Starke. Palatka. Miami. Maybe all three places in one day. I was flying around with a candidate. If the man coughed, I wrote it down. The man was Bob Martinez, the year was 1986, and he was running for governor.
There was much interest in what Martinez was doing, and not just in Tampa, where he had been mayor. Political figures across the country were watching - for in a state full of Democrats, Martinez had switched sides. He had joined the Republicans. The GOP was crazy to think he might win. He did.
Looking back, it all seems obvious. It wasn't. Today, Martinez believes he couldn't have succeeded if Ronald Reagan hadn't been in the White House.
Since his death, Reagan has been lauded for everything from his charisma to his stance against communism. But not quite so much attention has been paid to the way he revolutionized politics in places like Florida.
If you were not in Florida then, it may be hard to understand. The state was booming, as thousands of people, myself included, came here to start over.
Some of us had left dead-end jobs, broken marriages, the chill of the Rust Belt. To the extent we had any, we tossed our old political affiliations out the window. We wanted just this: a brighter, easier life. Our optimism and eagerness for change matched that of the man in the Oval Office.
Tampa was one of those booming Florida cities. Martinez, as mayor, cut taxes. Although he had once led the local teacher's union, he broke a city sanitation workers' strike. He might have been a Democrat, but he governed like a Republican.
He had the added appeal of being Hispanic. The GOP hoped to grab the loyalties of Cubans in vote-rich South Florida and have a better chance of winning the state. So Republican leaders wooed Martinez. They took him to meet Reagan.
The president made his sales pitch. He told Martinez they had traveled the same path. He too had been a Democrat and the head of a union, the Screen Actors Guild. "I changed parties," Reagan told Martinez, "and here I am."
Martinez lasted just one term as governor. He was defeated in 1990 by Lawton Chiles. Nevertheless, other Democrats did what Martinez did. He calls the process "follow-ship." One by one, they switched parties. The result was inevitable. The Republicans took control.
They won a majority of the state Senate in 1994, and the House in 1996. They remain strong to this day.
Jeb Bush lost the first time he ran for governor in 1994, but he won four years later and was re-elected in 2002.
Mac Stipanovich, Martinez's longtime adviser, says none of that would have happened so quickly without Reagan. "He was so popular in Florida," Stipanovich says, "that it was hard not to prosper in his shadow."
It is so much a theme in politics that we no longer notice, but there's hardly a Republican in Florida who fails to promise less government and lower taxes. Those words more or less started with Reagan. As Martinez says, "He made conservative thought mainstream."
Stipanovich takes Reagan's impact even further. "Now, nobody will admit that they're a liberal," he says. "John Kerry characterizes himself as a moderate. That's the legacy of Ronald Reagan."
Yes. He rewrote the very language we use to talk about government, what we think of it, what we expect it to do. In a phrase, not much. Every man must help himself, the poor as well as the middle class and the rich.
This philosophy had particular appeal in Florida, where jobs were plentiful, houses were cheap and life was a beach. In the Reagan years, hoarding the good life, while ignoring everything else around you, became an almost universal mantra. I think of a moment when I lived in a St. Petersburg apartment complex. I was out by the pool one hot Saturday when I heard a well-tanned woman laugh to her friends: "I wonder what the poor people are doing today."
Friday, Americans will bury Ronald Reagan. In Florida, too, heads will bow to honor his passing. But in a sense, Reagan has not left us. In Florida, his way of thinking is very much alive.
