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No point denying it: Barack Obama has a Jewish problem. Because of his sympathy for the Palestinians, his willingness to meet with enemies, perhaps even his Arabic middle name, he averaged ten or more percentage points worse among Jewish voters in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania than he did in those states overall. And then there's been the ongoing Reverend Wright saga, tossing gasoline on the whole situation. Still, come November, simple demographics suggest that his "Jewish problem" will be significantly less problematic in the general election.

Here's why: Jewish voters made up three percent of the national electorate in 2004, with their numbers concentrated in a handful of states where they constitute significant voting blocs. The states that have the highest Jewish populations, however, also tend to be reliably Democratic. Which means that even if McCain and the Republicans could somehow pry away most of the Jewish vote in New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and California (or if a lot of Jews were to decide to sit this election out), it's likely that those states would nevertheless deliver their electoral votes to an Obama ticket. And most swing states, such as Ohio and Missouri, have too few Jewish voters to make much of a difference either way. Which, naturally enough, brings it all back to Florida.

Nearly a half-century after the Cuban revolution, old age's in-exorable march on Fidel Castro in Havana and his most implacable foes 90 miles north in Little Havana is finally time-warping Miami politics into the new millennium--and perhaps giving Democrats a shot at three perennially Republican congressional seats.

Democrats--from local activists to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee--argue that a majority of South Florida's Cuban-American voters, long a die-hard GOP voting bloc, today are more interested in health care, the economy, and the war in Iraq than "The Bearded One" and his brother/successor, Raul.

"The Castro regime is coming to its biological conclusion. Succession among 70- and 80-year-olds is not the future," says Joe Garcia, former director of the Cuban American National Foundation and one of three Democratic challengers for the seats. "The same thing is happening in South Florida. You're entering a transformational moment."

Republican Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, who is seeking his fourth term in a district that stretches across the bottom of the state into Naples, laughs and calls such talk "wishful thinking by the radical Left," and then reads aloud a similar analysis from The Miami Herald. "You know when that was written? That was written November 10, 1985."

Regardless of whether the Democrats' dreams of flipping a trio of South Florida seats are mere wishful thinking, the three Cuban-Americans now holding them will for the first time since their arrivals in Washington face well-funded challenges. In 11 of their combined 21 general elections since 1989, the incumbents were unopposed by a Democratic challenger. This time, they all face Democrats who, if first-quarter filings are a good indicator, may be able to match them dollar for dollar.

With just two weeks of the legislative session left, it seems almost certain that public schools and public health programs will get whacked by billions of dollars.

In other words, everything is going according to plan.

Not the plan of most Floridians, who will be shocked when the new budget year starts this summer and they find that services that they, their elderly relatives or their neighbors rely upon will be reduced or gone.

No, this is the plan of the anti-government wing of the Republican Party, which has held considerable sway in Tallahassee over the past decade.

These folks fundamentally do not believe that government should be in the business of running schools or paying for medical care for the poor or elderly. Never mind that public education has been a bedrock value of this country for a century and a half, or that society as a whole appeared to agree in the 1960s that the richest country on the planet ought to care for its old and sick.

Such charity, in their view, should be entirely voluntary, and not subsidized by public dollars. True, in times when the economy is rolling along and tax revenues are bountiful, these arguments seem petty and mean-spirited. This is why you didn't really hear them in the Capitol during the late 1990s and through the first half of this decade.

Instead, the proponents of this ideology cleverly took after the other half of the equation through tax cuts — the "starve the beast" approach.

Scarcely a day goes by without Hillary Clinton exhorting fellow Democrats to count every vote—most particularly those cast in the disputed early primaries of Florida and Michigan, which she won. "I don't understand how you can disenfranchise voters in two states you have to try to win" in the general election, she said in Pennsylvania last week. "I don't think that is smart for the Democratic Party." Clinton, of course, has a strategic need to seat the Florida and Michigan delegates, who were denied entry to the nominating convention late last year by the Democratic National Committee after the two states scheduled their primaries earlier than the DNC wished. She needs these delegates to help close her gap with the front-runner, Barack Obama.

