Joe Scarborough's peculiar personality

The oddest member of the Florida delegation is a Republican whose political hero is Robert F. Kennedy.

By BILL ADAIR

© St. Petersburg Times, published March 20, 2000

PENSACOLA -- In one corner of the office is a 6-foot stuffed bear wearing a Mexican shawl. There's no desk in the room, just a wooden door lying across two sawhorses, with empty Absolut vodka bottles on top.

This being the office of a rock singer, there are guitars, an amplifier and Beatles posters.

This being the office of a newspaper mogul, there are clocks that show the time in four cities -- Paris, Bombay, Sausalito, Calif., and Two Egg, Fla. Either the world is in a time warp or the clocks are wrong. They say it's 8:15 in Bombay and 10 o'clock in Two Egg.

This being the office of a congressman, there's a framed, handwritten note from President Clinton and a battered congressional license plate -- a souvenir of the most important perk in Washington, a parking space.

Joe Scarborough, rock singer/newspaper publisher/congressman, wants to start a media empire here. Never mind that his weekly paper, the Florida Sun, has lost thousands of dollars since he started it four months ago. What matters to Scarborough is that he has an outlet for his creativity.

Rock music has always been his outlet -- he recorded a CD called Joe -- but Scarborough says he got weary of drummers leaving for drug rehab and guitarists who passed out on stage. He has found that people in the newspaper business are slightly more stable.

His paper is a mix of right-wing opinion, political profiles and pop criticism. He writes many articles himself, but uses pseudonyms because readers complained when he wrote a signed column that said the Atlanta Braves always choke in the playoffs.

The quirky newspaper has further established Scarborough as the oddest member of the Florida delegation. He is a Republican who prefers hanging out with Democrats (he says they're more fun). He is a fierce critic of the media who runs a newspaper. He is a conservative who writes songs about transvestites and taking bribes.

He plans to run for Bob Graham's Senate seat in 2004 and, in the meantime, write more songs that sound like the British band Radiohead.

So I guess I'll be a congressman
Where bad acting is rewarded every day
It's as easy as can be
If you give your cash to me

From his song (Guess I'll be a) Congressman

Walking up the steps of the U.S. Capitol on his way to a TV interview, Scarborough carries a set of talking points from the Bush campaign. They're titled "Al Gore is an Obstacle to Education Reform."

A stern-looking Capitol police officer moves to stop Scarborough from using the members-only door. With his boyish face and casual clothes, Scarborough looks more like a 25-year-old staffer than a 36-year-old congressman; a lot of people tell him he resembles Conan O'Brien, the talk show host.

"I'm Congressman Scarborough," he tells the officer, who quickly steps aside.

He was an insurance defense lawyer in the early 1990s but decided to run for Congress because he "wanted to do something that actually mattered."

A political unknown, he bought cheap air time and was host of a call-in show on a public access channel called BLAB-TV. That taught him one of the most important skills in modern politics -- how to look into a TV camera without getting nervous.

He came to Congress in 1994 as one of the brash young Republicans who vowed to shrink government and cut taxes. "We were all little Newts."

He has built a solid conservative record on social and budget issues and has been a favorite of the press because of his snappy one-liners. Last week he introduced a resolution condemning New York preacher Al Sharpton for comments that Scarborough says were anti-Semitic. It was a bare-knuckled maneuver to link Vice President Gore to the controversial minister. Scarborough's stock line -- "Al Gore's Democratic Party is the party of Al Sharpton" -- has gotten wide play around the country.

Despite his hard-line Republican rhetoric, Scarborough's best friends are Democrats.

"When it comes to music and pop culture, most members of Congress are clueless," he says. "Democratic members are less clueless than Republicans."

He often votes with Democrats on environmental and human rights issues. His political hero is Robert F. Kennedy, who he says "spoke his mind and didn't stick his finger up in the wind. Were I in politics in 1968, I would have worked on his campaign."

Scarborough has authored bills to cut taxes and improve treatment for federal employees, but he is most proud of a resolution he got passed a few years ago that urged the Clinton administration to cut off relations with Sudan, which was run by a violent regime. He jokes that he may have caused the U.S. bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in the African nation. "I didn't expect Clinton to actually bomb Sudan for me. As we say in the South, "That's gracious plenty.' "

He curses like a longshoreman. As he left a fundraising reception for his re-election campaign last week, he jokingly told a lobbyist, "Hey, when I see you tomorrow night, you have to bring the bottle of Scotch."

Scarborough was a leader in the coup attempt against former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his frank criticisms of his party have frustrated GOP leaders. He says Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott once lectured him by using an analogy of a rock band.

