An American Son: A Memoir (24 page)

I closed the speech by telling the hypothetical story of a young woman.

When I finished, I noticed several people in the audience apparently tearing up, including our lieutenant governor, Toni Jennings. It had been the most powerful part of my remarks and I had almost been convinced not to include it in the speech. All of my advisers had opposed using it, worried it made me sound like a Democrat. Only one person had felt strongly I should keep it in the speech: Jeanette. Not for the first nor the last time, I was glad I had listened to her.

I wanted to use the story to achieve two objectives. The first was to remind the members we had an obligation to use our time in public office to make a positive difference in the lives of the people we served. The second was to emphasize the importance of empowerment and upward mobility, and make that the purpose of our work.

We hung up pictures in my office of Florida’s “Unsung Heroes,” ordinary people throughout our state who were making positive differences in others’ lives. They were a reminder to us, and to anyone who entered our office, that our obligation was to the people of Florida—not to politics, not to power, but to people.

I knew from my own life’s experience that the purpose of my parents’ lives was to help their children achieve the dreams they had been unable to achieve for themselves. In my campaigns, I learned that was not just my family’s story but the common aspiration of people everywhere. The opportunity to give your children the chance to do what you could not do is what makes America special. I wanted Republicans to be defined by how well we helped every mother and father in Florida give their children a decent chance to live the best of their dreams.

The day was and always will be a special memory for me. It was obviously a milestone in my public career. My parents were there. They saw their son enjoy the success and distinction they had dreamed for me and sacrificed everything for so I would have the opportunity to attain it. My children were there, as I hope to be with them someday to witness their successes.

My speech was broadcast to Cuba on Radio Martí. I don’t know how many people in the country of my ancestors actually heard it, but if only one person had, I would have been very pleased. For I am the child of immigrants, an American with a history that began somewhere else and with a special place in his heart for the land of lost dreams his parents had left so their children wouldn’t lose theirs.

B
Y THE TIME I WAS SWORN IN AS SPEAKER OF THE FLORIDA House of Representatives on November 20, 2006, I was certain I had done everything right. I had planned my transition carefully. I had designed a new leadership structure for the house that would give greater authority to and demand greater accountability from its members. I had initiated and led an outreach to Florida voters to solicit ideas for an ambitious policy agenda. I had hired some of the most talented political professionals in the state as my staff. I wanted my speakership to be innovative, bold and accomplished, and I didn’t want to waste a minute of my term on anything that didn’t advance that ambition.

Politics, however, doesn’t operate with that degree of efficiency, no matter how prepared and determined you are. It’s a great business for teaching humility, even if you don’t believe you require a lesson in the virtue.

I chose twelve members to serve as my leadership team. We met regularly in different parts of the state in the months preceding my swearing in, occasionally holding focus groups with voters. The focus groups helped us communicate the policies we would pursue in the coming year. More important, they gave us the opportunity to listen to voters’ concerns. At the time, Florida’s economy and the national economy were still strong. Yet there was a real sense of unease among the voters in our focus groups, as if
they anticipated an imminent downturn. They sensed that rising property insurance rates and rising property taxes were the edge of an oncoming economic storm that would soon engulf them. The intensity of their worries influenced the selection of our policy priorities as much as it influenced the language we used to advocate for them.

I had been very deliberate in choosing the members of my leadership. I knew I would depend on each of them for the support and counsel I needed to be the kind of speaker I wanted to be. But I would lose two of them before I had even taken the oath of office.

Jeff Kottkamp was the first to go. He had been one of my rivals in my race for speaker, but I admired his ability and trusted him. That summer, Charlie Crist chose him to be his running mate. I was happy for him, but sorry to lose him, and I had to scramble to find a replacement.

Before they decided on Jeff, the Crist team had approached me to see if I would agree to be vetted for the lieutenant governor’s nomination. I don’t think they seriously considered me—I suppose it was an attempt to flatter the incoming speaker of the house. I turned them down. Had I been interested, and had word got out I was under consideration, it would have created chaos among house Republicans as members scrambled to join the race to replace me as speaker.

My decision would prove fortunate for another reason. Had I agreed to be vetted, I would have given the Crist campaign an enormous head start in their opposition research when I decided to oppose him for the U.S. Senate nomination three years later.

Losing Jeff was a blow. But it was the loss of another member of my leadership team that would be one of the most painful experiences of my entire political career. Ralph Arza and I hadn’t always gotten along. We had once had the same ambitions and viewed each other as rivals. But we eventually became close friends and allies. Ralph had been one of my most loyal and active supporters. Ours was a genuine friendship and not, as political friendships can be, an acquaintanceship of mutual convenience. My nephew Landy dates Ralph’s oldest daughter.