It was a different story in October. Back then, Clinton was far and away the national front-runner—by some 20 points in a number of polls. With much less at stake in the matter, she told a New Hampshire public-radio audience, "It's clear, this election [Michigan is] having is not going to count for anything." Clinton was unwilling to take her name off the Michigan primary ballot, as Obama and her other significant rivals did, but like them she agreed not to campaign in Michigan or in Florida before their primaries.

On Aug. 25, when the DNC's rules panel declared Florida's primary date out of order, it agreed by a near-unanimous majority to exceed the 50 percent penalty called for under party rules. Instead, the group stripped Florida of all 210 delegates to underscore its displeasure with Florida's defiance and to discourage other states from following suit. In doing so, the DNC essentially committed itself, for fairness' sake, to strip the similarly defiant Michigan of all 156 of its delegates three months later. Clinton held tremendous potential leverage over this decision, and not only because she was then widely judged the likely nominee. Of the committee's 30 members, a near-majority of 12 were Clinton supporters. All of them—most notably strategist Harold Ickes—voted for Florida's full disenfranchisement. (The only dissenting vote was cast by a Tallahassee, Fla., city commissioner who supported Obama.)

TALLAHASSEE, Fla.— With the Sunshine State now in the hands of a popular Republican governor and an overwhelmingly Republican Legislature, and with Democrats squabbling over whether to seat the state’s delegation at their national convention, John McCain can stop worrying about Florida’s 27 electoral votes, right?

Actually, maybe not.

In a state that has voted Republican in 11 of the past 14 presidential elections, beginning with the first Eisenhower-Stevenson match in 1952, all is not as red as it appears.

Tallahassee--Will there be a do-over Democratic nominating contest in Florida? There are plenty of good reasons why there won't. Here are the four best:

1) Money. Florida legislators are currently in their annual legislative session, looking under sofa cushions and in car ashtrays for ways to plug a $500 million hole in the current budget, and a $2 billion gap in the budget that starts this summer. They're at the point where they're actually discussing line items in the thousands of dollars. What are the chances they will suddenly decide that a second election, for 40 percent of the state's registered voters, is worth $20 million of taxpayer money?

Neither the Florida Democratic Party nor the Democratic National Committee wants to spend $20 million, either. "We can't afford to do that. That's not our problem," DNC chair Howard Dean said on Thursday. (At this moment, neither the DNC nor the state party has that much to spend anyway--and whatever money they do have they want to use on pounding the other team.) There's one final option, though: Barack Obama's and Hillary Clinton's campaigns pitch in $10 million apiece to stage a second election. What are the chances of that? Slim.

2) Partisan politics. Governor Charlie Crist is a Republican, and his party has near two-to-one margins in both legislative chambers. Florida's January 29 primary did exactly what Florida Republicans hoped it would do: put them at the center of the political universe for a week and give Crist a national lift. The current prolonged tussle between the state and national Democratic parties and the two campaigns clearly doesn't hurt Republican chances come November.

If it's nearly springtime in Tallahassee, it must mean that opponents of the class-size amendment are sharpening their spears to take another run at it.

And, sure enough, Rep. David Simmons, R-Maitland, and other longtime class-size foes want to give the popular, voter-approved limits some "flexibility" to deal with the dreaded "19th student" that threatens to wreak havoc for children and teachers everywhere.

Because the 2002 amendment sets caps of 18, 22 and 25 children per class, depending on the grade level, the thinking goes, schools will have to break up classes and assign some students to a new teacher mid-year should a 19th, 23rd or 25th student move in.

Gee, might not there be a simpler solution? Like, for instance, starting each school year with 17 children in a third-grade classroom or 21 in each sixth-grade room? That way, the addition of a child later in the year would not bust the caps? Indeed, this probably wouldn't even be necessary for every classroom — just one or two in each grade would likely suffice, except for those (few) remaining high-growth districts.

