|
Looking For The ‘Huckaboom’
The former governor of Arkansas “carries more baggage than the average 747.”
TAMPA -- The Huckaboom sweeping most of the lower 48 may have reached Florida. A Rasmussen daily poll on Friday showed the personable former Arkansas governor to be the choice of 27 percent of a sample of 685 likely Florida primary voters. Mitt Romney was second at 23 percent, Rudy Giuliani third at 19.
These are stunning numbers considering Giuliani has held a steady 2-1 lead over his nearest rivals in most Florida polls for months. And Giuliani counts on a win in big, red-state Florida January 29 to offset what are sure to be less than astounding performances by him in the smaller early primary and caucus states. He also needs Florida to give him momentum going into the 21 Super-Tuesday primaries Feb. 5. If Huckabee steals a round in Florida it would be Giuliani who is offset, and facing one hell of a hill to climb to be nominated.
If their protestations are to be believed, Giuliani's Florida brain trust isn't too concerned about the latest Rasmussen Florida numbers. Nor were the 400 or so enthusiastic supporters who showed up at the Tampa Convention Center Saturday morning to whoop up "The Nation's Mayor" at a campaign stop.
Bob Martinez of Tampa, a former Florida governor and federal drug czar under George the First, introduced Rudy at the rally and told me before the services that the Rasmussen poll may not be reliable because of its method of collecting data.
Rasmussen has predicted some elections accurately in the past, but Martinez may have a point. Rasmussen calls are automated. Respondents listen to recorded questions and respond by punching in answers into their telephone keypad. How you get a representative sample under these conditions is anybody's guess. It's hard to imagine anyone putting up with this at dinnertime. If I were called away from a grilled steak, ribs, or my wife's four-alarm Thai curry to listen to recorded political questions, I would be looking for #&*#@!! on my keypad.
Rasmussen's Friday numbers were at wide variance with a Quinnipiac poll also taken last week showing his Rudyness with a 30 to 17 lead over Romney and Huckabee still back in the pack.
Whether or not Rasmussen is measuring anything beyond voters' curious willingness to interact with recorded messages (a melancholy development in itself), it would be surprising if the Huckabee boomlet passes over Florida altogether. And Giuliani is having to deal with significant national slippage, most of it thanks to Huckabee.
In due course we'll see if Huckabee turns out to be more than the flavor of the month. Will he become President of the United States? Or will he become the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question?
It will take more than this one surprising poll to convince folks that Rudy has lost his lead in Florida. Huckabee is an intelligent, funny, personable, thoroughly charming guy. And these things count in electoral politics. But he carries more baggage than the average 747, and the scrutiny will be withering now that he holds a national lead in the polls. Besides, he's running for President of the United States, not for Miss Congeniality. Huckabee is more cuddly than Giuliani, or than any of the candidates in either party come to that. But does he have a fastball?
Tampa developer Al Austin, Giuliani's co-finance chair for Florida, puts himself in the "What, me worry?" camp as well. He reiterated the counter-punch strategy, where Rudy takes his lumps in the small states, then does well in Michigan Jan 15, in Florida January 29, and in a bunch of states Feb. 5.
"Super Tuesday will decide who the nominee is," Austin said. "If we do as well as we think we will on that day we're on our way."
Maybe so. In the meantime, Rudy and his campaign are hitting the same themes. The speech I heard Saturday morning was little different from the one I heard in New Hampshire in August. And considering Rudy's record, there's no reason to change.
Rudy is the most tested candidate in the field (on either side). In stark contrast with his primary opponents, Rudy has a record of courage, competence, and accomplishment in perhaps the most difficult executive office short of the presidency, and under the harshest of conditions. Unlike so many elected Republican officials, he has a measurable testosterone level. So there's no reason to get off the theme Giuliani hammered in his Tampa speech: "I've been tested in crisis, I'm ready to lead, and the time is now."
It's a record to run on. It may not take Giuliani all the way, especially if voters become less concerned with national security, a Rudy strong point. But it's what he has. It's considerable. And it appears that he's smart enough to stay with it.
_____________________________________________________________________
Southern Fried Fred
Tampa could probably be described culturally now as Peoria with palm trees.
