Woman on the Verge of Certifying

By Tim Padgett/Miami

Six years ago, Katherine Harris was an obscure Sarasota, Fla., socialite, a Harvard-educated heiress juggling a real estate job, arts charities and a short-lived nightclub gig doing the chicken dance and exhorting the audience to join in. She was also, say friends, bored silly.

How the world has changed.

Depending on who was speaking last week, Florida's secretary of state is either a hero or a villain of the Sunshine State's postelection madness--ready to bring an end to our long national nightmare or to abrogate the God-given rights of the American voter. Florida's senate minority leader, Buddy Dyer, a Democrat, says she "had an extraordinary chance to go down in history in a more honorable way and didn't take it." Not surprisingly, the other side disagrees. "She has had no choice but to follow the law," says former state Republican Party chairman Van Poole. "History will prove her a strong leader." Either way, Harris' career is a perfect illustration of the unruly politics of the state she has flamboyantly represented across the country and overseas for Governor Jeb Bush.

Harris not only inherited close to $7 million from her late grandfather, a citrus and cattle baron. She also received a legacy of fierce ambition. She unleashed it in 1994 by winning a state senate seat. Veteran pols like Poole, who helped her in that campaign, were dazzled by her "unbelievable drive." In the 1998 race that saw her elected to her current post, she engaged in some of the most steely-eyed mudslinging seen in the state in many years--and in the primaries the mud was flung against a G.O.P. friend and mentor. But that hard-won post proved too pedestrian for Harris. The job entails overseeing corporate filings, concealed-weapon permits and the state's election procedures. And so in her thousand-dollar power suits, Harris turned the office into a glamorous, globe-trotting Florida p.r. firm that lured business and ballet to the peninsula state.

What spurred Harris' political career has provided it with a dramatic, perhaps historic turning point--to either her benefit or her detriment. She bounded onto George W. Bush's campaign as his hard-charging Florida co-chair. Watchdog groups objected when she used the secretary of state's office--and taxpayer money--to produce get-out-the-vote TV ads starring Bush boosters like General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. Thus last week, when Harris unloaded decision after decision that appeared to be in lockstep with Bush strategy, cries of partisanship sprang up immediately. Harris, 43, insisted that her rulings were "independent," but many Floridians say otherwise.

Harris is in the spotlight largely because Florida's demographic chaos has turned its politics into a hypercentrist snarl of compassionate Republicans and conservative Democrats, of a G.O.P. Governor who broods like Hamlet over every issue and a Democratic attorney general, Bob Butterworth, Gore's Florida campaign chairman, who once made a joke about the problem of convicts' catching fire in Florida's electric chair. That mix ought to make Florida a more cooperative place during radioactive disputes like the recount. But in reality, says University of Florida political analyst Richard Scher, it has made the state a dysfunctional place in crises--a warning to the rest of the nation, he adds, about the pitfalls of centrism. "When the parties are as intellectually bankrupt as they are in this state today," says Scher, "it leaves the politicians with little to do but mud wrestle at times like this, not for the sake of their party causes but for the sake of blind, individual ambition." America, you've tuned in to Tallahassee!, a TV soap opera about rich political white people behaving badly.

Detractors say that Harris, despite her Harvard master's degree in public administration, has the rep of a country-club lightweight whose only exercise of "discretion" until now has been "pearls or diamonds?" "She was completely unprepared for both this job and this crisis," says Scher. Even some of her friends agree. Says one in the state capital: "She is in so far over her head that it's hard not to think that every move she makes is orchestrated by the Bushes and the Republicans."

Both G.O.P. and Democratic state legislators say that Harris, as secretary of state, has shown little interest in electoral-reform bills--despite taking office after one of the state's worst cases of voter fraud, one that saw a Miami mayoral race overturned in court. Her post requires especially detailed contact with local apparatchiks. But county election supervisors, the people who could have saved Florida from a week of embarrassment, grouse that she rarely attends their state meetings.

Instead, she has focused on lavish business trips to New York, Brazil and Australia to drum up commerce and culture. She is proud of bringing international culture like Mexico's Ballet Folklorico to Florida. "You can't believe how hard I work," she told the St. Petersburg Times last month. But a high-ranking state Democratic official, who was on the phone with Harris when the Florida recount was ordered on election night, says he was angry about her apparent foot dragging "until we realized that it was because she really didn't know what to do at that point."

Ex-G.O.P. chairman Poole, now a lobbyist in Tallahassee, regards that as tiresome demonization. Harris "has modernized the elections office," he insists. "And what she's done to bring in economic development outside of tourism shows how strong and independent she is." Even a Democrat like political consultant Ron Sachs, a former aide to the late Governor Lawton Chiles, says Harris has proved "a masterful hardball politician under extraordinary pressure. She's made sure that every move she makes says, 'I'll be damned if I'm the one who's going to get blamed for costing [George W.] Bush the election. Let the courts do it.' Her stock will rise after this."

Perhaps. But Harris' performance left Floridians asking another question: What happens to the stock of her boss, Jeb Bush? Whether Dubya wins or loses this week, most pundits agree, the recount debacle has dug Jeb a genuine Florida sinkhole. After running, and losing, as a Republican ideologue in 1994, he won in 1998 by campaigning as a more compassionate conservative. In 1997, for example, he attended an A.C.L.U. dinner where, after looking at a painting that exhibited some rather large male genitalia, he loosened up and joked, "So that's what liberals look like." But once in office, with strong popularity and a G.O.P.-controlled legislature, he backslid into his imperious habits--squandering a chance to build bridges with the black community last spring when he peremptorily rammed through an affirmative-action-reform program. It won applause from many liberals for reforming affirmative action without ending it, but black leaders were furious that they had not been consulted.

The resulting marches on Tallahassee stunned him, and he seemed to spend the summer months in an existential funk. "Most of us have two or three principles we stand behind, no matter what," says a state Republican leader. "Jeb has about 50, and that makes it very hard for him to brook dissent." Moreover, he was having to hit the presidential stump for Dubya after many had once said Jeb was the brother bound for the White House. Pols who know him say the situation made it hard for him to find his campaign stride in Florida. On a flight between Miami and Orlando, he told reporters, "You know, George doesn't have to win Florida to win the election." Then came Nov. 7, when black leaders repaid Jeb by producing one of Florida's most massive black turnouts, which helped make the election a cliffhanger. Jeb went into semi-seclusion, emerging last Tuesday to say it felt like "the seventh day of being held hostage."

He also lamented the world's "misimpression about our state." But if Florida's centrists will learn anything from their recount farce, says Scher, it's that they need to get a firmer hold on their capricious political bases "and let go of their personal agendas a little" or America's new bellwether state will become ungovernable. He points to state agriculture commissioner Bob Crawford, the Democrat who was tapped to replace Jeb on the state election canvassing board during the recount and who strongly backed W.'s campaign. Critics called it an opportunistic endorsement--one that has made Crawford even more unpopular with South Florida's largely Democratic residents. This year he has been chopping down their beloved backyard citrus trees to stop a citrus canker, a plague that may have been worsened by his department's mismanagement.

But doesn't Harris have to worry about re-election? No. As part of a 1998 change in Florida's constitution, the secretary of state's job will be eliminated in 2002. That, say Florida Dems, may be why she's working so hard for the Bushes right now--hoping they'll give her the European ambassadorship that she tells friends she longs for. Her friends say the omens look good. Among some 200 well-wishers' floral arrangements crowding her office last week were quite a few yellow roses of Texas.

--With reporting by Mitch Frank/Miami and Brad Liston/Orlando

With reporting by Mitch Frank/Miami and Brad Liston/Orlando