State: Two Florida politicos, two different kinds of tread wear

The mode of transportation differed, but both Democrats hoped a leisurely tour of Florida would help them reach the same destination: victory in November. Reno's pickup truck is an updated version of Chiles' walking shoes: no-frills transportation as populist symbol and media magnet.

Both Democrats attracted small crowds and both were fuzzy on specifics, but an image was planted in the public mind of a candidate listening to the people.

It worked for Chiles in 1970. Will it work for Reno in 2002?

Nobody had heard of Chiles when he started walking. Everyone knows Janet Reno.

Chiles was a 40-year-old longshot candidate for the U.S. Senate, and Reno, 63, is favored to face Republican Gov. Jeb Bush in November.

The little-known Chiles, trailed by a Ford camper truck topped by a loudspeaker, walked to gain public attention. Reno drove her Ford Ranger to reconnect with Florida voters and retool her public image. What better way for a South Florida liberal to reassure North Florida conservatives than from behind the wheel of an American-made truck?

Reno's "Red Truck Tour" ends today with a rally at her rustic house near Miami. It was her way of dealing with questions about her health and her politics in an attempt to win back moderate Democrats and independents.

"Chiles had a reputation of ignoring political elites in his party, the power people, and taking his message directly to the voters. So she has certainly taken that page straight out of his playbook," said Jim Kane of the Florida Voter, which does polling for newspapers and candidates. "The red truck symbolizes her closeness to everyday, working folks out there, particularly folks in the less rural areas."

Chiles' 1,000-mile walk is often thought of as a stroke of genius, but it was seen at the time as a risky move borne of desperation by a legislator with little name recognition and hardly any money.

The walk allowed Chiles to draw a contrast between his shoe-leather candidacy and his jet-hopping rivals. It was an audacious gamble that paid off spectacularly.

"Those of us with him on the floor thought it was a little crazy," remembers Ken Plante, who served with Chiles in the state Senate at the time. "It took several months before it started working. But it just grew and grew."

In the pre-Watergate days of 1970, voters held candidates in higher regard, and Florida was not as urbanized as it is today. The population of 6.9-million was less than half of today's 16-million. Small-town newspapers and radio stations unfailingly covered the "walking senator" when he went through town.

There were no satellite TV trucks, no 24-hour cable news channels, no traveling press corps to record Chiles' every move.

Reno, on the other hand, drew a media entourage. Such is the drawing power of the nation's first woman attorney general that she drew reporters and TV cameras, from the Christian Science Monitor to the CBS Morning News. Democratic rivals Bill McBride, Daryl Jones and Lois Frankel can only dream of such saturation coverage.

But Reno also is an irresistible target.

"A one-woman Thelma and Louise, zooming off the edge of the cliff," wrote Mike Thomas of the Orlando Sentinel.

They didn't take Chiles seriously at first, either.

The first few reporters who met Chiles on the roadside in Ponce de Leon or Paynes Prairie treated him as a curiosity. Many days when Chiles was all alone as he walked along U.S. 90 or U.S. 441.

But as the months went by, Chiles attracted massive media attention and captured the public's fancy. A journey of 1,000 miles made him a folk hero.

It took Chiles six months, with time out for his final legislative session, to go from Century on the Alabama border to John Pennekamp State Park in Key Largo. Like Reno today, the walking Chiles was hazy on many issues and talked mostly about government's failure to address average citizens' needs.

The walk came to define not only the campaign, but the man himself. "Walkin' Lawton" served three terms in the U.S. Senate and two as governor. He died on Dec. 12, 1998, three weeks before he was to leave the governor's mansion. A pair of his favorite boots was displayed next to his pine coffin as he lay in state in the Old Capitol.

The walk, combined with Chiles' populist rhetoric about the public's loss of confidence in government, created the image of a solitary man fighting the establishment.

Seemingly out of nowhere, Chiles placed second in the five-man Senate primary. He trailed the front-runner, former Gov. Farris Bryant, and was barely ahead of Fred Schultz, the House speaker at the time.

That's another critical difference between Chiles' 1970 campaign and Reno's 2002 candidacy: Chiles benefited from the runoff between the top two primary finishers when neither got more than 50 percent of the vote. The runoff has been dropped for the 2002 elections.

Chiles was from Polk County, in the center of Florida. He couldn't be tarred as a South Florida liberal, but he wasn't quite a North Florida redneck either. The second primary or runoff enabled him to capture all of the anti-Bryant vote.

Under the winner-take-all nomination system instituted by the Republican-led Legislature, the Democrat who wins the most votes in the Sept. 10 primary will be the nominee. That tilts the power in favor of the candidate who is most popular in southeast Florida, home to a giant bloc of Democrats, many of whom are more liberal on social issues, such as abortion rights and gun control, than their upstate counterparts.

Chiles won the nomination with ease and defeated Republican Bill Cramer of St. Petersburg in November, but the turning point in the race was the runoff against Bryant.

Bryant, who died March 1, recalled in a 2001 interview the sharp contrast between his own image as the consummate establishment politician and a shirt-sleeved Chiles walking across the state in search of votes.

"I could not match his campaign. I came back from Washington, and the governorship, in a blue suit and a tie. Lawton's out there in scuffed shoes with his hair in his face, and that captured the imagination of the people, and of the press," Bryant said. "He just had it, that's all."

-- Editor's Note: Steve Bousquet wrote a master's thesis in history at Florida State University in 2000 on Chiles' walking campaign. The thesis was used as a source for this article.

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Lucy Morgan

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