Quotes of the Day
During the week, Tim Mahoney, the Democratic candidate for Florida's 16th
congressional district, is a millionaire investment banker in Boca Raton,
Fla. On the weekends he plays cattle rancher at his spread west of Lake
Okeechobee. Given that just a week ago Mahoney trailed six-term Republican
incumbent Mark Foley by double digits in the polls, it seemed politics was
destined to be just another of his expensive hobbies. But since Foley
dropped out of the race last Friday — felled by the growing scandal over
inappropriate e-mails he sent to young congressional pages — Mahoney suddenly
appears to have all but won a seat that had come to look like a G.O.P. birthright. "I'm going
to work to clean up cronyism and corruption in Congress," Mahoney tells
TIME, sounding already like a victor in a hotel ballroom, "and work to bring
rationality back to the way it does things."
Negron, 45, a conservative and fast-rising Florida pol from the coastal town of Stuart, Fla., who recently chaired the House budget committee in Tallahassee, was brought in largely because he still has a sizable war chest, about $1.5 million, left over from his aborted run this year for state Attorney General. But he's making it dramatically clear that distancing himself as harshly as possible from Foley — and even calling for the heads of congressional (read G.O.P.) leaders who may have covered up for Foley — will be key to his come-from-behind prospects.
Saying he was "shocked" and "outraged" by the revelations about Foley — who this week returned to Florida to enter rehab for alcoholism — Negron visibly choked up on Monday when he was reminded that the pages involved in the Foley scandal were about the age of his own teenage children. And he insisted that "we need to know what happened, when it happened, who knew about [Foley's conduct]. If people knew about it and didn't report it, they should be held accountable... It's very offensive."
Mahoney, of course, won't let Negron have the Foley outrage platform all to himself in the race. "The salacious part I have no interest in talking about, though I pray for Foley and his family and the people he involved in this," says Mahoney. "But trust in government is a genuine issue here. We need to have the Speaker [of the House] and the House leadership address this, from the perspective of parents and not politicians — and if we find out there were calculated decisions made to protect seats and power, then the chips need to fall where they may."
Making things worse for Negron is the fact that Mahoney, 50, of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., is the kind of conservative Democrat whom many Republicans in the G.O.P.-leaning 16th District, which includes Palm Beach and the state's eastern Treasure Coast, can stomach more comfortably in the voting booth. Mahoney, in fact, was himself a Republican until he decided to challenge Foley last year. Born in New Jersey and raised an Irish Catholic Democrat, he became a Reagan Republican in the 1980s; his platform is heavy on economic-related issues like the growing financial struggles of small businesses in Florida. But he returned to the Democrats, he says, because of the Bush Administration and the G.O.P.'s hard turn to the right. "I realized their Republican values were not my Republican values," he says. "But I can communicate with both groups. The biggest qualification for a House candidate used to be your ability to work across the aisle and solve problems. I want to restore that."
That's one reason why conservative Democrat and former Florida Senator Bob Graham had endorsed Mahoney. Still, it wasn't until Foley exited that the Democratic national election committee declared the 16th a "blue" district worth fighting for. Democratic leaders like Massachusetts Senator John Kerry swooped in over the weekend to promote Mahoney. And though his campaign won't say yet how much national money has poured into Mahoney's coffers since last Friday, a campaign spokeswoman says it's "more than sufficient" to keep Mahoney on the TV-ad offensive throughout October.
Negron's campaign, meanwhile, will have to spend less time going after Mahoney and considerably more effort educating the district's voters about the strange electoral situation ahead. Palm Beach County G.O.P. Chairman Sid Dinerstein says the party is gearing up a major campaign of direct mail and polling place signs, and he believes he can still count on the party's base. "As a party we're still motivated," Dinerstein insists, but admitted that the "anti-Foley backlash" will be a large obstacle. Negron says his most important task will be to remind G.O.P. voters "to vote Republican" and not anti-Foley. "I think voters are pretty smart and pretty sophisticated, and I think they can figure [this situation] out."
As a result, both Negron and Mahoney say they hope to run as normal a race as possible — which, these days, may well mean the same mudslinging and attack ads that will characterize most other House contests. Mahoney had already taken Foley to court for defamation over an ad that accused Mahoney of questionable business practices; and Mahoney had countered by calling on Foley to "disclose how he became a millionaire as an elected official." Negron this week pounced on last weekend's visits from star Dems to insist Mahoney is just a liberal in disguise. "The voters of District 16," he said, "don't want a Congressman who's been hanging out with John Kerry." That may be true. But the question is whether voters will want to stay even further away from the alternative, a party that is too closely tied to Mark Foley.
—with reporting by Barbara Liston/Orlando and Michael Peltier/Tallahassee
- TIM PADGETT/MIAMI
- Until last week, no one was giving millionaire Democratic candidate Tim Mahoney much of a chance in his race for Congress. Now he's the front-runner