With a wave of killer hurricanes back home and big money walking the aisles of the Republican National Convention, the question for the Florida delegation sounds like a board game: Where’s Jeb?
“He’s taking care of Charley,” said Tom Gallagher, chief financial officer of the Sunshine State and one of 112 Florida delegates who have front-section seats.
Charley is the hurricane that hammered the state’s Gulf Coast last month, killing at least 13 people. Frances, already a Category 4 storm packing 140 m.p.h. winds, is drawing a bead on the Atlantic coast this weekend.
Bush, the president’s younger brother, insists he is needed more in Florida than at the convention.
“I will not be going to New York City, but in no way should that be seen as a lack of fortitude to work for the president’s re-election,” Jeb Bush said Monday. “Now we have Frances approaching our shores, so I will be doing double duty.”
He’s missing some of the best seats in the house at Madison Square Garden..
“It doesn’t get much better,” said Rich Crotty, Orlando’s county chairman, who also may forfeit his seat if Frances makes landfall this week. “There’s a 50-50 chance I’ll have to be out of here by Thursday.”
It’s not as if the Bush family lacks stand-ins.
The state party says it is “a good possibility” that the president’s father, former President George H.W. Bush, will regale the delegation at its Midtown hotel breakfast Wednesday. So will George Prescott Bush, the first-born son of Jeb Bush and the fourth generation of the family involved in politics, running back to the late Prescott Bush, a U.S. senator from Connecticut.
This is one pampered delegation, and it’s easy to see why. The red-jacketed Republican women’s club members, pinstriped moneymen and just plain folk who make up the Florida crew come from the biggest battleground, a state holding one-tenth of the 270 electoral votes needed to name the next president.
Florida handed President Bush the White House in 2000 after a 36-day court battle with Democrat Al Gore over a disputed 537-vote margin that had to be settled by the U.S. Supreme Court. And observers predict this coming election could be as close.
That’s why the president already has toured Florida 26 times and will return shortly after Labor Day.
Shaking off doubts
Republicans doubting Bush’s ability to carry Florida again are in short supply at the convention. Yet one, Ahmed Kabani, a Pakistani-born American Muslim and chairman of Asians for Bush who runs a Miami travel agency, acknowledges Bush is finding little support among his friends.
“No, not much, to be honest with you,” Kabani said. “There are a lot of misperceptions. There’s a misperception that he went to Iraq because of oil.”
Still, the businessman is bullish about Bush’s chances. Business is picking up for cruises that Kabani books out of Miami.
Other delegates, such as Bill Bunting, say Bush has his hand on the pulse of Florida’s conservative voters. Bunting stowed his own pistol for this convention.
A trim-bearded fellow who retired from a New York city job and settled in Bayonet Point, Fla., Bunting tours gun shows recruiting Bush voters.
“I travel the state for the 2nd Amendment,” said Bunting, one of 335,414 people licensed to carry concealed weapons in Florida, a state of 17 million.
Both he and his wife pack heat–she has a .38 special.
His weapon of choice?
“It depends on my day. I carry a number of guns,” he said, with his favorite being a 9 mm SigSauer 226. He came unarmed, however, to the convention floor. Police will not allow even umbrellas into the arena. .
Nor has he sallied armed into crowded streets around the delegation’s lodging, the Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan. “I’ve got enough common sense,” he said.
One delegate already crossed paths with a pickpocket who snatched the wallet from her purse inside the hotel.The place remains a choice hotel because it is a short ride from the convention hall. Delegates board green Peter Pan buses after a helping of political humor from Florida Lt. Gov. Toni Jennings, playing the role of chief Bush cheerleader and John Kerry taunter in Jeb Bush’s absence.
“There’s a strange bottle on your table,” Jennings told the breakfast crowd in a chandeliered Hilton ballroom where delegates assemble each day.
“It says Heinz ketchup,” she explained of the miniature bottles at each table. “We believe in the free-enterprise system, and we think it’s important that those Heinz-Kerry people go back to making ketchup.”
Mixture of pros, rookies
The delegation is dominated by seasoned activists such as Jennings, meticulously dressed and coiffed, manager of an Orlando construction company her father established. She ran the Florida Senate for two terms and hopes to run for governor when Jeb Bush steps down, as he must, in 2006.
But newcomers have arrived too. At 21, Sheri Valero is the youngest delegate. A University of Florida senior majoring in Spanish and politics, she is quick to note, “We got hit by the hurricane.”
Her family had just moved to Port Charlotte in July. They fled Hurricane Charley and its 145 m.p.h. winds, but the house where they were staying was ruined in the Aug. 13 storm.
Valero is volunteer chairwoman of Florida College Republicans.
“What got me motivated? I became involved in politics as a freshman,” she said. “It became a passion.”
What’s in store after college?
“I would like, perhaps, to get a job in the White House.”
She wouldn’t be the first here to parlay political activism into a political plum. Jorge Arrizurieta, a young executive from South Florida, raised top dollar for Bush in 2000. He was a “Pioneer,” those who raised $100,000 for Bush. He became U.S. director of the Inter-American Development Bank and has returned to Florida to run a trade office.
In government now, he has backed out of fundraising.
But there are plenty of other Pioneers and “Rangers”–those who raised $200,000 apiece for Bush–around this delegation. Mike Hightower, an insurance executive from Jacksonville, is a Ranger. He credits Jacksonville for raising $4 million in the president’s campaign.
He laughs about his seating.
“I can see when they don’t have their makeup on,” he said of speakers at a podium situated low and intimately.
Not all are high rollers. Bonnie Re and Sharon Greenhouse, delegates from Boca Raton, wear large jeweled “W” pins on their blouses.
“Oh, probably just rhinestone,” Greenhouse said. “Oh no, no, no, we’re not rich.”
How do delegates view the election at hand?
“Everything else is superfluous,” said Nancy Patterson of Orlando. “The bottom-line is: Who do you want to defend and protect you when the U.S. is attacked by terrorists.”
Most expect another close call in a state accustomed to storms.
“It’s gonna be rough, in the sense of hand-to-hand combat,” said J. Allison DeFoor, an attorney and environmentalist who once ran for lieutenant governor. “But in the end, I think Bush wins Florida, and by a lot more than 500 votes. At the end of the day, it’s the national security issue.”
