Whatever the real reason, it’s easy to forget that Janet Reno is in fact a seasoned veteran of Sunshine State politics who was appointed Florida state attorney for Miami-Dade County in 1978 and then won five consecutive elections for that office before Bill Clinton tapped her to become the nation’s first female attorney general in the early months of his administration.
By all accounts, Reno will need all that accumulated savvy-and more than a little luck-to bring a Democrat back to the governor’s mansion by the end of next year. After months of weighing the pros and cons of seeking her party’s nomination, she entered an already crowded field of candidates this week, immediately acquiring front-runner status in the primary election scheduled for next September. That will be the easy part, judging from a Mason-Dixon poll conducted in July that gave Reno 47 percent of the vote among registered Democrats (her closest rival followed with a paltry 12 percent).
But that same survey showed the Miami native trailing Jeb Bush by 15 percentage points-and with only 7 percent of those sampled describing themselves as undecided, it’s hard to see where Reno can find the additional voters she’ll need to close the gap. “I don’t see Reno as the candidate to beat Bush,” says Jim Kane, executive editor of the monthly newsletter Florida Voter, who has been running polls in the state for more than 25 years. “People either like her or they dislike her, and unless [Bush] makes a major gaffe, the polling numbers are going to reflect very few shifts. When you have a candidate [like Reno], who has 100 percent name recognition and is still down by 14 percent, that’s a big red flag.”
Still, those warning lights have failed to scare off many of the party faithful in Florida. Reno barnstormed the state in her Ford Ranger pickup truck this summer and received tumultuous receptions from fellow Democrats aching to avenge Al Gore’s razor-thin loss to George W. Bush in the contested presidential voting last fall. Armed with a green light from her doctors to hit the hustings, she apparently has put to rest any reservations about the Parkinson’s disease that has afflicted her for the past six years. During the marathon series of news media interviews she granted earlier this week, her hands trembled for only brief periods.
A Jeb versus Janet showdown figures to steal the spotlight in the 2002 midterm elections, and she credits the exuberant grass-roots response with helping clinch her decision to challenge the First Brother. “I was amazed and overwhelmed by the support and excitement that the mention of the candidacy appeared to create,” Reno told NEWSWEEK. “But I wanted to listen and make sure I was hearing from a variety of people, because I realize that there are people that don’t like what I have done. The excitement and the enthusiasm seem to continue unabated, and I decided I can’t sit on the sidelines.”
Nowhere will that enthusiasm translate into a larger percentage of votes than in the state’s African-American population. The Mason-Dixon opinion survey showed Reno outpolling Jeb Bush by a factor of 14 to 1 among blacks, and the governor’s assault on the state government’s affirmative-action policies has entrenched animosity against a politician who, in his first unsuccessful run for the office in 1994, said he would do “probably nothing” to improve the living standards of African-Americans.
But blacks traditionally account for only about 12 percent of ballots in a statewide election, and Reno will have to woo Hispanic and white supporters of Bush if she is to stand any chance of beating the incumbent. As attorney general, she outraged Miami’s Cuban-American community as the point person in the Clinton administration’s successful effort to send raft boy Elian Gonzalez back to his father in Cuba last year. The Mason-Dixon survey gave Reno about a quarter of the Latino vote, but she believes she can improve on that showing between now and November of next year. “I’ll lose some [Cuban-Americans] who will vote against me just because of Elian,” she acknowledges, “but I’m beginning to see people who come up to me and say, ‘Look, I agree with you about Elian, and now I feel I can speak out about it, and you have my vote’.”
Her biggest obstacle may lie among white men. Al Gore came within a few hundred votes of beating Jeb’s brother in Florida in part because he received the support of about 40 per cent of Florida’s white males. But Reno will be hard pressed to even approach that figure in a race that shows Bush leading her by 24 percentage points among men at this stage. Pollster Jim Kane attributes her weak standing among white males to lingering outrage over the spate of pardons issued by Clinton to fugitive financiers and drug traffickers in the waning hours of his presidency. In the state’s conservative Panhandle region, Kane forecasts a disastrous outcome for Reno as the cabinet member who took the blame for the bungled 1993 assault on the Branch Davidian religious sect’s compound outside Waco, Texas. But for now at least, Reno says she would “welcome” Clinton’s active participation in her upcoming run for the governorship.
If she wins her party’s nomination, Reno has pledged to run a positive campaign against Jeb Bush that will focus on issues rather than personalities. She will likely cast herself as a candidate who will spend more money on public schools and defend the environment more staunchly than the governor. But experts caution that such a high-minded approach to the contest won’t pry large numbers of voters away from Jeb’s camp. “She’s got to go negative on him,” says Larry Harris of Mason-Dixon, a Washington-based polling firm. “Even if she’s able to recast herself as a moderate, responsible, thoughtful person, that still doesn’t necessarily diminish Jeb among his supporters. Reno’s got to make it ugly.” That would keep the media spotlight firmly trained on Florida once again when election season rolls around next year-even if the president’s kid brother doesn’t have to wait for five weeks to find out whether he won or not.