Lott said, "If you have a drummer playing off one sheet of music, a guitarist playing off another sheet of music, a bassist playing off another and a singer singing off of another, what do you have?"

"Jazz?" Scarborough replied.

"No, boy. You've got chaos."

I met a girl from Austin, Texas,
who turned out to be an L.A. man
What's the deal with Austin, Texas,
please help this redneck understand
I saw a church in Austin, Texas,
its cross stood resolute and gray
Wish I knew what "resolute' meant
Cause it's a word I like to say

From his song, Austin, Texas

His music has evolved. A devout fan of the Beatles, he tried for years to write like Lennon and McCartney. Lately, he has adopted a more modern sound. He describes the songs on Joe as mostly "roots rock," which means they have some harsh guitar licks but enough melody to keep baby boomers singing along. He has also been known to stray into some "out there stuff," including the funky modern rock of Beck and the pop punk of Green Day

In deciding to start the Florida Sun, he didn't spend much time figuring out if it made good business sense. He just decided it would be fun.

His parents loaned him money to start the paper even though they were worried it would hurt him politically. But the paper seems to help more than it hurts.

"I love his paper because I got to quit reading the National Enquirer," says state Rep. Dee Dee Ritchie, D-Pensacola, a frequent target.

His weekly tabloid, distributed free at restaurants and newsstands, has a circulation of 30,000. Its motto is "Read Cover to Cover, Never Bound by the Truth."

The motto is appropriate because much of the paper springs from Scarborough's imagination. He writes many stories under the pseudonym Izzy Walser, who is listed in various issues as national affairs correspondent, religion writer and olfactory correspondent (for a story on transmitting odors over the Internet).

Scarborough says the mysterious Izzy worked on the 1972 Nixon campaign and went undercover on the McGovern campaign. He was in a Turkish prison for five years and is still on probation for supplying guns to the Contras.

Izzy has a wide range of talents.

He writes the weekly religion column, "What in God's Name." He wrote the Thanksgiving feature "20 Junk Foods We're Really Thankful For." (He put M&Ms at No. 19: "Other than Springsteen, these chocolate drops of heaven are the best thing to come out of New Jersey.") Izzy also wrote the essay on the Panama Canal, an assignment that angered him because he was pulled from Nepal, where he'd been sent to "get the Dalai Lama's reaction to Caddyshack being released on DVD."

You can count on me to make the deal
And baby, we can't change the world
But baby, life is rich.
At least we'll change our market share. a

From his song Contract with Bulgari

The Sun has an unusual mix of politics and down-home features.

Scarborough's son Joey writes reviews of Nintendo games, reassuring readers that Pokemon Yellow "certainly is not satanic." A photograph of Ashley Judd appears in nearly every issue because the Sun's art directors think she's gorgeous. When Judd wasn't picked for an Oscar nomination, the paper wrote that it was proof "Communism is still prevalent in Hollywood."

The Sun has a regular feature called "Esther's Beauty Salon and Carburetor Repair," written by Esther Bankhead, the "Central Alabama Demolition Derby Champion 1961-64." Scarborough won't say whether he writes the column, but her style sounds remarkably similar to Izzy. In a column on short fingernails being back in style, Esther wrote that "it's time to get a sandblaster out and tear off those fake nails. They're going to be the leisure suit of the 21st century."

With a motto that says he isn't bound by the truth, Scarborough hasn't worried much about journalistic ethics.

He has published serious interviews with prominent Pensacola residents, including trial lawyer Fred Levin and developer Collier Merrill, who also happen to be big advertisers in the Sun and contributors to his political campaigns. Scarborough says neither advertising money nor campaign contributions affect how he votes or writes.

He has written stories urging that the city shut down the Port of Pensacola -- he says it's a waste of taxpayer money and could become an environmental nightmare -- and has urged two feuding Panhandle politicians to unite behind a single route for a new highway.

Scarborough is a heavy favorite to win re-election this year but plans to step down from Congress in 2002 so he can spend more time with his 9- and 12-year-old sons. He wants to be closer to the kids when they're in "the Smashing Pumpkins-teen angst stage." He and his wife divorced last year.

He and Merrill, who publishes a rival weekly, agreed on a merger last week. Merrill's employees will handle the business and advertising side and Scarborough will continue to write and edit.

Once the paper goes statewide, Scarborough says he wants to start a TV version of the Sun that will have correspondents in Los Angeles and Washington. He'll be a co-host of the show and expects Izzy to be a correspondent.

"All I want to do is buy out Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner and the New York Times -- but only if I can have fun doing it."

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