On Feb. 23, 1983, late-night TV host Johnny Carson announced during his opening monologue:
"Guess what? Today Reubin Askew of Florida declared his candidacy for president of the United States."
Even without any punch line, Carson's studio audience laughed.
Things never got much better for Askew, governor of Florida from 1971-1979 and the last Floridian until now to mount a reasonably serious campaign for president. Askew's valiant effort ended a year later, after he finished dead last in the New Hampshire primary.
Bob Graham followed Askew as governor from 1979 to 1987, then went off to the U.S. Senate, where he's been ever since. Graham finally decided to run for president himself. But Graham's effort also came to little, and this week he gave up.
Askew was one of the greatest governors of the 20th century. Graham was the most popular man ever to lead Florida. Both men were strong chief executives and might have made good presidents. Florida, in turn, is one of the biggest states of the union and in many ways its perfect microcosm.
Yet on the national stage, both Floridians flopped utterly.
This leads us to an interesting question:
Is it impossible for a Floridian to be elected president?
Florida is the largest state not to produce a president.
Do you think that the rest of the country believes we're too wacky, too frivolous? The image of Florida as a land of retirees, hucksters and National Enquirer source material dies hard. The 2000 election didn't help.
Yet who can claim sincerely that California is less wacky a state than ours? What about the third in our trinity of Sunbelt megastates, Texas? You think the rest of the nation relies on California and Texas as models of sanity but draws the line at Florida?
However, both California (Ronald Reagan) and Texas (Lyndon Johnson, George W. Bush, and George Bush too, if you count him as a Texan) have seen their governors and senators promoted to the White House.
Notice that these other Sunbelt presidents were Republicans, except for Johnson, and he belongs to a previous, post-New Deal era. It was Reagan who ushered in the conservative counter-reformation in 1980, Bush the elder who promised to stay the course, and Bush the younger who offered to steer the nation back from the interruption of Bill Clinton.
Florida, in contrast, has offered the nation a couple of centrist Democrats (although modern attack politics has lumped Graham in there with Teddy Kennedy and Lenin.) Both Floridians were moderate, balanced, fair-minded - and singularly unexciting.
Maybe there's something inherently unexciting in being a Florida Democrat. These days you have to please everybody from urban liberals to Panhandle cowpokes, while managing not to offend labor, schoolteachers, African-Americans and gays and lesbians.
Last year's Democratic candidate for governor, Bill McBride, cheerfully gave the teachers' union too much say over his campaign, which failed miserably against incumbent Republican Jeb Bush. Meanwhile, is Florida's junior U.S. senator, Bill Nelson, known for electric charisma?
If there is anybody in current Florida politics who can break the pattern, then, it is Jeb Bush - assuming that his brother doesn't manage somehow to go down in flames and spoil the family name. It is hard to imagine Jeb (or his family) being willing to put up with national politics. On the other hand, if enough people tell you that you ought to be president of the United States, it is hard to remain unaffected by it.
With Bob Graham's pullout, an old generation of Florida stars has passed. The only statewide pol with supernova status, the only one with even remote potential to break the Florida curse, is Jeb Bush. Well, okay, there IS one other man in Florida politics to whom ordinary citizens will rush across the street to gush over like a rock star. I am speaking, of course, of Attorney General Charlie Crist.
