Harris: Can This Steel Magnolia Take the Heat?

It’s not clear whether Katherine Harris knew she was being taped that day in her Tallahassee office last March. But the secretary of state made it very clear that she knew her place in Florida’s rough-and-tumble Republican Party power politics.

At stake was the future of Sarasota’s Ringling Museum of Art, the beloved institution where Harris dug her first political trenches, where she’d learned fund-raising as an art form and where she’d reached out to borrow more than a dozen of the masterpieces that now lined her state office walls.

She told the museum trustees she had known for four months of a plan by powerful Republican state Sen. John McKay to disband the independent board and hand the 66-acre museum over to Florida State University, a move she conceded could destroy the museum. But Harris, who had been steadfast in her responsibility to protect all state-owned museums such as Ringling, admitted she had neither said nor done anything to stop the man who was about to become president of the Florida Senate.

“I tell you, John McKay is powerful. We have all been very tentative about annoying him because he is going to be very powerful,” she told the stunned trustees, according to the tape on file at the museum and later excerpted in a local newspaper.

“If John wants to do it, it is a done deal.”

It was, for many back in Harris’ hometown of Sarasota, a telling moment in the relatively young political life of the Florida state official whose judgments in the current election battle appear to be pushing Texas Gov. George W. Bush toward the door of the White House. Her comments--pragmatic or expedient, depending on one’s point of view--help to characterize this suddenly famous and powerful woman who has variously been described by associates as ambitious, determined, dynamic, enigmatic and vague.

“What an admission of weakness by an elected official,” complained one museum trustee in a letter to the editor of Sarasota’s Herald-Tribune after it had published a partial transcript.

From the Land of Arm-Twisting

It is just those strengths and weaknesses--and, indeed, the 43-year-old citrus and cattle heiress’ character itself--in a state known for its arm-twisting politics that have come under minute scrutiny in the days since Secretary of State Harris and her “discretion” began charting the course of U.S. presidential history.

At a time when Democratic Party stalwarts are suggesting Harris is following a script written by Republicans far more powerful than she in making her way through Florida’s crucial presidential balloting, her refusal to buck state Sen. McKay to defend an institution so near to her heart resonates back home.

Throughout the last 10 historic days of decision-making, Harris, as the top election official in the decisive state of Florida, has stridently defended her independence in public statements. She has, however, granted no interviews nor fielded reporters’ questions on the issue.

“She’s got the weight of the world on her, and I guess the jury is still out on whether she’s strong enough to withstand it,” said Ronald Book, a lobbyist and lecturer who donated $2,000 to Harris’ campaign two years ago.

“I think she has the ability to handle this issue. I think she will handle this issue. But it’s going to be debated on and lectured on until your and my lives are over,” Book said.

If there are any moments of self-doubt, Harris can browse through the 400,000 to 500,000 e-mails she has received in the last several days--the vast majority of them described as supportive--and smell the hundreds of bouquets of flowers delivered to her Tallahassee office.

The e-mails and Harris’ phone logs were released by the state Friday in response to public record requests by The Times. There were kudos galore from GOP political operatives, according to the phone logs. “Good job” was the message from Mike Hightower, a Jacksonville lobbyist who raised more than $100,000 for the Bush campaign.

The logs recorded no phone calls last Wednesday and Thursday, the days right after the election when Harris’ office was inundated. Her office could offer no logical explanation for why the calls weren’t documented.

Born Into Politics and a Wealthy Family

Harris’ political life began in earnest nine years ago, with her appointment by Florida’s Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles to the very museum board she had addressed in her office last March. But, by all accounts, Harris had been around politics all her life.

Born in April 1957, the eldest daughter of one of five children spawned by Ben Hill Griffin Jr., Harris grew up in the bucolic central Florida town of Bartow with a horse named Crackers, a high school reputation for hard work and good looks, and a granddad who helped shape the state, its politics and presumably the young Harris.

Before his death at 79 in 1990, Griffin had parlayed a 10-acre wedding present into an empire that included tens of thousands of acres of rich citrus and ranch land. He’d served eight years in the Florida House and four more in the state Senate and once ran unsuccessfully for governor.

