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Brown-Waite's no one's rubber stamp

 While other incumbents worry, looking after her constituents has Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite in a pretty good position.

By WES ALLISON and ELENA LESLEY
Published May 27, 2006

CLERMONT — It is 10 a.m. on a perfect Friday. The old soldiers and their wives shuffle into the council room at City Hall, clutching each others’ arms while they find seats up front.

It is an old story, particularly in this part of west-central Florida, where in many communities veterans outnumber  children: service records lost over the years, the hunt through the federal bureaucracy to find them, the  awarding of honors for heroics in World War II or Korea or Vietnam, before it really is too late.

For all the weighty issues rocking Washington these days, a politician can do no better than excel at what’s dryly known as constituent services — finding lost Social Security checks, clearing up confusion over Medicare or, as she is today, handing out medals. Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite is an expert.

She walks in briskly a few minutes after most are seated, a matter-of-fact and tenacious woman who today offers bright smiles and a tender touch as she works her way down the rows.

“So they call you Bill?” she asks William Lynn, 82, of Leesburg, who fought in World War II.

“No, Sweet William,” Lynn says, laughing, explaining that he was a clown with the Shriners.

She teases back. “So Sweet Willy, you still like to do that, clown around?”

Her congressional district has more veterans than any other district in the nation, and she has done a dozen such medal ceremonies this year already. As they wait for one last vet, Brown-Waite makes small talk, chatting about the dry weather.

“If I got out to wash my car, then it’ll rain,” one man cracks.

“Or if I hang my clothes on the clothesline,” Brown-Waite says. “I’ve tried that a few times, but it hasn’t worked.”

Everybody chuckles. No one asks about what’s happening in Washington.

In a district like this at a time like this, Ginny Brown-Waite, R-Brooksville, should be nervous.

Registered Republicans outnumber Democrats only slightly in the district, which also has scads of unpredictable independents. Republicans are taking a beating in the polls, President Bush’s approval rating is below 40 percent.

These conditions have helped Democrats recruit top-tier candidates in similar districts nationwide. But not here, amid the sprawling collection of farms, retirement communities, suburbia and swamps of Florida’s 5th Congressional District.

None of the three Democrats who qualified this month for the chance to challenge her in November has raised significant money. National Democrats have scant hope.

“The bottom line is that the voters, whether they’re in the most liberal or conservative or moderate districts, they like their elected officials to have the backbone of steel that Ginny Brown-Waite has,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a liberal Democrat from Broward County who has worked with, and against, her since their days in the Florida Legislature.

“When constituents know they are represented by someone who is willing to vote her conscience and do the right thing and is independent and not a rubber-stamp, that’s going to be tough to beat.”

Since her narrow upset of veteran Democratic Rep. Karen Thurman in 2002, Democrats say, Brown-Waite has committed several of the sins they believe will drive voters to their party in November:

She has aggressively supported the war in Iraq, even as the death toll climbs and its popularity plummets. She accepted $14,000 from former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay in her last election and $1,500 from a   former DeLay aide who pleaded guilty in a  corruption scandal.

She supported changing House ethics rules to allow DeLay to remain as leader if indicted, as well as expanding corporate tax cuts and allowing police to search library records. A Congressional Quarterly analysis shows she has voted with   her party more than 90 percent of the time since she got to Washington.

But, in a nod to the mixed constituency of her district, Brown-Waite has bucked her party on some high-profile issues, helping preserve the reputation as a maverick she built in the state Senate:

As a member of the Veterans Affairs Committee she has steadfastly opposed Republican attempts to cut veterans’ benefits, her pet issue.

She voted for expanding federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, despite strong opposition from the House leadership and the White House.

And when the House Republican leadership pushed a bill to intervene in the Terri Schiavo end-of-life case, Brown-Waite shocked many by walking onto the House floor and sitting on the Democratic side, next to Wasserman Schultz, who helped lead the opposition.

Brown-Waite was one of just five Republicans to oppose it.

“I am very comfortable in being independent because I don’t think Republicans have all the good ideas,” Brown-Waite said during an interview at her Capitol Hill office. “Democrats have good ideas, too.”

Rick Penberthy, the leading Democrat in a three-way primary to challenge her, said flashes of independence don’t compensate for Brown-Waite’s allegiance to the Republican agenda, which often favors big business over consumers and the environment, as well as cuts in social services.

“She’s a follower,” said Penberthy, an Army veteran and social studies teacher from Wesley Chapel. “I think she gets out and gets her photo ops. But I think it’s important how you vote in the district, not just the photo ops.”

Ginny Brown-White, 62, looks like many of the people she represents: white hair cut short for convenience, comfortable shoes, and bright, matching suits in colors like coral, green and navy.

She is married to Harvey Waite, a retired New York state trooper, and has three adult daughters and four grandchildren. To relax, she gardens and takes joy rides in her 1959 MG.

Lots of grandmothers bake, but she learned to make doughnuts as the owner of a Mr. Donut franchise in Albany, N.Y. She is one of three House members from Florida with a concealed weapons permit. She carries a .38-caliber Taurus and is a reliable vote against gun control.

Before seeking public office, she served for 17 years as a top Republican aide in the New York Senate.

After Harvey retired, the couple left New York for Spring Hill in 1985, but Brown-Waite commuted to her Senate job in Albany for two more years. Then her mother fell ill and moved in with them, and she quit.

