On the menu today: The passing of former Florida senator and governor Bob Graham offers some lessons on how dramatically our political landscape has changed, both nationally and in Graham’s home state. Meanwhile, voices in the media start making excuses for Joe Biden to skip the general-election presidential debates, and a reminder of where you can see me next week.
Florida’s Shifting Political Landscape
Former Florida senator and governor Bob Graham has passed away at age 87. To read his obituary is to be reminded of how much politics, and particularly Florida politics, has changed in the past few decades.
The guy had his own campaign song that he would sing at rallies: “Bob Graham is a cracker. Be a Graham cracker backer.” Think that would fly in today’s political and cultural environment?
I ran across an old — as in, almost old enough to drink — column I wrote for NR, jokingly summarizing the ups and downs of the Graham presidential campaign, imagining his meticulous diary entries in the notepads he always carried with him. Graham kept copious notes about his day, every day, for decades:
Mr. Graham, a third-term senator and former two-term governor now seeking his party’s presidential nomination, is known for meticulously recording his day’s activities, the people he encounters and his detailed to-do lists on 3-by-5-inch notepads he keeps at the ready.
Whether it is a breakfast of cereal at his 3STH (Third Street town house) near the Capitol, his clothing for the day or the sports telecast he watches before pronouncing himself ready for sleep at his MLTH (Miami Lakes town house), Mr. Graham jots it down. And he has done so religiously since his first race for governor, in 1977, when he wanted to make sure he got the name of every possible supporter of his underdog campaign.
Now, as he seeks the nation’s highest office, the questions must be posed: Are American voters ready for a president who could all but moonlight as a stenographer? Is his habit a disqualifying eccentricity?
Graham had a sense of humor, and he was also — how do I put this kindly? — weird:
Two years ago, after a reporter congratulated Bob Graham on being named vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Florida Democrat rose from his office chair and got down on his hands and knees.
Graham lowered his head beneath a coffee table and began talking to the furniture.
“I have with me a reporter from the St. Petersburg Times,” the senator said to the table, as if talking into a CIA listening device. “He has just congratulated me on becoming vice chairman. He is wearing a blue blazer and khaki slacks.”
It wasn’t the notebooks that held back Graham in his presidential bid in 2004. After the 2000 presidential campaign came down to the wire in Florida, you might have thought that a longtime senator from the Sunshine State would have been a strong option for the Democrats. Graham’s service on the intelligence committee also presumably would have been a plus during the War on Terror.
And the irony is that Graham could be as fierce a critic of former president George W. Bush and the Iraq War as anyone else in the field; he was the only senator running for president in 2004 who had voted against authorizing military force against Iraq. Graham argued that he opposed the Iraq War because he wanted the U.S. War on Terror to turn its attention to Hezbollah. “We should first eradicate those who had just killed 3,000 Americans; then we should go after groups which had killed Americans previously — particularly Hezbollah — and had the capability of killing more Americans.”
Does Saddam Hussein or Hezbollah represent the greater threat to the United States? In my opinion, there’s no question that Hezbollah is that greater threat, and yes, we should go after it first and go after it before we go to war with Iraq. . . . They are a violent terrorist group. And they have demonstrated throughout their now 25-year history a hatred of the United States and a willingness to kill our people.
Today, anti-Israel protesters wave the flag of Hezbollah on the streets of New York City.
But not only did Graham not catch fire, he kept coming in dead last in the polls, and he seemed to sense it was because he wasn’t theatrical enough:
While he professed himself “outraged” by Bush’s policies, his tone rarely conveyed any passion stronger than exasperation, and he seemed uncomfortable ad libbing, preferring to keep his eyes on his speech scripts. At his appearance Saturday before DNC members, Graham virtually apologized for not serving up the “raw meat” that an audience of partisans wanted.
While John Kerry ultimately won the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, throughout much of 2003, the candidate generating the most buzz was Vermont governor Howard Dean. Even back then, both the media and the voting public tended to conflate moderation in tone and speaking style with moderation in policy choices. Graham was even-keeled and buttoned-down, and thus, he just didn’t seem like a furious critic of the administration and the war.
Graham was progressive by the standards of a Florida politician at that time, but he wasn’t one for histrionics. This was before the social-media era, and before emoting for the cameras could translate into a lot of small-dollar donations.
Graham was folksy, Southern, and old-fashioned in a party that was starting to detest folksiness, the South, and anything old-fashioned, because those traits reminded them of George W. Bush.
In one final indignity, when Graham dropped out of the presidential race, he did so on Larry King Live on CNN, but he was the second guest and topic discussed, because King’s first segment was about Las Vegas legend Roy Horn of Siegfried & Roy getting mauled by one of his own white tigers. “This Wednesday night, Siegfried will be here exclusively, his first interview since all of this happened. Siegfried, the special guest on Wednesday night on Larry King Live,” the host declared. “And later in the program tonight, Senator Bob Graham with a special announcement.”
When Graham was reelected to the Senate in 1998, it was the last time a Democrat would hold that U.S. Senate seat in Florida. Republican Mel Martinez won the open-seat race in 2004, and was followed by Marco Rubio in 2010. Florida’s other long-time Democratic senator, former astronaut Bill Nelson, hung on until the 2018 elections. Rick Scott narrowly beat Nelson, and Scott is considered a safe bet for reelection this November.
Graham’s daughter Gwen has run for office, but statewide politics have changed dramatically since her father represented the state in the U.S. Senate. Gwen Graham was one of the very few Democrats to knock off an incumbent Republican in a U.S. House race in the 2014 midterm elections, beating Steve Southerland in Florida’s second district, in the eastern part of the Florida panhandle. By 2017, Gwen Graham had set her sights on the Florida Democratic gubernatorial nomination and led a considerable number of polls during the primary. But she narrowly lost the primary to Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum. You can make a case that selecting Gillum over Graham was one of the all-time blunders by a state-party electorate. Gillum lost the 2018 gubernatorial election narrowly to Ron DeSantis, and descended into a dark spiral of scandals. DeSantis went on to become a juggernaut, at least at the state level.
This week in the New York Times, Doug Sosnik laid out how Joe Biden has a narrower path to 270 electoral votes than Donald Trump does. Sosnik did not put Florida on his list of the seven states most decisive to this election. Sosnik did not even contemplate a scenario in which Biden wins the state of Florida, and that assessment is supported by available public polling. In 2020, Biden only lost the state by 3.3 percentage points, but that might as well have been a landslide.
Barack Obama carried Florida twice, but now it’s a state with 30 electoral votes that Democrats don’t even bother dreaming about winning.
ADDENDA: The excuses for Joe Biden skipping the fall debates are starting to percolate in the mainstream media. . . .
A reminder that next week I will be in Kansas City, Mo. — land of Super Bowl champions, amazing barbeque, and Taylor Swift’s boyfriend — to speak about the state of the war in Ukraine at an event co-sponsored by the Show-Me Institute, National Review Institute, the Kansas City Public Library, and Show-Me Opportunity. The event is at Kirk Hall in the Kansas City Public Library, with a reception at 5:30 p.m., and remarks and a Q&A running from 6 to 7 p.m. The event is free; organizers just ask that you register here.