Proud of being called a “cracker,” Griffin was noted for his generosity--he donated more than $10 million to the University of Florida for a new football stadium--but even better known for his conservative politics. Early in his career, Griffin tried to close white schools to blacks. Decades later, he quipped to one interviewer, “There’s no way a woman--except in rare instances--can be worth as much as a man.”

When he died, Griffin’s obituary in Miami noted that he was worth well over $300 million and still drove a Jeep with 117,000 miles on it.

By the time Griffin passed on his fortune to a trust and its 18 beneficiaries, Harris already had left the serenity of Bartow, where one local newspaper profiled her this week under the banner headline, “From Bartow to Big Time.” It quoted her mother, Harriett Griffin Harris, as saying, “I believe that growing up in our large family and in the closeness of Bartow helped in the development of her personality.” Her father, George W. Harris Jr., is chairman of the local Citrus and Commercial Bank, and the couple has contributed to several Republican candidates through the years, including to their daughter.

After several years of marketing work for IBM in Tampa, New York and elsewhere, Harris settled in a two-story Colonial on Prospect Street in Sarasota, where she passed her real estate broker’s license exam in 1986 and started working with a small local firm.

It was in Sarasota that her first marriage ended in June 1989 after just four years and, soon after, her political life began--a meteoric career by most standards that ultimately would land her in the eye of today’s presidential hurricane. In 1996 she remarried, to a man she met on a blind date at the Sarasota opera.

For Harris, who had studied art and Spanish in Switzerland and Madrid after graduating from Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, the appointment to the Ringling Museum board seemed a perfect fit, although many museum members were leery at first.

“When she first came onto the board, there was a real strong concern about her,” said one active museum member in Sarasota who asked not to be named. “She was a bundle of nerves, very fast-paced. She spoke rapidly, and there was a sense of, ‘What are you talking about?’ ”

Harris herself conceded her early naivete in a self-effacing assessment of political appointments to the museum board during the March trustees meeting.

“I’m happy to use myself as a bad example,” she told the trustees, adding that she was appointed “at 27 or 28, when I’ve never raised a dime in my life for anything. My family had never given to culture, nor will they. They couldn’t even spell it.

“I was a horrible appointee, and yet the governor put me on the board of trustees. And that simply didn’t make sense. But that was really the level going on at that time.”

It also turned out to be a brilliant mistake.

Success at Museum and at the Polls

Harris soon wowed the board and its thousands of members by taking the lead in organizing Ringling’s annual Un-Gala Gala, a normally break-even fund-raiser that brought in more than $100,000 in donations after Harris applied her marketing skills, went door-to-door and enlisted a small army of her younger-generation friends and volunteers.

Within two years, Harris brought those same skills to bear in her first political campaign with similar results--yet with a distinct and enduring downside.

In her successful primary and general election campaigns for state Senate in 1994, Harris raised and spent more than $500,000--the costliest race in Florida legislative history at the time. But more than $20,000 of those contributions came from a Sarasota insurance company that had wooed her as a champion of business, and it turned out to be illegal.

The company’s founder and several employees were indicted by a federal grand jury and convicted for making illegal campaign contributions. Harris’ campaign manager was named as an unindicted co-conspirator, and her race was cited in a detailed investigative account of the case in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune as “a snapshot of what can happen when a candidate heavily courts money, and gets it.”

The story suggested--and Harris flatly denied--that the contributions were behind her Senate sponsorship of an amendment that helped the company and hurt a competitor. Harris, in fact, insisted that the story was “wrongheaded” and that she had voted often against measures the company endorsed. She insisted she knew nothing about the source of her campaign contributions.

It was a celebrated piece of legislation Harris introduced during her four years in the state Senate that defined her deeply conservative politics. In a year that won her an 86% approval rating from the Christian Coalition of Florida, Harris sponsored a bill requiring minors to get parental permission for abortions; it passed the Legislature before Gov. Chiles vetoed it.

In her hometown of Sarasota, the abortion legislation recalled a local campaign flap that erupted on Halloween night, when the basket of candy for trick-or-treaters on Harris’ front porch was flanked by a photograph of an aborted fetus and a sign: “Abortion kills children.” Harris said her roommate had done it.

