Why Not Pam Brown?

By BILL DURYEA

© St. Petersburg Times, published December 26, 1999

Meet Pam Brown, the Most Important Person in Florida The most important person in Florida has cats named Mo and Harry and a catfish named Ralph that lives in a backyard pond. Her car radio is tuned to the left of the dial (emphasis on left), she doesn't much care who's quarterbacking the Bucs and it makes her sick how little teachers are paid. Why Pam Brown? Pam Brown is the woman of David Colburn's dreams.

Not everyone thinks we were looking for the right person when we went looking for Pam Brown. Among the dissenters is former state Sen. Curt Kiser, who says the baby boomer forecast is as revelatory as predicting that the sun will rise in the east.

The real impact, Kiser says, will be made by "immigrants from Central and South America."

Kiser should be considered something of an expert on the future of Florida. In 1981, a political correspondent from The Baltimore Sun decided that Kiser, then 36, embodied the shift of power from the liberal Democrat North to the conservative Republican South.

Back then the attributes that distinguished Kiser were his Midwestern roots, his arrival as a young man in Florida looking for business opportunities and his steady rise in Republican state politics.

"If they had looked a little higher on the horizon, they could have picked the Hispanics," Kiser says. After all, Hispanics will soon overtake blacks as the nation's largest minority group, accounting for more than a quarter of the population by 2050.

"I think that's baloney," says University of Florida professor David Colburn, who is working on a book about Florida's future. "There's no such thing as the Hispanic vote, or a Hispanic group."

In short, no cohesion means no political clout.

Okay then. Pam Brown it is.