Ralph had gotten into a political tug of war with the Miami superintendent of schools. The dispute turned ugly when several people claimed Ralph had used a racial slur when referring to the superintendent, who was African American. One of his accusers was a fellow Republican member of
our Miami delegation. And when in October of 2006 Ralph left a voice mail for a fellow legislator in which he used the same slur he was accused of using before, he was forced to withdraw his bid for reelection.

I wanted the house to operate differently than it had in the past, when the speaker had so much authority that members could always assign the blame for any failure to the “fourth floor”—code for the speaker’s office. The speaker had always decided which committees would have jurisdiction over legislation, and his decision could mean life or death for a bill. If he assigned it to one or two committees, a bill had a decent chance of passing. If he assigned it to five or six committees, the sixty-day legislative session would expire before all the committees had disposed of the bill.

I decided to relinquish the most important power a speaker possessed, and give it to the members of my leadership team who would chair the house committees. Committee chairmen would decide which subcommittee would consider a bill or if the full committee would assume that responsibility. I combined the budget and policy authorities in each committee as well. Committees would now receive a budget allocation and they would decide how to fund their policies within the limits of their allocation.

Under my speakership, committee chairmen would have more power than ever before, but a greater share of responsibility as well, and greater accountability. I trusted the leaders I had chosen. I had spent a lot of time with them during the months before I was sworn in, and I had a good sense of their abilities and interests, which informed my decisions about which responsibilities to assign them.

A series of devastating storms in Florida over the last few years had nearly wiped out the private property insurance market in the state, and the few companies that were still offering property insurance were charging exorbitant rates. It was the biggest political issue in Florida. Just weeks after I was sworn in as speaker, the new governor, Charlie Crist, called the legislature into special session to pass his proposal to resolve the crisis. It was a purely political remedy. He wanted to go to war with the insurance companies. He wanted to give the state-run insurance carrier the authority to compete in the private insurance market. He didn’t worry about the long-term consequences of his approach. He knew in the short term the move would be met with widespread approval from Floridians who had become very angry with insurance companies. The longer-term
consequences of his solution, however, could make them even angrier. If the public carrier, which was, of course, subsidized by the state, was unable to pay claims after another devastating storm or series of storms, taxpayers would have to cover the shortfall.

The politics of opposing the governor’s plan were daunting. A newly elected Republican governor with the support of Republicans and Democrats in the Florida Senate would accuse any member of the house who opposed his proposal of being in the pocket of the hated insurance industry.

We tried to modify the bill with some small successes. We limited the public carrier’s ability to expand, and got everyone to agree that the measure would be temporary. When the private market recovered and rates came down, the public carrier would begin to exit the private market. But other than these small changes, the legislation gave the governor most of what he wanted. The house leadership team decided to take the small concessions we had gotten, pass the bill and live to fight another day.

Nothing seemed to go smoothly in my first months as speaker. I learned that the press covers the speaker of the house differently than they cover the speaker in waiting. The fun started just a few days after I was sworn in.

During the transition, outgoing speaker Allan Bense had asked us for our input on making improvements to the house office complex. We made several suggestions, one of which was to turn an unused, nondescript space on the third floor into a members-only dining room. The space already had a kitchen, and the only improvements required were to knock down a wall and furnish it with plastic tables and chairs. We had two purposes for making the suggestion. The first was simply to give members a place where they could buy breakfast or lunch without being surrounded by lobbyists.

The second reason was to help improve bipartisan comity in the legislature. Many members hardly knew each other personally. In the era of term limits, members simply weren’t around long enough to form close relations with members of the other party. Most knew one another only from debates on the floor or in committee. The house had become less civil than it should be, and we thought a dining room open to all members might serve as a place where legislators from both parties could get to know one another better, which might improve the civility of the place. Anticipating some criticism in the press, we showed the new dining room to
reporters before I was sworn in. None of them seemed particularly interested in it.

Changes we had made to the committee structure in the house also necessitated some changes to house offices. I had created a position of Democratic ranking member on the committees, and gave Minority Leader Dan Gelber the authority to choose his ranking members—an authority no speaker that I know of had ever given the leader of the opposition before. But now we needed office space for the new ranking members in the committee suites or near them. And because we had combined budget and policy authority in the committees, we had given the committees more staff, which also required additional office space. The only change I made to my own office was to remove a spiral staircase that connected the speaker’s office to the majority leader’s office.