Down & Dirty (34 page)

Al Gore wants to know just who this Katherine Harris character is.

“What do we know about her?” he asks his communications director, Mark Fabiani.

Fabiani says that she’s very partisan, a state co-chair of the Bush campaign.

“Why aren’t we getting that out?” Gore asks.

No decision had been made because she obviously wields a lot of power, Fabiani says, and the legal guys are worried about
picking a fight with her.

But later that afternoon, the Gore generals talk about it and decide that since it’s crystal clear that she’s not a friend,
they might as well start trying to discredit Harris and her decisions. Soon Gore spokesman Chris Lehane is talking to reporters,
calling her “Commissar Harris,” a “lackey” and a “hack.”

Of course, there’s much more to the answer to Gore’s question than just Lehane’s pointed barbs. She’s rich, for one, worth
about $6.5 million. The granddaughter of the citrus magnate and state representative Ben Hill Griffin, Jr., Harris—born in
Key West, raised in Bartow, east of Tampa—comes from a long line of Democrats. As such, she once interned for then-senator
Lawton Chiles during her four years at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia.

She’s been all over the map, job-wise. She’s served as a marketing executive for IBM in Tampa, New York, and Dallas. In Sarasota,
she worked in commercial real estate. Freshly divorced in the 1990s, Harris quit her job in real estate and served as a Vanna
White–like character in a Sarasota nightclub act, “Mr. Chatterbox’s Sentimental Journey.” In addition to giving members of
the audience gift certificates to Wendy’s and for dry cleaning,
Harris’s primary job was to show the crowd how to perform a chicken dance.

This is the person who might decide who becomes the next leader of the free world.

Bearing in mind Harris’s role in the presidential conundrum, Chiles would turn over in his grave if he knew that he played
perhaps
the
major role in pushing her toward her current power. In 1991, Chiles appointed his former intern—who studied art in Spain—to
the board of trustees of Sarasota’s Ringling Museum of Art, known for its collection of works by Peter Paul Rubens. Harris’s
fellow board members eyed her warily. In 1992, however, she proved her worth by taking control of the museum’s annual fund-raiser
and using her marketing skills, and social contacts, to make the fund-raiser, which normally just broke even, profitable.

Not long afterward, she and her fellow board members hopped a flight to Tallahassee to lobby for restoration of museum funds
that had been cut. The trip was a success, but Harris was quite dismayed with her meeting with freshman Democratic state senator
Jim Boczar, who didn’t seem to care about the museum. Boczar told her that as far as he was concerned, a Rubens was a sandwich.

Harris ran against him in 1994, breaking all fund-raising records for a state senate seat, raising more than half a million
dollars. In November, she beat Boczar handily, 60 percent to incumbent Boczar’s limp 40 percent. With her victory, a senate
split down the middle 20 to 20 finally landed in GOP hands, 21 to 19. And Republican control of once-Democratic Florida began
to take root. Harris was the harbinger.

For a newcomer, Harris took to the sleazy ways of Tallahassee politics pretty damn quick. A chunk of her 1994 campaign coffers
cash—$20,600—had come from Riscorp Insurance Company. Riscorp gave $400,000 to ninety-six different candidates that year,
but Harris was the largest beneficiary of the company’s largesse. In 1996, from her seat on the state senate’s Banking and
Insurance Committee, Harris offered a bill that made it more difficult for Riscorp’s out-of-state competition to offer discounts
for workers’ compensation policies. (She also was a co-sponsor of a bill that would have required parental consent before
a minor could have an abortion, a bill that Governor Chiles happily vetoed.)

Around that time, Harris not only became a big fixture in the Sarasota social scene, and a regular in the
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
’s gossip column (“ANNUAL CLAMBAKE IS A CASUAL EVENT”), she found love. Set up on a blind date, Harris was wooed by Swedish
businessman Anders Ebbeson,
who runs a company that makes accessories for yachts, and who took her to the opening night of the 1995 opera, where they
saw Verdi’s
La Forza del Destino
—The Force of Destiny. In September 1996, while cruising the Greek Isles with a dozen or so other loaded Sarasotans, they
announced their engagement.

Snagging an interview with Harris at the Governor’s Ball at Ringling Museum, the
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
reported the news of her engagement breathlessly.

“Will she change her last name? ‘No,’ said the legislator. ‘I planned to, but Anders said that I had built my public life with
the name Harris, and I should keep it.’ Children? ‘We’ll see,’ she said. ‘Right now I love what I’m doing, what I’m able to
accomplish, and there’s a lot more to do.’ The wedding in Paris? ‘It’s what Anders wants; the city is very special to him.’

“You might say that the last couple of months have been hectic for the petite legislator. Last Saturday, though, was a time
for Katherine to dance with her new husband and bask in the beauty of her beloved museum.”

They were married on New Year’s Eve 1997 in Paris, but she was back in Tallahassee before the week was over to assume the
chairmanship of the state senate Commerce Committee.

In 1998, incumbent secretary of state Sandra Mortham was set to be Jeb Bush’s running mate in his second go at the governor’s
mansion, against recount veteran and current Lt. Gov. Buddy MacKay. Harris declared her intention to run for the office.

But Mortham fell out of favor with Jeb after she was criticized for using state funds on outings that had little to do with
anything but her own self-promotion. So Mortham said she would instead run for reelection for secretary of state.

But Harris said she was staying in the race.