Her mother died in 1988. With an empty nest and a zest for politics, Brown-Waite got involved in a spat over plans to build a hazardous waste incinerator in Hernando County.

That led to an upstart campaign and upset victory for the Hernando County Commission in 1990. Which led to an upstart campaign and upset victory for the state Senate two years later.

Which, with a little help from a GOP-friendly redrawing of Florida District 5, led to her biggest upset of all: unseating Thurman, a personable Democrat who held the seat for a decade.

Over the past four years, Brown-Waite has embraced the philosophy that all politics is local, and has followed a simple strategy: key on the issues  important to your constituents, regardless where they fall in the political spectrum, and don’t let go.

She has successfully lobbied for two new VA health clinics, in the Villages and Zephyrhills, and major improvements for three more. The size of the Brooksville clinic has tripled, easing wait times that once ran up to three months.
She has pushed for more funding for job training and higher education, and she succeeded in boosting the death benefit for those killed in action from $12,400 to $100,000.

“My husband is military and she looks out for the guys,” said Dana Pearce, 44, of Spring Hill, whose husband, William, spent a year in Iraq with a St. Petersburg-based Army Reserve military police unit. “If I had a problem when he was in Iraq, she’s who I’d call.”

For Brown-Waite, backing the troops means defending the president’s policies in Iraq. She has  attacked those who  “support the troops” but who oppose the war.

Six men from her district have died in combat in Iraq, and a seventh died in Kuwait. At  forums and in letters to the editor, most of the criticism she draws is for her pro-war stance.

Most days the president has a friend in Ginny Brown-Waite. But not always on the big stuff.

When Bush launched his second term last year by calling for an overhaul of Social Security, including creating private investment accounts, Brown-Waite sensed concern in her senior-heavy district and took no firm position.

The plan died.

She also has taken a hard line on immigration reform, opposing President Bush’s plea to balance border security with allowing millions of illegal immigrants to  work legally.

Instead, she voted for the House bill that calls for sending all 12-million illegal immigrants back, and opposes the more lenient Senate version that passed last week.

As a state senator, Brown-Waite developed a reputation as a moderate who often voted against her party on consumer and environmental issues. Observers say her Washington career has been more conservative.

Her rankings with the Christian Coalition, the American Conservative Union, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and most other conservative groups are typically over 90 percent. She has consistently supported the president’s tax cuts, banning gay marriage and drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

“Going to Congress, we thought we’d have another Floridian who would be an environmental champion,” said Mark Ferrulo, director of Florida Public Interest Research Group. “With the exception of offshore drilling (which she opposes), it really hasn’t happened.”

Beth Shields, Brown-Waite’s top aide in the state Senate for nine years, said Brown-Waite has an uncanny political instinct for landing on the right side of public opinion, as with the Schiavo case.

“I can’t think of a time when she didn’t make the right call,” said Shields, who left on strained terms. “It amazes me. She could fall in a cesspool and come out smelling like a rose.”

Ginny Brown-Waite’s biggest gamble of the past year has been touting Part D, the new Medicare prescription drug benefit, despite  reports of mass confusion and dislike.Rather than join those calling for enrollment extensions and other tweaks, Brown-Waite campaigned on the plan’s virtue, if not its perfection.

Now, she says, complaints about the program have fallen to a trickle, and constituents tell her they are saving money. In the past year, she has hosted about 15 workshops and pharmacy visits in the district aimed at helping seniors understand it.

Voters say they notice. Dennis Stafford, 57, owner of the Barber Shop in Brooksville, said he tripped on a broken sidewalk outside the Hernando Court House, where Brown-Waite keeps an office, and mentioned it to her when he passed her on the street.

“The next day, it was being fixed,” Stafford said. “She always seem to be there. … That probably helps her more than anything.”

But she can also be abrasive and pushy, and has alienated some Republicans as a result. In 2002, she lost her home county of Hernando partly because some prominent Republicans, including former Sheriff Tom Mylander, campaigned against her.

“Ginny Brown-Waite is Ginny Brown-Waite,” Mylander said. “She has her way of doing things, and she just … You can’t take anything away from her. She’s gotten where she is, but I don’t particularly like the way she’s treated people along the way.”

Mike Jarrett, chairman of the Citrus County Democratic Executive Committee, said local Democrats plan to criticize Brown-Waite for her lack of initiative on the nation’s dependence on foreign oil and failing to protect the environment.

“The fact is that nothing is better than it used to be,” Jarrett said. “Nothing.”

As for his three candidates’ dismal fundraising, he said he expects it to improve soon.

It will have to. Penberthy, of Wesley Chapel, the Democrats’ top fundraiser, had just $10,000 in the bank and $68,000 in debts as of March 31, the last filing deadline. Next was John T. Russell of Dade City, with $2,159 on hand. Candidate David Werder of Hudson had nothing.

Brown-Waite, by contrast, had $407,000 on hand and no debts. Thanks to her spot on the House Financial Services Committee, her top contributors are lending and insurance interests, who have given $107,000 so far, according to Political Money Line, which tracks contributions.

But given the current climate, Brown-Waite said she’s not taking anything for granted.

“Every opponent you take seriously, particularly in an environment with war, rising gas prices — all those issues that are out there will be the ones I’ll be beat over the head with,” she said after spending two weeks home with voters.

And, it’s worth noting, constituent services was Karen Thurman’s trademark, too.

[Last modified May 27, 2006, 20:01:21]