Cover Story
by jacquelyn horkan, editor
Happy Warriors
Florida’s New Art Of Political War
The last legislative
session may just have been the best ever for the business community. Victories abounded
—tort reform, tax cuts, education reform. But Jon Shebel, president and CEO of
Associated Industries of Florida (AIF), is not satisfied.
"We’re going out there
as if we’re losing," he says.
"There" is the 2000
election battleground, a minefield of hidden strategies, untested campaign reforms, and
trigger-happy partisans. In fact, next year’s campaigns may provide political junkies
with the most titillating election season ever.
To wit: On the national scene,
Floridians will have to choose a new president and a new U.S. senator, the first time
since 1968 that neither high stakes race has included an incumbent candidate. In voting
for school choice and tort reform, the state’s GOP tweaked the noses of two of the
Democratic Party’s most potent benefactors — the teachers’ unions and the
trial lawyers. Insiders expect their national groups to make the Sunshine State a theater
of war in 2000 as they seek to retake lost ground. The 1992 term-limits amendment, if left
standing by the Florida Supreme Court, will create 65 open legislative seats out of the
140 up for re-election. And two new election-related constitutional amendments (see
article on page 24) have redefined traditional election strategies.
To the happy warriors of the
political armies all of this produces an adrenaline surge, a sugar high, a caffeine rush
— fill in your own analogy. To the rest of us, though, it may seem about as exciting
as watching Jell-O gel. But whether you sign the paychecks or simply deposit them, Shebel
has a warning: ignore politics at your own risk.
"Now more than ever,"
he cautions, "business people can’t afford to ignore elections. We’ve got a
bigger opportunity to make an impact, but the potential is also there for people to get
elected who will send our economy back to the dark ages."
BUILDING THE ARSENAL
Every weekday morning, Marian
Johnson drives from her home in Cairo, Georgia, to her office at AIF’s Tallahassee
headquarters, pours herself a cup of coffee, and checks out whether anyone new has
announced his candidacy.
Before 1994, when Johnson joined
AIF, the association’s existing political infrastructure was limited to political
contributions, fundraising, and campaign services such as the production of television
commercials for candidates. Recognizing the potential risks and opportunities of the 1992
term-limits amendment, Shebel decided to augment those efforts. He embarked on a search
for someone who could build a powerhouse political unit to rival that of the trial
lawyers, AIF’s arch-enemies. He finally chose the designer of the trial lawyers’
machine — Marian Johnson — to build his own.
"We wanted the best. We went
out and got the best," Shebel says.
Johnson left the Florida Academy
of Trial Lawyers in 1992 after spending seven years there. "I just felt that my
political beliefs didn’t correspond with their political beliefs," she says.
Johnson’s task was to put
together an apparatus to coordinate the political efforts of the business community. The
AIF political group, given the name Florida Business United (FBU), was anchored by the
contributions and input of the association’s most politically active members.
Although she joined AIF midway through the 1994 election cycle, she quickly put together a
program to identify and support pro-business candidates. She prepared a 20-page issue
questionnaire and mailed it to potential candidates. She then organized a six-city swing
of candidate interviews that gave AIF members an opportunity to interview 237 of the 313
legislative hopefuls.
FBU’s questionnaires and the
interviews helped the association and its members select the candidates to support. The
combined contributions from AIF’s political action committee, prosaically named
AIFPAC, and AIF’s affiliated companies that year totaled $249,274; 92 percent of the
supported candidates won their races. In 1998 the record had improved to $821,125 and 95
percent.
Johnson also organized a
high-profile polling program. During the six weeks leading up to the November elections in
1994, AIF released weekly polls of public opinion surrounding the election. Unlike other
statewide polls, AIF’s showed that Jeb Bush presented a significant challenge to
then-incumbent Gov. Lawton Chiles. Some in the Chiles camp later admitted that the AIF
poll results were a shock that sent the campaign staff into high gear. The reliability of
Johnson’s polling data gave instant credibility to the fledgling FBU.
Each year Johnson expanded on the
previous year’s successes, all in preparation for the big challenge of 2000.
FILLING THE VACUM
Two of the primary foes of the
free-enterprise system — trial lawyers and unions — lack the sheer size and
financial muscle of the business community, but they make up for that disadvantage with
qualities that are more important in the political arena: cohesion and a limited agenda.
Both groups rely on government to supply their financial and political power; thus, they
have a greater motivation to make sure that they get their supporters elected. If
anything, FBU was created to fill the vacuum that existed in opposition to those two
groups.
The purpose of any group’s
political program is to turn the balance of power in its favor. The threat of term limits
is the loss of reliable pro-business votes.
The opportunity is the loss of
reliable anti-business votes. The challenge of term limits is to find a stream of
candidates to feed the constant turnover.
Through FBU, the business
community is seeking to consolidate its hold on its existing favorable tilt in the balance
of legislative power, an advantage that is tenuous at best.
"If the court overturns term
limits," says Johnson, "we’ll just have to take a more aggressive approach
for the legislators we want out."
With or without term limits,
Johnson has spent the last several years developing the tools she’ll need to fight
her battles wisely. One of those tools is a proprietary voter database compiled from
several different public information databases. The database, nicknamed TVE (for Total
View Equation), gives Johnson a household-by-household snapshot of every voting precinct
in the state. By studying the TVE data, Johnson has been able to target those districts
that will become the major battlegrounds in 2000, along with an image of the kinds of
candidates who can win there.