Of course, this solution, while simpler, would be somewhat more expensive. Which is why Simmons and his allies have never been interested in it.

That attitude was pushed hard by former Gov. Jeb Bush, who could not stand the idea of a constitutional amendment (pushed by sit-in foe Kendrick Meek, no less) that would force him to spend more money on schools. He claimed the amendment would require a massive tax increase, and "block out the sun." He wanted state economists to cook up a $50 billion estimate to scare voters into opposing it.

Florida leaders trying to woo world-class research institutions in the same league as Scripps and Max Planck to the state should hope their scientists have better things to do tomorrow morning than watch the Florida Board of Education discuss putting the word “evolution” into the state standards.

Because God forbid that the board bows to religious pressure and continues to hide from the public school curriculum the fundamental concept of modern biology. What are the chances these researchers will want to subject their own children to public schools too afraid to teach science?

Of course, the actual concepts of Darwin’s theory as it has been modified in the subsequent century and a half have been part of the Sunshine State Standards since 1996. The major change under consideration now is to use the word.

A brief discussion from Jeb: America's Next Bush on the former governor’s unwillingness to anger Christian conservatives on the matter – which remains of interest as those board members on record as opposing the new standard were both appointed by Bush:

Even in cases where specific personalities were not involved, Jeb’s coziness with fundamentalist Christians made for suspect educational policy for everybody else. A perfect example was in the autumn of 2005, with the backdrop of the “intelligent design” trial going on in Pennsylvania and a review of the state’s Sunshine State Standards for science looming in the coming year.

Some important background: Jeb’s own professed faith, Roman Catholicism, has made its peace with science. Sure, the Vatican burned the monk Giordano Bruno alive for declaring that the sun was the center of the solar system and put Galileo under house arrest for the last four decades of his life for the same offense. But the church has gotten over that, and has come around to the view that faith and science are complementary, not in conflict. Mainstream Catholic schools in Florida teach the theory of evolution in their biology classes.

True, the implications of the Democratic primary remain unclear, but there can be no doubt that Florida Republicans shaped the course for their party's nomination — something their counterparts two states to the north had been doing since 1980.

The impact of our primary may not last. Congress could step in and create a rational system of rotating primaries. And the parties may further rein in what became a free-for-all this year and redistribute some of Florida's newfound influence.

Romney, chatting with Republican state senators during a swing through Tallahassee, was blaming Bill Clinton for a weakened U.S. military and had promised to correct it with more troops.

As it had been six years since George W. Bush had replaced Clinton, and as Bush had enjoyed a GOP-dominated Congress for most of that time, Romney's assessment raised the obvious question: How could this be Clinton's fault?

To which Romney turned to his traveling press aide, saying he wasn't sure if he could answer that question, but that he'd try, "If he says I can."

Here is an obviously bright man, the product of Harvard business and law schools who has made a good deal of money in a cut-throat business, and yet he needed to check with his press secretary to discuss his own remarks from a few minutes earlier?

And then he can give Florida Governor Charlie Crist a lifetime, unlimited mileage pass on the Straight Talk Express, or maybe even a copy of that prized donor list that he had to use as collateral last year to keep his campaign afloat.

It's strange how quickly Crist's last minute endorsement has faded into history. Perhaps it was the exit polling--only 42 percent of Republicans said that Crist's endorsement had been important to them, and only 54 percent of those had wound up voting for McCain--that gave rise to the conventional wisdom that, Sure, Crist helped John McCain win Florida. Somewhat. To an extent. Didn't hurt.

The problem with that analysis, though, is that it's entirely incorrect.

If John McCain accepts the Republican nomination, it will be the direct result of the Florida governor's endorsement. Without Crist, McCain not only would have lost Florida, he would have lost it by double digits--and Mitt Romney would be counting down the delegates to 1,191.

Time and again, he manages to astonish by pulling off political victories that the smart money would have deemed impossible, if it hadn't been so busy laughing at him. Tuesday evening's results are only the latest example.

