Opinion: Harris, foreign diplomat

Katherine Harris added international relations to her role as secretary of state, however, the state of Florida already pays a company for that purpose.

On a WFSU-FM radio show during her first year on the job, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, Florida's chief election official, summed up her agency's role with enthusiasm. "Our largest priority, and where we can make the most significant impact," she said, "is in the international arena."

Come again?

A state agency that oversees elections, corporations, licensing, cultural arts, historic preservation and libraries has as its highest priority the international arena? Her answer certainly helps to explain why Florida, and Harris personally, looked so comically and tragically confused by the punch-card ballots and procedural questions raised by the 2000 presidential election. But a deeper look into her agency's $188.8-million budget, a look which her own Republican colleagues in the Legislature are now appropriately demanding, raises a more peculiar question. Does Harris believe she is Henry Kissinger? Does she think she was elected to be the state's globe-trotting diplomat?

In just two years, Harris has more than quadrupled the amount of money her agency spends on "international relations," and in the first 22 months, she spent $106,000 of taxpayer money on her own travel alone. Her destinations have included Mexico, Panama, Brazil, Venezuela, Canada, Argentina, Barbados and Australia. She says that, "The secretary of state is charged with the diplomatic functions; many states will sometimes overlook that."

Florida hasn't overlooked international commerce. In fact, it pays Enterprise Florida considerable money for just that purpose.

Harris, though, the granddaughter of the late Ben Hill Griffin Jr., has always fashioned herself as worldly. She was rumored as a possible foreign ambassador for President Bush, prior to her highly partisan and nationally visible role in helping him win the Florida election. Her master's degree is in international trade, she has won the Milton N. Fisher Award for International Trade Advocacy, and she calls the international work "her passion." The problem is, she was not elected to run international trade missions. The agency she supervises devotes less than 2 percent of its budget -- and that's after she quadrupled it to $3.4-million -- for "international relations."

By virtue of a constitutional amendment approved by voters in 1998, the office of secretary of state is being eliminated and its duties distributed to other elected officials. Harris' stewardship in office has certainly reinforced the wisdom of such a change. In all the years that Jim Smith served as secretary of state, he took only one international trip. When asked by a reporter last year to explain why he didn't travel more, he said: "My whole deal was to kind of stay well within the major responsibilities of the office." That's kind of the deal voters probably thought they made with Harris. Too bad she didn't find it sufficiently entertaining.

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