For example, House District 7
encompasses four complete counties and parts of four others. While Democrats control party
registration 70 percent to 30 percent, voters there prefer conservatives; Jeb Bush won the
district in his losing campaign against Lawton Chiles in 1994. Johnson says the perfect
candidate for District 7 would be a popular conservative businessman living in Jackson
County, where the highest percentage of voters resides.
Some of the data reveal
surprises. "There are some districts that year after year elect Democratic
representatives by a wide margin," says Johnson. "But if you look more closely,
you’ll find that year after year they elect Republican sheriffs because the
Republican party represents law and order. That tells me that we could pull off an upset
with the right Republican candidate and the right message."
After picking the districts to
target and finding the right candidates to run in those races, AIF’s political team
is ready with the kind of support and resources to help those candidates win. Sometimes
it’s as simple as a word of advice.
Shebel remembers a frantic phone
call in the closing days of a campaign a few years ago. It was a candidate desperate for
four $5,000 contributions so that he could put a phone bank in place to remind his
supporters to vote. Shebel asked Johnson what she thought about the request.
"Right away I could tell
that he was asking for too much money," recalls Johnson. "He couldn’t have
spent $20,000 calling every Republican in his district twice."
Then she checked her campaign
database. The candidate had already paid for a phone bank. Shebel called back and advised
the candidate that he was a victim of overspending campaign consultants.
"There are a lot of
consultants out there who pad their expenses with the campaign contributions we
make," says Shebel. "That’s why we want to help the people we support keep
from wasting their money and ours."
With more than 30 years of
experience as a campaign manager and political consultant, Johnson knows all the tricks of
the trade, and how to spot them.
"An experienced campaign
professional can usually look at the expenditure reports and tell you the outcome of an
election," she says. "The amount of contributions really doesn’t matter as
much as how the money is spent."
POLITICAL SPEECH
While the elections are still a
year away, Shebel has begun amassing a war chest to keep control of the Legislature in
conservative hands.
"If we don’t do
this," he says, "we’re abandoning the field to the people who favor the
kind of tax and regulatory policies that strangle prosperity."
Shebel’s goal is to exceed
the $6.1 million spent by AIF and its member companies in 1998.
"As we get closer to the
term limit-elections, a lot of people are finally waking up to the challenge and that
means we’re competing for business dollars," says Shebel. "But we’ve
got an advantage because we’ve spent five years preparing for this and they’re
just getting started."
Shebel and Johnson are building a
field team of party operatives to provide top-notch and cost-effective campaign services
to selected candidates in crucial races. Coordinating the Democratic forces is Barney
Bishop, a former Florida Democratic Party executive director, now the president and CEO of
the Windsor Group. On the Republican side is Tom Slade, past-chairman of the Florida GOP
who last year formed the Tallahassee power-house consulting firm of Tidewater Consulting,
Inc.
"The political parties are
going to be spending most of their energy on the presidential and U.S. Senate races,"
says Johnson. "We’re planning to fill the void that will exist with so many
legislative races at stake."
Shebel acknowledges that while
the two national races have a higher profile, the business community has more at stake in
the state campaigns. "When it comes to putting food on the table and paying the
bills," he says, "I’m more interested in the legislative races."
He also plans to get AIF more
involved in issue advocacy during and after the 2000 session. "We’ll run T.V.,
radio, and newspaper ads letting voters know how their lawmakers voted on key economic
issues."
While money is a key ingredient
in his plans, Shebel also hopes to increase the political involvement of business owners
and managers. "My advice is: if you’re involved now, get more involved. If
you’re not involved, now is the time to get started because the stakes are
high."
A SPECIAL INTEREST IN ECONOMIC LIBERTY
Johnson, a deeply religious
woman, says she came close to abandoning the world of politics a few years ago because it
seemed overpopulated with unsavory characters. "Then I thought, if I get out,
I’m leaving something important to people who don’t deserve the
responsibility."
So she stayed, one of the happy
warriors of politics, that special breed of cheerful combatants who savor the minutae, the
fighting, and the purpose of campaigning.
From the more Machiavellian
aspects of the political battleground can spring a cynicism about the process. But that
cynicism merely throws a thin cloak over the battle of ideas waged during campaigns —
the battles over how to secure our economic and political liberties.
Although speaking in a different
context, Vaclav Klaus, prime minister of the Czech Republic from 1992 to 1997, perhaps
best summed up the importance of political involvement. During his lecture on Liberty and
the Rule of Law for the Heritage Foundation, Klaus spoke of the European Unification
process, the major beneficiaries of which are rent-seeking bureaucrats. He noted that the
majority of Europeans, "who live in a nirvana of unconsciousness ... who maximize the
pleasures coming from a relatively easy life," are unaware of the "strong rivals
and competitors" to liberty.
In the face of that threat Klaus
cautions, "There is no need for pessimism, but there is also no room for passivity
and inactivity. We have to continue the endless fight for liberty and the rule of law, and
I am sure we will do it."
July/August 1999 -- Florida Business Insight, PO Box 784, Tallahassee, Fla.
32302
(850)224-7173, insight@aif.com