In just a few hours, Crist went from the popular-but-sniped-at-from-his-right-flank governor, to one of the most important Republicans in the country. He went from someone who needed to worry about a primary challenger in 2010 to a likely short-lister for the vice presidential nomination.

As the results start streaming in from Florida tonight, America will finally get a better handle on the state's major intra-Republican battle. Not John McCain versus Mitt Romney--that's a short-term engagement. The real heat is between former Governor Jeb Bush and current Governor Charlie Crist, two men who are vying for position in elections still to come.

Obvious to anyone down here is that both of these guys would love a shot at the White House. Upon leaving office, Bush immediately began the cross-country speaking tours that typically foreshadow a presidential bid. And Crist, though he's been governor for barely a year, is known to harbor larger ambitions--and he understands that in order for him to succeed, Bush must fail. Why? Because the nation is unlikely to pick two Republicans from Florida in the next three or four elections, particularly as it has elected exactly zero in the 163 years since statehood (unless you count Andrew Jackson, the first territorial governor). That calculation would certainly explain Crist's cautious interplay with the presidential candidates over the last few months--much of it behind-the-scenes, right up until his bombshell endorsement of McCain on Saturday night.

We'll know later tonight whether Charlie Crist found such a stone Saturday evening, when he put his name and popularity behind John McCain's outgunned effort to win the Florida Republican primary.

Because if McCain can manage to eke out a win tonight after seeming to have lost the momentum to better-organized and better-financed Mitt Romney, it will rightfully be attributed to the final weekend stump appearances, robo-calls and TV news footage flowing from Crist's surprise announcement. And if a Florida win puts McCain on track for the nomination, Crist could wind up the single most influential reason why.

If Mitt Romney fails to win Florida next week, at least he won’t have to waste too much time puzzling over what went wrong.

He’ll likely be able to blame the same flawed strategy that cost him in every one of the three states so far where he devoted months of his life and millions of his own dollars: a failure to sell himself to the bloc of evangelical Christians that he chose early on to make his “base.”

If any of this sounds familiar, it should. This is the same strategy Tom Gallagher tried in the Republican governor’s primary 18 months ago. Romney even has much of the same financial backing and political support that helped Gallagher to a two-to-one drubbing in 2006 at the hands of Charlie Crist.

"This is the political equivalent of whack-a-mole," joked Republican pollster Neil Newhouse. "We're waiting for a candidate to win two consecutive races."

A recent internal poll by the group Crist is using to push the plan showed 60.3 percent approval – on the knife’s edge, with 60 percent needed for passage. So don’t be fooled by the soft-sell sales pitch – “If you want to cut your taxes, vote yes; if you don’t, vote no.” This is a big deal for him, for a number of reasons.

Crist’s phone has been ringing off its holster of late from Republican presidential candidates hoping for his endorsement – John McCain called the day after his big win in New Hampshire – which is a likely precursor to calls later this spring to gauge his interest as a running mate.

The last thing he needs is a black eye on one of his signature issues. The single biggest thing – perhaps the only really big thing -- Crist can offer the GOP nominee is a guarantee of Florida and its precious 27 electoral votes. If he can’t pass a tax cut he personally campaigned on when he ran for governor, why should anyone think he can seal the deal in a battle where the other side will be fighting a lot harder than they are on this one?

How else to make sense of last week’s decision to pull advertising from Florida television stations? True, by normal human standards, a statewide TV buy is an expensive thing: $1 million to $1.3 million. But by Mitt Romney personal wealth standards, it’s really no big deal – more like an unexpected muffler repair for the typical working stiff.

So something else is clearly up, and what’s up is this: His claim that winning two “silvers” in Iowa and New Hampshire is perfectly okay simply does not hold water. The big-deal money guys (who frankly don’t care that much about his or any of the candidates’ politics; these people are investors and want a piece of the winner) are getting nervous and are exploring other options.

