Harris has described her childhood home in Polk County as "magical," with her mother working as a Girl Scout leader, and a pet horse named Cracker. As she told one Florida newspaper in 2002, "We had a neighborhood that everyone came to play in."

For college, she chose an all-girls school in Georgia, called Agnes Scott, where she followed a socialite's curriculum, studying art and philosophy in Spain and Switzerland. By her own account, she was more interested as a younger woman in patronizing the arts than in partisan gun-slinging. "I had hated politics, and wanted nothing to do with the political arena," Harris told me as she waved to passing motorists. "I thought that Washington and Tallahassee were very dark and dismal places."

But in 1988, she began organizing cocktail parties and fundraisers for Porter Goss, a local candidate for Congress who would go on to become the director of the CIA. She later became outraged at the conduct of her local state senator, a Democrat named Jim Boczar. Among his many sins in Harris' eyes, Boczar had reportedly joked that a Rubens (as in Peter Paul Rubens, the Flemish baroque painter) was just a sandwich. Unable to recruit another candidate to oppose him, she decided to run herself, facing long odds and a costly race.

And she won, tipping the balance of the evenly divided state Senate to the GOP in 1994. Four years later, she ran for secretary of state, again overcoming discouraging polls to defeat an incumbent by eight points. It is a record that has left her skeptical of the political prognosticators who now expect her certain defeat. "Together we shall prove the naysayers and the pundits wrong again," she exhorted the crowd on Tuesday night.

By all appearances, she plans to run a consistently negative campaign against Nelson, calling him a do-nothing elite who is more liberal than Hillary Clinton, a fact that she culls from a somewhat selective reading of the Florida senator's record. She has reportedly sunk more than $3 million from her own considerable fortune -- estimated at more than $30 million with her husband -- into the race. She has discussed selling her house in Washington or property in Florida to raise more funds.

From a distance it is easy to see the whole endeavor as a fool's errand. For Democrats, her defeat could be little more than icing on the cake of a transformative 2006 election. But to understand why Harris herself continues to withstand the jeering motorists and the patronizing press corps, one has to step back from the influential, if not accidental, role she played in the 2000 election. At the time, she was a secretary of state who spent her time visiting foreign countries, a person caught as off guard as the rest of America by the election debacle. By most accounts, she did the bidding of the political party she served, executing the law in a way that favored her party's future leader.

But today she controls her own fate, and she seems determined to do herself proud no matter the cost. This may just be what her campaign consultants and pollsters never completely understood about her as they tried to steer her to abandoning the race. "She has always wanted to be someone of some importance, " says Glenn Hodas, who quit as Harris' campaign manager in July and now doubts whether she has the proper temperament to be a U.S. senator. "She doesn't quite realize the reality of her situation."

At the end of her victory speech Tuesday, she inserted a quick line, six words that were easily lost amid the exhortations and applause lines. "I know my dad is smiling," she said.

It was a revealing moment, in which she seemed to be saying something else: If she must lose this race, Katherine Harris has decided she is going to lose on her own terms. She will not be forced out by party leaders or political advisors. She will not be defeated by the press or by her own clumsy mistakes. The Florida socialite, the arts benefactor, the torchbearer of the family of Ben Hill Griffith Jr. is going to lose with style. Her own style. This is, no doubt, a pose that would make her family proud.

-- By Michael Scherer

Florida Primary Showing Bodes Ill for Harris
Against three political unknowns, the onetime GOP star gets 49% of the vote in Senate bid.
By Carol J. Williams, Times Staff Writer, September 6, 2006

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MIAMI — Rep. Katherine Harris, the controversial one-time Republican hero, collected less than half the party's vote Tuesday in winning her Senate primary race against three political unknowns, foreshadowing a tough November face-off with Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson.

Harris' 49% showing reflected her growing unpopularity within the party after a campaign replete with gaffes and questions about her integrity. Nelson, who had no primary challenger, leads in opinion polls by 40 percentage points and has amassed a $16-million war chest — twice the amount of Harris' contributions.

In the hotly contested race to replace Gov. Jeb Bush, the costliest in Florida history, moderate Republican Charlie Crist ran away with the primary with 64% of the vote over 33% for challenger and religious-right choice Tom Gallagher.

In the Democratic contest, Rep. Jim Davis outpolled state Sen. Rod Smith 47% to 41%, despite an eleventh-hour spending blitz by the state's powerful sugar lobby on behalf of the underdog.

The four men seeking to succeed Bush in the governor's mansion spent more than $30 million, on top of lavish outlays for attack ads by soft-money supporters.

Crist's decisive victory suggests that Florida Republicans have moved toward the political center, as Gallagher cast himself as the more conservative choice, campaigning on his staunch opposition to abortion, legalized gay unions, stem cell research and stricter gun controls.

But Florida voters rate those issues of less importance than education, immigration and the economy, and Gallagher's attempts to label Crist a closet liberal apparently failed to sway them.

Crist and Gallagher had cast themselves as fitting successors to the conservative Bush, although Crist had criticized the governor for intervening in the right-to-die case of Terri Schiavo, a brain-dead stroke victim whose husband had sought to end life support after 15 years.

In the Democratic gubernatorial contest, Davis lost some of his early lead over Smith in the final weeks as the state's sugar giants spent millions in support of the little-known state legislator. As head of the agriculture committee, Smith, who has backed looser environmental protection for the Everglades, had a legislative track record the cane growers preferred to the more environmentally oriented Davis.

