Mud Is Flying in Florida Senate Race
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WASHINGTON – Even by Florida’s roughhouse standards, the U.S. Senate race to replace the retiring Senator Graham has descended into an ugly tussle.
Judging by an ad unveiled this week by the Democratic candidate, Betty Castor, blasting Republican Mel Martinez for being soft on terrorism, the mud-slinging is likely to worsen.
The ad, which began airing in Tallahassee yesterday and is to be broadcast statewide today, accuses Mr. Martinez of “allowing” George W. Bush four years ago to campaign and be photographed with suspected terrorist, Sami Al-Arian, then a tenured professor at the University of South Florida, where Ms. Castor was president.
“As chair of George Bush’s Florida campaign, Martinez allowed suspected terrorist Sami Al-Arian to campaign with Bush,” the ad’s narrator says, “years after Al-Arian was suspended by Betty Castor.” The spot concludes: “Can we believe anything he says?”
Mr. Martinez, President Bush’s former housing and urban development secretary, has castigated his Democrat rival frequently on the campaign trail and in ads for only suspending Mr. Al-Arian and not firing him promptly when claims first surfaced in the 1990s of his ties to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a group responsible for suicide bombings in Israel.
Ms. Castor maintains that without an arrest she could not fire Mr. Al-Arian, arguing that her successor at the university was only able to do so last year after Mr. Al-Arian was indicted on terrorism finance charges. The case is awaiting trail.
Mr. Martinez’s campaign dubs the new Democratic ad “a complete fabrication,” arguing that it is an attempt by Ms. Castor to dodge her “failed leadership” in dealing with a suspected terrorist cell on the USF campus.
“Mel Martinez never allowed Sami Al-Arian to do anything, unlike Betty Castor, who allowed Al-Arian to operate on her campus for six years,” said a Martinez campaign spokeswoman, Jennifer Coxe.
The barbed exchanges about Mr. Al-Arian are attracting even more national attention to a Senate race that both parties suspect could determine whether the Republicans maintain their slim Senate majority.
“This is a national race,” Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee said while campaigning recently in Tampa for Mr. Martinez, who was handpicked by presidential adviser Karl Rove to run for the seat.
Most opinion polls show the race between Mrs. Castor and Mr. Martinez as a toss-up, and pollsters are currently divided about who has the lead. Ms. Castor led 51% to 45% in a recent Gallup Poll, while a Quinnipiac University poll gave Mr. Martinez 48% to Ms. Castor’s 47%.
Political analysts think the Florida Senate race will have a bearing on the presidential contest, and vice versa. Historically, the coattail effect in the Sunshine State from a presidential ticket tends to be strong. White House strategists hope Mr. Martinez, a Spanish-speaking Cuban immigrant who came to the states when he was teenager, can help the president, too.
They are looking to Mr. Martinez, who served three years in the Bush cabinet, to boost Mr. Bush’s standing with Democratic Hispanic voters. That holds true especially with Puerto Rican, Mexican, and other non-Cuban Hispanics, who have been pouring into the state and are now equal in number to Cuban-Americans, who traditionally favor the GOP. The Hispanic newcomers tend to be poor and politically inclined toward the Democrats, but their party affiliation is weak.
Hispanics account for 14% of the state’s total vote and, with Florida politically polarized, only slight inroads into the non-Cuban vote by the GOP or into the Cuban-American vote by the Democrats could alter the outcome.
Four years ago, a majority of Puerto Rican-Americans backed Vice President Gore in the presidential race, but two years later, most switched parties and voted for the Spanish-speaking Jeb Bush, whose wife is a native of Mexico, in his successful gubernatorial campaign. The Bush campaign hopes Mr. Martinez will do the same for the GOP’s presidential ticket.
Mr. Martinez describes himself as a “compassionate conservative” and hasn’t hesitated to link his fortunes with the president, touting his ties to Mr. Bush in ads and in his regular stump speech. “I’m proud of my association with the president,” he tells voters.
The Castor campaign has tried to turn Mr. Martinez’s alliance with the president into a liability for the Republican, labeling him as a “follower.”
“Florida deserves better than a rubber-stamp senator,” said Florida Democratic Party Chairman Scott Maddox. “Bob Graham made a career out of being independent-minded and being an advocate for Florida first and above party and politics.”
Ms. Castor, a gray-haired 63-year-old whose primary election opponents wrote her off as a “nice lady” before she demolished them, has sought to compete with Mr. Martinez for the Cuban-American vote and is courting more recently arrived Cuban immigrants, who polls suggest disapprove of the president’s clamping down on travel to Cuba.
She says the restrictive policy “hurts families, not Fidel Castro.”
In terms of muscular campaigning, neither candidate has pulled any punches, and both have overshot on occasion. During the primaries Mr. Martinez earned a rebuke from Governor Bush for accusing a former conservative congressman, Bill McCollum, of being anti-family and the “darling of the homosexual extremists.”
Last month, he infuriated law-enforcement groups when his campaign sent a statement to Cuban-American radio stations describing as “armed thugs” the federal officers who seized Elian Gonzalez in 2000 to return him to his father in Cuba.
And Ms. Castor’s negative pounding of Mr. Martinez on the Al-Arian issue may be doing her harm with swing voters, pollsters say.
Both Senate candidates have raised about $5 million apiece and the national parties intend to spend the state maximum allowed under federal election laws – $1.9 million each.
Party stalwarts are flocking to the state to shore up their candidates. A former New York mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, and the president’s mother, Barbara Bush, have stumped for Mr. Martinez, and retired General Wesley Clark and Senator Lieberman have deployed for Ms. Castor.
Both Senate nominees have campaigned in the state with their presidential and vice-presidential candidates, and in the remaining weeks Mr. Bush and Senator Kerry are scheduled to return.