Romney spent the better part of $100 million (perhaps a quarter of it his own money) to win Iowa and New Hampshire and then roll onward from there. That didn’t happen, and now Romney’s got his back against the wall. As one top Florida Republican said privately: “If he doesn’t win Michigan, he’s in trouble.”

What? Doesn’t everyone remember Pete Wilson?

Well, that’s kind of the point. He’s the former Republican governor of California with a bright future who pretty much vanished off the national stage after his re-election in the mid-1990s on a platform bashing illegal immigrants. If the plan was to hand over the state to the Democrats for the subsequent two or three generations, then it’s proceeding brilliantly. Otherwise, Wilson’s alienation of Hispanics in California should have served as a teachable moment for Republicans nationally.

And, in fairness, it did, to some Republicans – notably, the Bush brothers, who held fairly enlightened views on immigration (in the case of Jeb, he’s actually married to a native of Mexico) in their respective states. Yet the party as a whole never really bought into their perspective, and with the Bush brand’s diminished role in party leadership, the new brain trust has inexplicably elevated this to the number one hot-button issue of the campaign.

Even those who once held reasonable positions on the matter – John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee – have come around to the notion that illegal immigration is one of the biggest threats, if not the biggest, facing this country.

Step back for a moment to consider the out-and-out hypocrisy of a nation built entirely by immigrants to demand sending the newest ones back. Native Americans must get a kick out of that one – excellent idea, but let’s do it right, and kick out everyone whose ancestors weren’t here at the time of the last ice age.

January 10, 2008

Hillary's second firewall

(Originally published in The Palm Beach Post)

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January 4, 2008

McCain making a play for Florida

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Agents of intolerance to Romney: Go away

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December 27, 2007

Florida Republicans' new day

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December 24, 2007

Who is blacker: Barack Obama, or Bill Clinton?

(Originally published in The Palm Beach Post)

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December 20, 2007

Gambling enabling Jeb

Steve Webster writes: "I've read your Post reports regularly and written about a few of them, was delighted to learn about your blog through FlaPolitics.com, and loved the blog. Way to go.

Wish you could post more often, and I also wish you could look more often at housing issues, but all of your reports are valuable, you're a big asset in Fla.

I read a couple 'first chapters,' tomorrow I'm off to Barnes & Noble to try one."

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December 18, 2007

Jeb watch: Following Lehman Brothers' Florida money

Larry Thorson writes: "Are we at least asking for the paper trail?"

We have asked for the paper trail, or in the case of e-mails, an electron trail.... But as someone who has made dozens of such requests over the past nine years, I can say with confidence that the likelihood of coming across any sort of smoking gun is pretty slim. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if an honest search finds nothing at all. Like I said, I cannot imagine that Jeb has provided much advice -- or that Lehman actually expected him to.

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December 17, 2007

Jeb watch: Voucher push not dead yet

(Originally published in The Palm Beach Post)

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December 15, 2007

Romney unplugged

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December 12, 2007

If Hillary Clinton becomes the first woman president, she'll accomplish another "first" that supporters are less eager to acknowledge: She'll be the first candidate to win with the support of many who are really more interested in the candidate's spouse.

"The underlying reason is a yearning for a Bill Clinton third term," one South Florida Democratic official who supports Clinton said privately. "The feeling is that he is a power behind the throne."

Charles Morgan, a Destin restaurateur who in August hosted a fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton that was attended by the former president, said he agreed with that assessment.

"I don't think it ever struck what a powerful addition he is to her campaign until he was here," said Morgan, a prominent Panhandle Democrat who says he also plans to host a fund-raiser for former Sen. John Edwards. "From a standpoint of fund-raising, from a standpoint of campaigning, from a standpoint of getting him back in the White House."

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Now that the Tampa Bay Rays have joined the line of pro sports teams hoping for a second $2 million a year from the state, look for its defenders to again call the program a "sales tax rebate."

Of course, it's not. That word appears nowhere in the law, which instead uses the drier term "distribution."

