From Yellow Dog Democrats to Red State Republicans: Florida and Its Politics since 1940

6. Holding Back the Republican Tide, but for How Long?

147 6 Holding Back the Republican Tide, but for How Long? With the service-tax proposal still weighing heavily on voter attitudes, Republicans were not confident about retaining the governorship in 1990. They privately hoped several Democrats would seek the governorship , leading to another intraparty bloodbath and a weakened candidate , as had occurred in 1986. But these hopes turned to consternation when rumors circulated that Lawton Chiles, one of the lions of the Democratic Party, had expressed an interest in returning to politics and was being courted by party leaders. Chiles had retired from the U.S. Senate in 1989 after serving for three terms and earning the respect of both parties for his political prowess and his bipartisan efforts to reduce the nation’s budget deficit. Near the end of his third term, Chiles developed clinical depression and was treated with Prozac, at 148 · From Yellow Dog Democrats to Red State Republicans the time a very controversial drug. He struggled with depression, what he called the “blacks,” while teaching political science at the University of Florida, and it was unclear whether he was healthy enough to run for political office, let alone serve as governor. However, as he began to recover his health, several supporters convinced him that the party needed his leadership to recapture the governorship. With the well-respected Buddy MacKay, who had been narrowly defeated by Republican Connie Mack in the 1986 Senate race, agreeing to serve as his lieutenant governor, Chiles’s health became of less concern to Democrats. Throwing his name into the campaign ring in April, Chiles pledged to reinvent government by making government less costly and more responsive to citizens and by limiting campaign contributions to one hundred dollars , a tactic Askew had employed in his reelection campaign in 1974. Chiles and MacKay constituted a formidable team, but it also looked like an aging ticket in an aging party, designed chiefly to enable Democrats to hold power for at least another four years.1 The Reemergence of Lawton Chiles While Chiles’s political reputation was without peer in the state—he had never lost a campaign—questions abounded about his health, persuading the ambitious Democratic congressman Bill Nelson to run against Chiles in the primary. Nelson had been in the House of Representatives for eleven years, and although he had not gained much state or national attention for his legislative service, he was well known for having flown aboard the Columbia space shuttle in January 1986. Nelson was a relatively young, attractive candidate, but he gave many voters the impression that he was little more than a pretty face who was more interested in gaining and holding office than in serving the people well. Nelson attempted to make an issue of Chiles’s age and health, contending that the governorship required a person with great energy. But Nelson’s strategy angered Democrats and backfired in a state where a large retirement population was personally offended by his efforts to impugn Chiles’s age, his health, and, therefore, his ability to serve.2 As he had in his senatorial campaigns, Chiles appealed to middleand working-class voters by pledging to make government more responsive to the citizens of the state. Much of Chiles’s thinking about Holding Back the Republican Tide, but for How Long? · 149 government had been shaped by his years in Florida politics and in the U.S. Senate and by his involvement in the Democratic Leadership Conference (DLC), a group of mainstream Democrats that included Bill Clinton. The DLC sought a new vision for the party in the mid1980s , aimed particularly at recapturing middle-class voters by offering moderate social and economic programs and fiscally responsible leadership that would provide a constructive alternative to the rights, responsibilities, and values agenda of the Reagan administration.3 At heart, Chiles was essentially a populist who embraced the values of the common folk, whether they were seniors, immigrants, workers, or Crackers. But Chiles had also been persuaded by David Osborne’s book Reinventing Government that governors could accomplish more with less by stressing outcomes and accountability and by privatizing some government programs. Chiles’s pledge to make government responsive to the people and his limit on campaign contributions gained a broad following among middle- and working-class voters following the service-tax imbroglio and reports of widespread insider influence by lobbyists in the state capital. Chiles had no difficulty in...