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One runs on drive, the other on previous success

Though Steve Mattingly has less money, his door-to-door strategy is keeping opponent Robert Schenck on his toes.

By ASJYLYN LODER
Published August 20, 2006

Steve Mattingly stood astride his daughter's purple bike, looking up at the street signs and down at the map in his hand. He used a pink pen to trace the streets that he already had covered.

He pointed to a squiggle of black lines: "I got this little horseshoe in here I'm trying to wipe out," he said, pulling his bike onto Elwood Road, west of Mariner Boulevard, in Spring Hill.

Just about every day, Mattingly, 61, sets out on what he calls "my walks." The retired auto worker has been to 15,000 homes so far in his door-to-door campaign for the Republican nomination in state House District 44. He wore out the battery on his electric scooter and tried walking. That took too long.

"I can probably do 160 homes on the scooter, 150 on the bike," he said.

On this day, he wore ironed khaki shorts, white socks and black sneakers. His white T-shirt had "Steve Mattingly 2006" written on the front and back, matching the sign on his pickup. His black baseball cap read "Vietnam Veteran."

He had a stack of campaign palm cards with him. If he didn't get an answer, he stuck one in the door.

"They don't trash it, like they do the mailers," he said.

He has $1,548.56 to run his campaign, most of it out of his own pocket.

This is Mattingly's third try for public office. He ran twice for state Senate and lost. He was a Democrat then but switched.

This is his year, he thinks. And if it isn't, he won't run again.

* * *

Several times a day, Fox News viewers see Rob Schenck: Schenck perched stiffly on the edge of a sofa reading to children from a thick, red volume. Schenck standing in front of a house talking to a concerned citizen. Schenck with his 2-year-old daughter on his knee, with an adorably fixed and focused expression on her face.

The commercial cost Schenck $1,000. The air time cost $15,000. He paid $15,200 more to Public Concepts, a West Palm Beach company run by Randy Nielsen, a fierce and widely known political strategist.

By all of the usual measures, Schenck, 31, has Mattingly beat. He's a local who has lived in Hernando County since he was 5 years old. He won the first and only race he ever ran in. He was 27 years old when he ousted incumbent County Commissioner Chris Kingsley in 2002. He has raised $80,430 - $10,500 of that in the first two weeks of August. He has the tacit backing of the local GOP. And he was - until July 20, when he resigned his commission seat to focus on his House campaign - an incumbent.

It's quite a turnaround for the sunburned kid whom Shawn Foster spotted four years ago.

Foster, then an aide to Mike Fasano's first state Senate campaign, said, "We were up in Hernando one day, and there was this young guy. He was sunburned. And you knew, that time of year, he was going door to door."

Schenck hadn't raised a lot of money and relied almost solely on shoe leather campaigning. He and his wife, both teachers, didn't have money of their own to invest in the race. Back then, the couple lived with their son in a small house on Dow Lane in Spring Hill.

County Commissioner Jeff Stabins met Schenck and his sister in a teacher training class in 2001. He remembers Schenck as "the quiet one" of the siblings.

"They invited me the last five years to dinner on Christmas Eve, since I don't have any family here except my two dogs," Stabins said.

That first year, there wasn't room in the house for everyone, so dinner was served in the garage.

"We put three or four banquet tables out in the garage and had everybody eat out there because the house was so small," Schenck said.

Schenck raised $15,945 in his first race. He knocked on thousands of doors. He beat a seasoned politician and former commissioner in the primary. He won the general by more than 3,400 votes.

Maybe it's because he won as an underdog that Schenck runs against Mattingly, as Foster put it, "like he's 10 points behind."

* * *

Certainly, when Mattingly first knocks on a door, it's difficult to tell whether it's doing much good. Mattingly moved down Elwood and up Sedgefield Avenue quickly, getting few answers.

"You're seeing a slow day," he said.

In some houses, he could hear residents moving around warily but not coming to the door. Some listen with thinly veiled impatience. One said there were no registered voters in the house.

"No voter," he said, wheeling the bike to the next door. "I should've recognized that. They have a rent sign. They usually don't vote."

Mattingly worked in the stockroom of a Ford auto plant for 30 years, he said. He moved to Florida from Kentucky in 1994.

His is a frustrated idealist, but not so frustrated that it has lost its freshness. He is not bitter. He isn't mean-spirited or critical. He is determinedly earnest.

"You have bitter people out there on both sides," he said of the American electorate, with some regret.

