Like many another lifelong Floridian, Lawton "Bud" Chiles left his heart behind, never intending to transplant his roots, when he went elsewhere to make his living. Those roots run deep indeed. Theirs was already an old Florida family when his father, the late governor, was born at Lakeland 75 years ago.
So it goes beyond irony into the realm of the grotesque that Chiles is ineligible to run for governor because he returned from a 10-year absence only two years ago. The obstacle is a constitutional provision, originally inspired by Florida's Reconstruction experience, that requires the governor and Cabinet members to have "resided in the state for the preceding seven years."
Chiles is certainly no carpetbagger, and he might have made a superficially plausible legal argument that the residency requirement should not apply to him. But he decided correctly that it would be unseemly to try. One might wish that all elected officials had as much respect for what the Constitution plainly says.
Is the residency rule an anachronism for a state that thrives on population growth? Whose governors more often have been immigrants than natives? Not really. The well-known rootlessness of Florida's electorate makes it that much more important for the people who govern them to have more than a superficial knowledge of Florida history. The carpetbagger clause is less than a perfect assurance of that, but it will have to do for the lack of anything better.
