[AP photo]
Janet Reno waits at her home in suburban Miami for interviews to begin. Instead of a news conference, she gave five minutes to any media representatives who came to the house.

MIAMI -- Janet Reno's campaign for governor began Tuesday in typically quirky Reno fashion, in a bungalow without central air conditioning and without any trappings of a modern political operation.

Well, maybe one. A parade of satellite trucks and TV crews descended on her wooden house at the end of a dirt road, and dozens of pursuers from The Late Show With David Letterman to Meet the Press joined the chase, a hint that something very unusual is happening in Florida politics -- again.

Reno refused to hold a news conference and instead gave five minutes to any news organization that showed up. At one point, an ABC technician set up elaborate lighting equipment while Reno finished a one-on-one talk with a Miami Spanish-language reporter. Two rattan chairs, placed in the yard, completed the tableau.

"I'm running for governor," said Reno, 63, the nation's first female attorney general and former Miami-Dade state attorney, ending three months of euphemistic talk about her plans. "I wouldn't be in this race if I didn't think I could win."

Her candidacy sets up a potential megawatt showdown with Gov. Jeb Bush, brother of the sitting president. Her platform: to make Florida schools a national model, protect the environment and stand up for the elderly.

Even without Reno, the 2002 governor's race loomed as a midterm referendum on President Bush's performance, in the state that tipped the election in his favor by 537 votes, and where many Democrats remain energized and ready for battle.

Four other Democrats have filed papers to raise money for the race and said they intend to be on the primary ballot in September 2002: state Sen. Daryl Jones, state Rep. Lois Frankel, Tampa attorney Bill McBride and former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam Pete Peterson. A fifth, U.S. Rep. Jim Davis, D-Tampa, has opened a campaign account and is expected to decide in the next several days whether he will run.

The ferocity of the media interest in Reno's unconventional candidacy threatens to distract attention from her rivals' fledgling campaigns.

"Reno just sucks the air out of the room for the Democrats," said former Florida GOP chairman Tom Slade. "She is as dominant in this particular primary as Jeb was in the last Republican primary."

Reno's rustic style and down-home demeanor remind some of the late Lawton Chiles, who rode a populist image to the U.S. Senate and from there to two terms as governor.

But Reno's campaign won't be a walk in the park. She must reassure voters in Central and North Florida that she is not an old-fashioned liberal Democrat. Her bid to become Florida's first female governor faces other questions: her ties to former President Bill Clinton, controversial decisions involving the Waco siege and the capture of Elian Gonzalez, and whether she can endure a rigorous yearlong campaign while battling Parkinson's disease.

"What they want is a governor who's not afraid to make the hard decision and then be accountable for it and stand by it," Reno told CNN in one of countless five-minute interviews Tuesday. "There are hard decisions and it's hard to know what the right answer is. But you take steps forward and address the issue, and move on."

After tantalizing Floridians during three months of assessing her chances, Reno made her candidacy official by filing papers in Tallahassee allowing her to raise money and hire workers.

She plans to concentrate on raising money and building an organization, which began with the appointment of Gary Barron, an Aventura businessman and veteran Democratic fundraiser, as campaign treasurer.

Reno confirmed her plans Tuesday at the end of a curved, unpaved driveway off a bustling Kendall street, behind a sign reading "Posted: No Trespassing." This was the house her mother, Jane Reno, built with her own hands out of cypress beams soon after the end of World War II while her father, Hank Reno, worked as a police reporter for the Miami Herald.

At the time, SW 88th Street and 112th Avenue was at the edge of civilization, more Everglades frontier than Greater Miami. Today, the weathered L-shaped house is a tiny oasis of calm surrounded by suburbia, with a funeral home, chain bookstore and townhouses all close by.

The Reno homestead stands as a living museum to a bygone time, when neighbors talked to each other and people did not seal themselves in air-conditioned cocoons. The candidate showed a visitor a piece of driftwood mahogany her mother shaped into a mantle.

"Mother sanded it down and rubbed it with linseed oil," Reno said, rubbing her hand across the woodwork with pride.

Her red Ford Ranger truck sat in the yard, and a boat and outboard motor rested under a metal canopy. Sweaty media types were encouraged to stand in the shade of a tree.

During her lengthy period of "assessment," Reno said, she vacillated about whether to run but said that waves of encouragement from people all over the state persuaded her to enter the race. Her journeys in her red Ford Ranger pickup took her all over the state, from an African-American church in Indiantown in west Martin County to the condos of west Broward to a grass-roots picnic in Tallahassee.

"I ebbed and flowed. I woke up one morning and was going to do it, and woke up the next and was not. Then it seemed to fall into place," Reno said.

Along the way, Reno met people such as Marilyn Peterson, a lawyer in Gainesville, who worked as a child-support enforcement lawyer in the early 1980s when Reno was the chief prosecutor of Florida's largest county. They shook hands last Thursday at a Democratic dinner at the University of Florida.