"I wish we had a better quality of candidate in this country," he said later.

And later: "One thing I don't like is special interests. I think it's destroying our country."

If elected to the House, Mattingly, a longtime AARP volunteer, wants to fight for senior citizens, he said, who need relief from rising property taxes and insurance rates. He also wants reserves held in state coffers returned to taxpayers.

On the campaign trail, he's had to hide out from lightning. He's had doors slammed on him, people yell at him and a dog bite him - a very small dog, he clarified.

When he sees a statue of the Blessed Mother in a yard, he pens "St. Frances Cabrini" on his palm card. That's his church, on nearby Mariner Boulevard.

"That gets the Catholic vote," he said.

When a door opened, he usually earned a bored stare as he launched into his ad hoc stump speech. A man answered his door in shorts with no shirt on. He didn't appear to have much interest, until Mattingly asked, "How you doing on your home insurance, brother?"

The change comes instantly. Mattingly goes from a nuisance, a bare step above an unwelcome salesman, to a citizen confessor, a man with the same problems trying to do a little bit of good.

"Don't ask," the man answered wearily, introducing himself as Jeff Thomas. "It's almost tripled. It's killing me, man."

Mattingly listens attentively. He doesn't claim to be an expert. He offers suggestions, calls people "Hon," tells one retiree that he's on a fixed pension, too. He points out his home number on the card and tells everyone who answers the door to call him at home after 8 p.m. He tells one woman, "I'd be more than glad to listen to you, or help you if I can."

It becomes easy to see why Schenck doesn't take the race for granted.

* * *

Schenck's friends and colleagues describe him as "reserved." County Commission Chairwoman Diane Rowden, a Democrat, calls him an "empty suit." Glenn Claytor, who is unopposed for the Democratic nomination in District 44, said he's heard Schenck described as "shallow."

While on the County Commission, Schenck has voted consistently in favor of development and business, and at the same time pushed to lower property taxes. He said he would carry that same probusiness, fiscally conservative philosophy to Tallahassee.

Schenck can be a little difficult to get to know. He didn't want his wife interviewed for this story, or his parents. Asked if he had any political mentors, he said, "I'm probably not real strong on mentors, to be honest. I'm just not that type."

He hadn't kept in touch with any of his teaching colleagues. Asked if there were friends who would be interviewed, he had to think about it for a few days.

Seeing Schenck's public face - pressed suits, hair neatly combed back, his carefully staged commercial, his admitted nervousness as a public speaker - it's hard to recognize the man his friends describe: a devoted father who drives his son to school every day and hams it up as Santa Claus every Christmas Eve, an avid collector of sports memorabilia, and a prodigious repository of basketball history and statistics.

"The seniors love him," Foster said. "They all adopt him. He's their grandson or son."

Randy Woodruff, Schenck's campaign treasurer and a friend, said, "Once you get to know him, he's probably one of the biggest cutups in the room."

Schenck said if he seemed standoffish, it's because "I try to keep my private life separate from my public life."

It has been a tougher balance to strike in recent months. First, there was a flap in April over a sheriff's officer - a friend and campaign volunteer - using the county's interoffice mail to send Schenck some campaign material. Then, in July, the St. Petersburg Times reported that his wife, Megan, worked briefly for a lobbyist for the controversial Hickory Hill development. Schenck voted in favor of the comprehensive plan amendment needed for development.

"One, you're talking about a very dear friend," Schenck said of the incident with the sheriff's officer, "and two, you're talking about the woman who means the world to me. I just feel so bad about the public perception because they were just innocent mistakes."

Woodruff said, "I think it took a lot of self-control not to lash back at the press." But the incidents also stripped Schenck of some of his innocence about public life.

Schenck sees a long career ahead of him, Woodruff said. "This is another stepping stone in his aspirations.

"If he stays in this position for eight years, he'll be looking for something else to go on to, whether it's U.S. Senate or maybe governor, depending on who's in office and what's open," Woodruff said.

"I compare him to Marco Rubio, who is going to be speaker of the House," Foster said. Rubio is four years older than Schenck. "Rubio was younger than Rob when he got elected."

For now, Schenck refuses to speculate beyond winning the Sept. 5 primary, saying, "I truly, honestly believe that the minute you start picking out something or planning a career in politics, you lose focus on what you set out to do."

Asjylyn Loder can be reached at aloder@sptimes.com or 352 754-6127.

[Last modified August 19, 2006, 21:03:09]