The party front-runner also was thought to have lost some ground among black voters after Smith reminded them that Davis had refused as a state legislator in 1990 to back compensation for two wrongfully convicted black men who served 12 years, nine of them on death row, before another man confessed to the 1963 killings of two white men.

Although it has been 16 years since that vote and some state civil rights leaders continue to support him, Davis could see the issue come back to haunt him in the general election campaign against Crist, who as state attorney general has sought overdue justice in a number of high-profile racial cases.

A poll last week by Strategic Vision put Crist ahead of both potential Democratic challengers but with a better lead over Davis. The three-day poll of 1,200 likely voters, with a 3-percentage-point margin of error, forecast that Crist would outpoll Davis 49% to 41%, while the Republican would garner 48% against 43% for Smith.

Harris faced considerable opposition within her party, but the three political unknowns challenging her canceled each other out.

Reflecting how far the former secretary of state has fallen in her fellow Floridians' esteem since her role in certifying the 2000 presidential vote in favor of George W. Bush, two of the three newcomers managed to draw double-digit support.

Attorney Will McBride had 30% of the votes and retired Navy Adm. LeRoy Collins Jr. picked up 15% with a campaign on which he spent less than $200,000. A fourth Republican hopeful, developer Peter Monroe, got about 5%.

Harris retreated behind her comfortable lead in the last days of campaigning, making only one meet-and-greet appearance over Labor Day weekend in the safe conservative territory of Miami's Little Havana. She gave no interviews while McBride and Collins barnstormed the state and hit the airwaves.

Torrential rain throughout the holiday weekend kept supporters for all candidates away from rallies and also hurt turnout at the polls, which was as low as 14% in some counties.

Katherine Harris 'Oops' On Terror
CBS News, WASHINGTON, August 5, 2004

(AP) Republican Rep. Katherine Harris said Wednesday she regrets making the claim that a plot existed to blow up the power grid in Carmel, Ind., a notion city officials disputed.

But the Florida lawmaker stands by her statement that based on classified information, the United States has thwarted more than 100 potential terrorist attacks.

Harris, who was at the center of the political storm over the disputed 2000 presidential election, made the comments about terrorism and the plot on Monday at a rally for President Bush in Venice, Fla., and a subsequent interview with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

She told the audience that while in the Midwest recently, the mayor of Carmel told her how a man of Middle Eastern heritage had been arrested and hundreds of pounds of explosives were found in his home.

"He had plans to blow up the area's entire power grid," she said, according to the newspaper.

City officials in Carmel said they know of no such plot.

"We're aware of the comments we read in the paper," said Tim Green, assistant chief of police in Carmel, a town about 10 miles north of Indianapolis. "We're not aware of any plans to blow up Carmel's power grid."

Nancy Heck, a spokeswoman for Carmel Mayor Jim Brainard, said, "The mayor never talked to Katherine Harris. They never had that conversation."

Questioned Wednesday, Harris' office issued a statement in which the congresswoman said, "I regret that I had no knowledge of the sensitive nature of this situation."

But Harris stood by her comments to the newspaper that the United States has thwarted potential attacks in the last three years, which she said was based on classified information.

"Actually, it's been more than 100," she told the newspaper. "It's classified ... obviously not classified to me ... but things I can't go into details about." She said only the specifics of the thwarted attacks were classified.

She said Wednesday in a statement that her comments underscore the need "for each of us to remain alert and vigilant in fighting terrorism."

Harris serves on the House Financial Services Committee and the International Relations Committee, which often gets briefed on terrorism. She does not serve on the House Intelligence Committee.

Disclosure of classified information is forbidden by law and by the rules of Congress, which require members to take an oath. However, prosecutions or sanctions of members for revealing secret information are rare.

By Will Lester ©MMIV The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Rep. Harris: Church-state separation 'a lie'

MIAMI, Florida (AP) -- U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris told a religious journal that separation of church and state is "a lie" and God and the nation's founding fathers did not intend the country be "a nation of secular laws."

The Republican candidate for U.S. Senate also said that if Christians are not elected, politicians will "legislate sin," including abortion and gay marriage.

Harris made the comments -- which she clarified Saturday -- in the Florida Baptist Witness, the weekly journal of the Florida Baptist State Convention, which interviewed political candidates and asked them about religion and their positions on issues.

Separation of church and state is "a lie we have been told," Harris said in the interview, published Thursday, saying separating religion and politics is "wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers."

Electing non-Christians allows 'legislating sin'
"If you're not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin," Harris said.

Her comments drew criticism, including some from fellow Republicans, who called them offensive and not representative of the party.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Florida, who is Jewish, told the Orlando Sentinel that she was "disgusted" by the comments.

Harris' campaign released a statement Saturday saying she had been "speaking to a Christian audience, addressing a common misperception that people of faith should not be actively involved in government."

The comments reflected "her deep grounding in Judeo-Christian values," the statement said, adding that Harris had previously supported pro-Israel legislation and legislation recognizing the Holocaust.

Harris' opponents in the GOP primary also gave interviews to the Florida Baptist Witness but made more general statements on their faith.

Harris, 49, faced widespread criticism for her role overseeing the 2000 presidential recount as Florida's secretary of state.

State GOP leaders -- including Gov. Jeb Bush -- don't think she can win against Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson in November. Fundraising has lagged, frustrated campaign workers have defected in droves and the issues have been overshadowed by news of her dealings with a corrupt defense contractor who gave her $32,000 in illegal campaign contributions.