"We're going to get a Democrat next year. We've got to," Peterson said. "I think Janet Reno is magnificent. She's straight as an arrow. She followed the rules and did it with such grace."

Asked how she would improve teacher salaries -- one of her campaign promises -- without raising taxes, Reno said she would first analyze how money is now being spent and would allocate more money to "upfront" programs that would discourage crime or domestic violence.

Reno dismissed early polls that suggest she would be a runaway favorite to win the Democratic nomination but would falter in a general election against Bush. She politely, but firmly, waved off questions about campaign strategy, fundraising and Bush's record, saying there would be lots of time for that later.

Reno, whose Parkinson's disease at times causes her hands to shake uncontrollably, said she would make her medical records and her doctors available when she makes a formal declaration of candidacy later. Her doctors say the condition has not affected how she lives.

She also said, perhaps with excessive optimism, that the Democrats already in the race would run a clean campaign that would be "a model for the nation."

Through the years, Democratic primary campaigns in Florida have been models of nastiness, and this one has a new wrinkle designed by Republicans: There will be no runoff, or second primary, meaning all the marbles are at stake in the first primary a year from now.

The Democrat who gets the most votes in the primary will win the party's nomination, even if he or she doesn't get more than 50 percent. The winner will face Bush, who faces no opposition for the Republican nomination, in the November general election.

Reno leaves Florida today for previously scheduled speaking engagements in Pennsylvania and California. A rudimentary campaign operation emerged Tuesday, as a Miami public relations firm cranked out news releases and fielded interview requests from all over the country.

Reno's cousin Nora Denslow kept TV crews at bay while her niece Hunter Reno handled phones. A marketing consultant and former journalist who lives in Kendall, but who insisted on anonymity, said he would be one of Reno's speechwriters.

Reporters from Fox, ABC, NBC, Reuters, USA Today, CBS Radio and many other outlets waited their turns in Reno's yard, but the media onslaught outside the house was only the beginning.

"You name it," said Julie Simon, a campaign volunteer juggling the many media requests. "David Letterman, Rosie O'Donnell, Meet the Press, Face the Nation. Everybody's calling."

- Times staff writer Lucy Morgan contributed to this report.

Janet Reno

AGE: 63

POSITION: Became the nation's 78th attorney general on March 12, 1993. First woman to serve as U.S. attorney general.

PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE: Dade County State Attorney, 1978-1992.

EDUCATION: Bachelor's degree, Cornell University; law degree, Harvard University School of Law.

PERSONAL: Born in Miami. Her father, Henry Reno, was a police reporter for the Miami Herald. Her mother, Jane Wood Reno, was an investigative reporter for the Miami News. Janet Reno is single. She enjoys canoeing and hiking. She was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1995.

LEGACY: As attorney general, Reno has always maintained that the care of children is her top priority. But her tenure began tragically with the bungled raid at Waco, Texas, where about 80 people died including more than 20 children. She also has weathered criticism for being slow to pursue campaign finance irregularities involving President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore.

Key factors

WACO: Reno ordered the 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas, after a 51-day standoff. Some 80 people, including 27 children and four federal agents, died in the raid and the fire that resulted.

"I stayed awake at night trying to figure out what was the right thing to do. What about the children?" she recalled in 1995.

"I don't think you comprehend . . . the fact that this instance will be etched on my mind for the rest of my life," she told Congress.

ELIAN: Reno ordered federal agents to raid the home of Elian Gonzalez's relatives and take the 6-year-old boy from his Miami relatives. The decision outraged South Florida's Cuban-American community. "Elian Gonzalez is a child who needs to be cherished, who needs to have quiet time and private time, and to be with his father," she told a news conference. "And that is what this case is still all about -- the bond between a father and son."

CLINTON-GORE: Reno was the nation's longest-serving attorney general, but it was a rocky tenure. She approved independent counsels to investigate President Clinton as well as five Clinton Cabinet members. But she was criticized by Republicans, who said she was not aggressive in investigating campaign finance irregularities in Clinton's 1996 campaign.

PARKINSON'S: Reno was diagnosed in November 1995 with Parkinson's disease, a progressive brain disorder. She has tremors in both her arms. She takes two medications daily, but she and her doctors say it has not forced her to change how she lives. "My real concern is: Would it have any adverse effect on my being governor? The doctors say no. I don't feel any adverse effect. I didn't feel it on my abilities as attorney general or what I'm doing now," Reno told the St. Petersburg Times in July.

POLLS: A Miami native, Reno enjoys the highest name recognition of the Democrats running for governor. A Mason-Dixon Polling & Research poll in late July found that Reno would easily win the Democratic primary but would lose to Bush 54 percent to 39 percent in the general election.

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