So why call it a rebate, rather than the more accurate payment, subsidy, or -- admittedly more perjorative -- handout?

Because "rebate" has a specific meaning in the minds of most Floridians. It's when you buy, say, a television at Best Buy, and then, after you send in the receipt, the manufacturer sends you a check for $50 or $100 or $1,000.

When the typical voter hears rebate applied to sports teams, the logical inference is that the amount "rebated" is based upon or limited by the amount of sales tax collected at the new park.

And that is precisely NOT how it works. Read the law. After a team has been qualified by the governor's office as meeting the projected requirements, the Department of Revenue starts sending the stadium owners a monthly check for $166,667 for 30 years -- no further questions asked.

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Should Florida lease its lottery to a private company, then turn around and use the proceeds to buy an annuity to replace the regular payments the lottery currently provides?

Major New York investment house Lehman Brothers thinks it should and is trying to sell the proposal to Gov. Charlie Crist's office as a way to help the state get out of its budget bind.

Leasing the lottery "would provide additional budgetary flexibility and support education programs that benefit schoolchildren (reducing class sizes, funding preschool expansion, enhancing the Bright Futures Scholarship), reducing the debt burden on future generations," Lehman Brothers Vice President Bradley Tusk wrote in a memo to Crist's staff in June.

Critics, though, call it a boondoggle that would transfer billions of dollars back and forth for no apparent reason other than to generate millions of dollars in fees for the underwriters involved and as much as $1.8 billion a year in profit for the private vendor.

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Gov. Charlie Crist burns ethanol in his official car and uses the sun's rays to heat his swimming pool, all part of his efforts to make Florida a leader in combating climate change.

"We are providing the moral leadership needed to preserve our state's beautiful natural environment. State government is leading by example," Crist said at his recent climate change summit.

Yet there is one area where Crist has declined to take the lead in stopping global warming: having to be literally warm himself.

The governor likes the Governor's Mansion cool -- "like a meat locker" is how he enthusiastically puts it -- despite the high energy and associated carbon dioxide emissions costs.

How high a cost?

A Florida Solar Energy Center study from 1996 found that, for every degree a thermostat is set below 81, electricity use increases slightly more than 13 percent. That means that setting the air conditioning at 72, the temperature Crist prefers, uses 110 percent more electricity than setting it at 78, which is where many energy conservation experts recommend.

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As Gov. Charlie Crist begins his business in Israel on Tuesday, the publicized reason for the trip is simple: Drum up more business between the nation and Florida.

Business like biotech, on which Crist and others on Enterprise Florida's "trade mission" are set to receive a briefing Tuesday. Or aerospace, for which the three dozen members of the delegation will visit Israel Aerospace Industries on Thursday.

"Eyeball-to-eyeball is healthy. Face-to-face is good," Crist said, explaining the need for his personal presence. "To make sure the world knows Florida is open for business."

But there's also the unpublicized reason.

"This is an important trip for Charlie," said U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Boca Raton, and a longtime friend of Crist's. "It gives him more gravitas."

Gravitas for what?

Wexler, like Crist and his advisers and supporters, does not like to elaborate on that part -- "Gravitas is good no matter what you do in life," Wexler joked, adding: "He's 110 percent committed to being the governor of Florida."

But when pressed, Wexler acknowledged what many others agree to privately: that a trip to the troubled Middle East helps build a foreign policy portfolio for someone with an eye on higher office.

"Republicans are viewing Gov. Crist as an incredibly attractive national candidate. And I think their judgment is correct," Wexler said.

Thanks to a provision of the elections bill that Crist signed into law last week with Wexler at his side, Crist could accept the Republican nomination for vice president next year without having to give up his governorship, which he would have had to do under the old law.

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January 21, 2007

Jeb's next move: Once again, a Republican governor upsets the plan for the smarter Bush

(Originally published in The Palm Beach Post)

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What would Jeb do?

(Originally published in the Washington Post)