That same year, five Riscorp executives pleaded guilty to felony and misdemeanor charges surrounding their 1994 campaign donations,
which were illegal. The company’s founder—who illegally reimbursed his employees for donations to candidates—was sent up the
river for five years. Mortham had received $5,825 in illegal contributions from the company. Company executives wrote checks
to political candidates and received special bonuses from their boss paying them back—a clear violation of election law.

Harris’s share of illegal contributions, however, was even larger, the most of any legislator, $20,292. Her campaign manager,
David Lapides, was described by federal prosecutors as a “co-conspirator” or “co-schemer” in
the Riscorp strategy to hide contributors’ true identities; a 1994 memo from Riscorp representatives to Lapides offered instructions
on how to change the addresses on Riscorp checks so they couldn’t all be traced back to the company. “Katherine’s office called
and asked if we could give them different addresses to list for each of the checks. All the checks show the P.O. Box 1598
address and if we submit these, the newspaper will probably make the connection and track them all to Riscorp,” read an internal
Riscorp memo.
^*
Harris was never linked to the malfeasance, and she returned the illegally donated funds. But she wouldn’t let reporters
inspect her files, unlike other politicians who took Riscorp money.

Incredibly, under the guidance of senior adviser “Mac” Stipanovich, Harris ran TV ads against Mortham for taking “illegal
contributions from insurance executives.” Harris beat Mortham in the September GOP primary.

Then Harris, who said she was running for secretary of state to depoliticize the office, called her children’s advocate Democratic
opponent “a liberal lobbyist” and beat her, 56 percent to 44 percent. That same day, Floridians voted for a constitutional
amendment to eliminate the secretary of state’s office in 2002.

Where Mortham had heralded an election-reform package, Harris turned her attention elsewhere. She traveled extensively, spending
more than $100,000 in state money on trips to Barbados, Brazil, New York City, and elsewhere to promote trade with the Sunshine
State—her travel almost three times more than Jeb’s. At the Sydney Olympics, Harris spent $350,000 in taxpayer funds on a
Florida Pavilion.

The amount of money she spent on reforming the state’s election problems was slightly less than that.

Perhaps the most telling step in Harris’s journey to power came in March, however, when she shocked her former colleagues
on the board of trustees of the Ringling Museum of Art. They were talking about a plan by the GOP senate president, John McKay,
to give the museum to FSU—a move that the trustees opposed.

In a conversation that she apparently didn’t know was being recorded, Harris said that McKay’s plan would “destroy the museum.
I mean, it’s bad. I don’t see any upside.” But, she told the trustees, she wasn’t going to do anything about it. “John is
immensely powerful,” she told them. “And I said, if John wants to do it, it is a done deal. I have said that I can’t take
a personal proactive role.” Other cultural establishments “are doing terribly under FSU,” she acknowledged. But “I am not
fighting McKay on it….John McKay is powerful….It’s really sad to watch all of our whole work go down the drain.”

After the tape of the board meeting was leaked to the press, the editorial board of the
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
slammed her. “Because she lacked the nerve to do so, she failed in her duty to all Floridians and to her office….In choosing
political expedience over principle, Harris may have damaged her reputation beyond repair.”

Just six years! Most politicians take at least a decade to completely sell out the very cause that compelled them to run for
office in the first place. But Harris is on a fast track. She wanted to run for senate this year, in fact, but Jeb had already
decided that Rep. Bill McCollum would get the nomination, and he cleared the field accordingly and told Harris no.

Around this time, I get a phone call from a high-ranking Gore adviser I’ll call “Strep Throat.”
^*

Strep Throat seldom called me during the campaign, frequently not even returning my phone calls, so I am immediately suspicious.
The Gore media strategy was cataclysmically poor, I thought. It’s part of the same idiocy that Clinton referred to on Election
Night behind closed doors—Gore was surrounded by hired guns who weren’t in it because they believed in him (whoever he was
that day) but rather because they were Democrats who wanted to make some money and accrue some power. This was in stark contrast
to both Bush and, of course, Clinton, both of whom were surrounded by True Believers.

“What’s up?” I ask.

Strep Throat wonders if I’ve heard the rumor that “everyone” is talking about—that Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush had, or are
having, an affair.

No, I say. What’s the proof?

None yet, Strep Throat says. But people are working on it. He hears that Mike Isikoff from
Newsweek
is on it. (I later ask Isikoff about this, and he says it isn’t true.) Better look into it, Strep Throat says.

I ask a staffer at a Democratic state senator’s office about any rumors she’s heard about Jeb. She gives a couple, but when
asked, says she’s never heard anything about Jeb and Harris.

Chris Vlasto, the ABC News producer who with Jackie Judd broke the story of Monica Lewinsky’s DNA-coated Gap dress, has been
given the same “tip.” He asks staffers at three local hotels, inquires around town, checks out phone and e-mail records, and
comes up snake eyes.

There’s no evidence, Vlasto thinks. Not at all. No hint, even.

At a Tallahassee bar, Café Cabernet, I ask some local scribes about it, and though they’ve heard the rumor in recent days,
they never heard it before this election mess.

It’s vile and despicable stuff, completely untrue, and it comes from a senior adviser to Vice President Al Gore.

Theresa LePore spent Sunday organizing her office, getting ready for a hand recount, while Roberts spent her day scoffing
at GOP attempts to have her removed from the canvassing board because she gave the Gore campaign money and has that bumper
sticker on her Lexus SUV. But now it’s back to work, and they start with a short meeting.