Kitty and Mel Martinez catch a private plane out of Tampa International Airport around 11 a.m. Tuesday after appearing at a St. Petersburg rally with President Bush. They flew to Apopka where Martinez was to speak.
Republican Senate candidate Mel Martinez greets the crowd gathered Tuesday to see President Bush at Progress Energy Park in St. Petersburg.
Mel Martinez couldn't sleep. A campaign for the U.S. Senate kept racing through his head.
After weeks of intense lobbying by the White House, Republican senators and friends, he and his wife Kitty bolted out of bed at 3 o'clock one morning last November. They grabbed their list of pros and cons and agonized some more.
The field of candidates already was crowded. Martinez was not well known outside Orlando, even after three years as the nation's housing secretary. A Senate campaign would be long and nasty, yanking him away from his wife and their 11-year-old son.
Yet, he could be the first Cuban-American in the Senate, a towering symbol of Hispanic achievement. His presence on the ballot also would help President Bush, who had plucked him from obscurity.
"Kitty and I both had a reluctance," Martinez recalled. "But before I made my decision, Kitty said, "You ought to do it."'
Martinez won a bruising Republican primary and is now in a dead heat with Democrat Betty Castor.
In a recurring theme of his storybook life, he felt swept up by larger forces.
"To be the first Cuban-American, you almost feel it's something you have to do," he said. "I feel that my life has taken on a context that's a little bit out of my control."
But some wonder if the Martinez they are seeing now is real or the product of a Republican makeover.
Coming to America
The basic biography of Melquiades Rafael Martinez is now so familiar, he no longer feels compelled to recount it to audiences.
"Many of you know my story, and I don't want to dwell on it today," he recently told a largely Hispanic audience in Tampa. "But it is an improbable journey."
Martinez, who turned 58 Saturday, fled Castro's Cuba through a Catholic program, Operation Pedro Pan. Separated from his family, the 15-year-old was sent to live with foster parents, Walter and Eileen Young, in Orlando in 1962.
As he stepped off a Greyhound bus in Orlando, Eileen Young gave him a new name.
"She said, "You're going to learn to be Mel. We can't say Melquiades," he recalled.
The lanky teenager couldn't speak English and didn't know what a peanut butter and jelly sandwich was. But he found strength in his Catholic faith, and he used sports as a bridge to being an American. Years spent on baseball diamonds in Cuba had honed his skills as a catcher and first baseman and he was tall enough to play center in basketball.
His parents moved to Orlando four years after he arrived. By then he was going to Florida State University, where he would earn a law degree. Working summers at a YMCA camp, he saved $300 to buy his father a 1959 Chevy.
After law school, Martinez returned to Orlando with his new wife, Kitty, to start a career and family.
He quickly found his way to the door of someone who would prove instrumental in his political future.
Establishing himself
A law school classmate, Ken Connor, knew someone he thought could help Martinez. Bill Frederick was a lawyer and pillar of the downtown Orlando establishment who would later become the city's mayor.
Martinez impressed Frederick with his poise and self-confidence.
"Not only was he a good student, but he had that star quality that I think is important for a trial lawyer," Frederick said. "I think all of us recognized in Mel a public person that might bloom into elected office at some point."
At Frederick's firm, and several others, Martinez made a very good living suing people and companies, choosing cases with care and helping immigrants like himself. As head of Florida's trial-bar lobby, in 1988 he helped defeat a doctor-sponsored move to limit damage awards in malpractice cases.
The name Mel Martinez surfaced increasingly in Orlando in the 1980s. He was well-liked, and no blue-ribbon panel seemed complete without him.
He served on the housing authority, Chamber of Commerce board and Hispanic Advisory Committee and the board of the United American Bank. He coached Little League and took prominent roles in Catholic charity work.
He was even invited to join the Country Club of Orlando, a bastion of the city's old, white, social order. Martinez quit the club after several years, not long before he decided to run for Orange County chairman, saying the club was too slow to admit women, blacks and Jews as members.
In the mid 1990s, he served on the Orlando Utilities Commission during a time of upheaval. The OUC was forced to fire managers of the city-owned electric company, and Martinez directed a probe of spending irregularities. It was an assignment combining his legal ability and networking skills.
"He was very businesslike. On the other hand, he was very considerate," recalled Jerry Chicone, an OUC board member. "He just handled things the way they should be handled. It was a very tough, sensitive time, and he did a good job."
In 1994, pal Ken Connor ran for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, and he persuaded Martinez to be his running mate. They stressed their strong opposition to abortion.
"I think he enjoyed being out on the stump with Ken," said Roy Dalton, Martinez's former law partner.
The Connor-Martinez ticket drew 10 percent of the vote in a crowded primary won by Jeb Bush, who narrowly lost to Democrat Lawton Chiles that November. Martinez's political timing was off but the experience whetted his political appetite.
Catching the president's eye
When Martinez ran for Orange County chairman in 1998, he built a broad, bipartisan network of support and easily defeated a more conservative rival, Republican state Sen. John Ostalkiewicz, a millionaire diamond merchant.
In that race, Martinez advocated more police officers, a smaller bureaucracy, children's programs and "fair and equitable funding" for the University of Central Florida.