And it was Harris’ 1998 campaign for secretary of state that reset the bar both for political fund-raising and campaign fury in statewide elections here.

Not only was Harris outside of Gov. Jeb Bush’s inner circle in 1998 when she opted to run for secretary of state, but Bush opposed her candidacy, endorsing incumbent Republican Sandra Mortham instead. But Harris had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the primary race and enlisted the advice of veteran Republican strategist J.M. “Mac” Stipanovich.

A last-minute blitz of television ads that harshly questioned Mortham’s integrity was reportedly designed by Stipanovich, a former Marine intelligence officer who once likened political campaigns to the Vietnam War. The ads helped Harris win the primary election. A similarly bruising ad series attacking Democratic opponent Karen Gievers as a “liberal who led an extremist group to an ultra-feminist agenda” preceded Harris’ victory in November.

During her two-year tenure in the state Cabinet, Harris didn’t always agree with Gov. Bush. She was one of just two Cabinet members who voted against Bush’s ban on gambling cruise ships docking on state land. Among the gambling ships’ lobbyists: Harris’ former campaign advisor Stipanovich. The ban was overturned in court.

Her first two years in office were marked by her efforts to improve the state’s library system and make Florida the Internet link to Latin America; it won high marks from the Clinton administration.

Although Harris’ public life has been criticized on occasion for high-flying, high-spending ways--she spent about $700,000, half of it taxpayer money, on a Florida Pavilion at the Sydney Olympics this year and now is well known for $400-a-night hotel rooms while promoting Florida business abroad--her private life has been relatively spartan. She bought her modest Tallahassee home last year for just $269,000 and sold her Sarasota Colonial early this year for $400,000, county records show. Her state salary is $106,870 a year.

Yet, like the response by some in Sarasota to her performance at the Ringling Museum trustees meeting, it is Harris’ commitment to such personal issues as the arts and the Ringling Museum, in the face of political pressure, that have been questioned most in her hometown during her two years as secretary of state.

Borrowed Painting Returned Damaged

While campaigning in 1998, Harris said repeatedly that the secretary of state’s job was “perfect” for her. Although she rarely spoke about its role in elections, she consistently cited her love of the arts, her commitment to business and her lack of future political ambition (the job will be eliminated in 2002). Until then, the position oversees all state cultural institutions and mandates promoting Florida business and trade.

“It’s not about climbing the ladder,” she said in one interview. “It’s that I have always been involved in and cared about these issues. It’s all the things I’ve been so passionate about in my life.”

That personal commitment to Florida’s arts and culture came into question after disclosure of the Ringling tape in Sarasota. And her treatment of the museum art she borrowed for her office didn’t help matters.

One of the 15 paintings--Jan Breughel’s 17th century masterpiece “Venus and Cupid at the Forge of Vulcan”--was sent back damaged earlier that year, and the regional newspaper quoted internal museum memos that blamed the cracks in the $500,000 painting on the lack of climate control in Harris’ office.

The unnamed trustee’s letter to the editor commenting on the Harris tape added: “The painting is being restored. But in choosing political expedience over principle, Harris may have damaged her reputation beyond repair.”

Still, reflecting on Harris’ life and times this week after she was catapulted into a role neither she nor any Floridian ever could have imagined, one Ringling member said, “This is a heavily Republican area, and Katherine Harris still has a big following here.

“No matter what happens, I’d bet the next time Katherine comes to Sarasota for an opera opening, she’ll get a standing ovation when she walks in.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Profile: Katherine Harris

* Title: Florida secretary of state.

* Party: Republican.

* Age: 43; born April 5, 1957.

* Education: Bachelor’s degree in history from Agnes Scott College in Atlanta; master’s degree from Harvard University with emphasis on international trade and negotiations.

* Personal: Granddaughter of the late Ben Hill Griffin Jr., a citrus and cattle baron who served in the Florida Senate.

* Career highlights: A one-term state senator known for her support of the arts, she was elected secretary of state in 1998. Before that she was an IBM marketing executive and vice president of a commercial real estate company. She was one of eight co-chairpeople of George W. Bush’s presidential campaign in Florida.

* Family: Married to businessman Sven Anders Axel Ebbeson; one daughter, Louise.