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Graham nears a year working ordinary jobs
By BILL ADAIR © St. Petersburg Times, published January 8, 2001
During the past 26 years, Sen. Bob Graham has been a garbage worker, a tomato picker and a "pooper scooper" at a horse ranch. He has cleaned dead fish at a seafood company and spent two days on the unemployment line, sleeping in a homeless shelter to see what it was like to be downtrodden. He burned his face as an arson investigator, cleaned muck out of sponges and bagged groceries at Publix. When Graham was a chicken plucker in 1978, a news release described his duties this way: "He began by slitting the throats of fresh chickens, removing the internal organs. . ." A 1982 newspaper headline had this exciting promise: "Graham to spend day picking trash from lake." On Tuesday, the Democratic U.S. senator will be a flight attendant, baggage handler and ticket agent for US Airways on flights to Tampa and Miami. It will be his 365th "workday," marking a full year of his on-the-job experiences with ordinary Floridians.
"I've learned a little bit about what people do for a living, but I've learned a lot about the way people live their lives," he said in an interview last week. Republicans have occasionally scoffed at the workdays, saying they were a political gimmick designed to obscure Graham's wealth and lofty education. Robert L. Shevin, a 1978 opponent for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, said during the campaign that Graham was "a man born with a silver spoon in his mouth who never worked a day in his life, who is worth $4 1/2-million . . . going out and saying he's a working man." A 1979 poll after Graham became governor showed a majority of Floridians wanted him to scrap workdays. But he continued to do one each month. Many Republicans now concede the workdays have been remarkably effective at boosting Graham's political stature and keeping him in touch with Floridians. Tom Slade, a former state GOP chairman, says the only Republicans who now criticize Graham's jobs are those who are envious of him. "His workdays are clearly one of the more clever and innovative political undertakings I've ever observed," Slade said. Members of Congress are often criticized for having a "Beltway mentality" because of their obsession with life inside Washington's fabled highway. But Graham says his monthly jobs have prevented him from becoming too much of a Washington insider. They have led to several bills in Congress and, while he was governor, to several laws passed by the Florida Legislature. Graham's 1995 workday as a Medicare fraud investigator showed him how people and companies were defrauding the government's health program. It led Graham to write an anti-fraud bill that passed Congress in 1997. His work last year as an immigration officer at the Krome Detention Center in Miami helped to convince him a 1996 immigration law was too stringent and led him to co-sponsor a bill to ease the rules. In 1977, while working as a mechanic at a Toyota dealership in Homestead, he was amazed at the terrible condition of cars that had passed the state inspection. As governor, he persuaded the Legislature to scrap the inspection program. Another 1977 workday in which he got a commercial driver's license without much effort led to tougher state rules for licensing.
Other changes have been more subtle. During his day as an unemployed worker, he saw a sign at a state employment office that declared a bathroom was for state employees only. Graham removed the sign after he became governor and hung it at the governor's mansion as a reminder that state employees should not have special privileges. The first workday was in 1974 when Graham, then a state legislator, was invited to teach in a Dade County high school. He said the experience was eye-opening because much of what he knew about education he had learned in a legislative committee room. When running for governor in 1977, Graham decided to do 100 workdays before the election. He wanted a stunt like Lawton Chiles' walk across the state to distinguish him from the pack of Democrats seeking the nomination. Graham came up with the idea of regular workdays after talking with his consultant Bob Squier, who had used them with Tom Harkin, now a senator from Iowa. Graham used them to make his opponents appear out of touch. He scheduled them the same day as debates, arriving at the candidate forums in dirty work clothes while his opponents were in finely pressed suits. He has often used the jobs to get news coverage but says they are not media stunts. He insists that he do a full day's work in an actual job. He does not want tours or lunch with the CEO.
"He worked hard all day," said Beverley Billiris, who supervised Graham during a 1977 workday at a Tarpon Springs sponge-diving company. "It was backbreaking. It was a lot of hauling and lifting all day." Billiris, now a city commissioner, has adopted her own workday program so she can better understand the Tarpon Springs government. Along with the sweat, Graham has also gotten a chance to have some fun. He got to cover a submarine trip as a wire service reporter and had a singing role in the play The Fantasticks. A Miami Herald writer said Graham's lines were delivered well but that he was not musically inclined: "As a singer, he makes a good governor." One of Graham's lines in the play was especially fitting. He said, "I am a man of experience."
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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From the Times state desk
From the state wire
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