As chairman, Martinez is best remembered for being one of the first elected officials in Florida to push for stricter growth controls to limit school crowding. The "Martinez Doctrine" is still the law of Orange County. While it didn't slow growth, it forced officials to more carefully weigh the impact of new subdivisions.
Martinez hired as his chief of staff Dan Murphy, a Republican operative who had worked for Vice President Dan Quayle. In hindsight, critics view that as the beginning of Martinez's shift from nonpartisan consensus builder to partisan conservative.
"I think the whole purpose of getting Dan Murphy was to promote Mel's profile in D.C.," said Doug Head, chairman of the Orange County Democratic Party. "He made the office hugely partisan and became a super conservative overnight."
He soon caught George W. Bush's eye. After running Orange County government less than two years, Martinez's phone rang. It was Jeb Bush, whose brother had just been elected president with a 537-vote margin in Florida.
"Jeb said, "My brother would like to know if you'd like to serve in the Cabinet,"' Martinez recalled. "Dick Cheney called a couple of weeks later."
He was the third person chosen for Bush's Cabinet. As secretary of Housing and Urban Development, an agency long hobbled by cronyism and inefficiency, Martinez promoted home ownership, especially among Hispanics and African-Americans.
His efforts to simplify the home-buying process faltered on Capitol Hill, largely due to resistance from real estate interests. Martinez received mediocre reviews during his three years at HUD.
Critics said he pushed home ownership to the exclusion of other issues, such as rental housing for poor people. Sheila Crowley of the National Low Income Housing Coalition has written that Martinez was forced to toe the administration line.
"He learned the parameters of what was permissible for him to do as a member of the Bush administration," Crowley wrote.
Last November, Martinez met with Republican Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania over lunch in the Senate dining room as politicians waited to see if Florida's Sen. Bob Graham would run again. Martinez wasn't interested; he had his eyes set on a run for governor.
"Rick wrestled a promise from me that if Graham did get out, that I would reconsider, and I did," Martinez said.
When Graham dropped out three days later, Martinez was on a housing trip in St. Petersburg, Russia. His cell phone rang incessantly. The message: Run, Mel, run.
Party insiders had their doubts about former U.S. Rep. Bill McCollum, who lost a Senate bid in 2000. They also feared that U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris would run and rekindle memories of the recount debacle.
The engaging Martinez would broaden the party's appeal to Hispanics. He was bilingual, he lived in the Interstate 4 corridor, and he was the president's favorite. To Republican senators nervous about keeping their slim 51-to-49 majority, it was a no-brainer.
"We begged," said U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
Martinez answered their prayers, though it meant giving up watching baseball on TV, sailing and long bicycle rides, and spending weekends with Kitty on Longboat Key.
On his return to Florida, he signed on to the Akerman Senterfitt law firm, which pays him about $400,000 a year.
To win the Republican nomination, he also had to bury his past as a trial lawyer who gave money to Democrats. A pragmatic moderate morphed into a probusiness conservative.
Martinez was always strongly opposed to abortion, but his positions on other social issues were unknown.
"When you're county chairman, stem cell research doesn't come up," he said.
Today he opposes a higher minimum wage and expanded stem cell research, and while he personally opposes in vitro fertilization, he said he would not seek to ban it. He accused conservative Republican opponent Bill McCollum of backing the "radical homosexual lobby," and has accused Castor of going soft on a "terrorist cell" at USF.
"A lot of people who knew Mel are wondering if he's been taken over by Washington operatives, or if we just didn't know him in the first place," said Linda Chapin, a Democrat who preceded Martinez as Orange County chairman and supported his bid to replace her. "Because issues like honor and integrity were always important to the Mel that we knew."
Martinez is approachable in public. At 6-foot-2 he looms over most voters, and favors dark business suits. He's a big baseball fan. He loves to cook breakfast for his family on Saturdays, but lately has had to avoid dairy products. His doctor told him he's lactose intolerant.
At heart, he's still a trial lawyer. He does not trust insurance companies, and he opposes Amendment 3 on the ballot that would limit lawyers' fees. He favors a $500,000 cap on damages for pain and suffering - twice what the president supports.
Republicans can only make light of the irony.
"He's a recovering trial lawyer," McConnell joked.
The Republican establishment points to one factor that makes Martinez electable Nov. 2: his story.
"Mel Martinez is a Horatio Alger story," said Bill Miller of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "This is the story that makes the Senate a better place, and makes America a better place."
MELQUIADES "MEL" MARTINEZ
U.S. Senate candidate, R
PERSONAL: Born Oct. 23, 1946, in Sagua La Grande, Cuba; lives in Orlando; married to Kitty (Kathryn); three children; two grandchildren.
RELIGION: Catholic.
PROFESSIONAL: attorney; of counsel, Akerman Senterfitt law firm, 2004; secretary, U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development, 2001-2003; chairman, Orange County government, 1998-2001; partner, Martinez & Dalton, 1989-1998; partner, Connor & Martinez, 1986-1989; partner, Wooten, Honeywell, Kest & Martinez, 1976-1986.
EDUCATION: B.A., International Affairs, Florida State University, 1969, and law degree, FSU, 1973.