TAMPA-- Now that Fred Thompson has moved from endless foreplay to actually running for president, there's great interest in seeing how big a bump he gets in the polls for finally coming out.
More than one poll in Florida shows Thompson about dead-even here with national GOP front-runner Rudy Giuliani of New Yawk. Various commentators -- including some Floridians who should know better -- have said Thompson is popular in Florida because he's a fellow Southerner.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Red state Floridians may like Thompson for his conservative views. Or because they thought he was good in Hunt for Red October. Heck, some here may even enjoy listening to his Tennessee drawl. I know I do. But don't let the heat, the humidity, and the fact that we're well below the gnat-line fool you. Florida is not a Southern state, and hasn't been for decades.
Before you hit Orlando going south you've left Dixie behind. OK, I know the entire South is morphing into the Sun Belt, an execrable term, made up by chamber types and other Babbitts. The word grates on the true Southern ear and signifies mainly that the South has become as economically grabby as the North, and nearly as bland. But the change in Florida has been much more dramatic than in other Southern states.
There's still some Southernness in the panhandle area of the Florida (the beach areas there are often referred to as the "Redneck Riviera"), and in many of the state's smaller, interior towns. But the major cities have largely taken on the cultural cast of immigrants from the snowy reaches of the Midwest and the Northeast (Jacksonville less so). There are so many Northeasterners in Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Boca Raton, the area is sometimes called Baja New Jersey.
The second wave of carpetbaggers has been much larger, and some would add has done much more damage, than the first one in Florida. Which view you take on this tectonic civilization shift depends largely on how much you like the fact that more than 18 million people, a majority from the Midwest and the Northeast, are now shoe-horned into the Sunshine State, often rubbing each other the wrong way and getting under each other's feet. Many new arrivals are trying to re-zone the place so no one else can come down.
There were "only" about six million souls in Florida when I graduated (barely) from H.B. Plant High School in Tampa in 1960. A large majority of these people were from Florida or nearby Southern states. Thompson-like drawls were common, though air-conditioning wasn't yet.
Most waitresses in Eisenhower-era Tampa were named Laverne. They called you "honey" and gave you grits with your breakfast without your having to ask for them. Radios were tuned to country stations. People were mostly civil to each other, with nary a "fuggedaboudit," or a "Bada-bing!" to be heard. Kids said "sir" and "ma'am" to grownups. "Dixie" was played at high school pep rallies, sometime after the "Star-Spangled Banner," and everyone stood up and cheered. We also prayed at school and didn't realize we were doing something naughty. Lots of men were named Harlan, Coy, Junior, R.L., Bubba, Buford, Trace, Lonnie, and Cole. Women had two first names, not two last names. No one jogged. When you drank it was usually bourbon. The house wine was iced tea.
Heck, even Miami had its good ole boys before El Jefe Maximo came down out of the mountains in 1959 and stole everything from anyone who had one nickel to rub against another, thereby creating a mass exodus from Cuba to South Florida. Now Miami is the most vibrant city in Latin America, and no one even remembers when the last Southerner left Dade County.
Less agreeable aspects of the Southern life of my boyhood included the dehumanizing strictures of Jim Crow, both as law and as etiquette. These have been written about and commented on exhaustively, and exhaustingly, and there's no point in reviewing them here. Except to say that Florida was Georgia was Alabama in this regard.
But all that Southern business is mostly gone, the bad stuff as well as the good. Because of the predominance of Midwesterners on Florida's west coast, Tampa could probably be described culturally now as Peoria with palm trees. Mobile and Montgomery and Yazoo City (one of my favorite American place names, along with Pascagoula) may still be recognizably Southern in many ways, but you really have to search in contemporary Tampa to find artifacts of Southernness. And don't even get me started on Orlando.
This isn't uniformly bad, and I don't mean to sound too cranky about all this. Some of these folks from elsewhere are quite nice, and I number many of them among my friends. Even poor souls from New York who say "becuaws" for "because," or native Ohioans who say "tock" for "talk." I'm always patient with these newcomers when they try to speak a little Southern but don't even realize that "y'all" is always plural. I know they can't help it. At least they're trying, and many catch on in time. Some have even learned how to blow gnats and say "howdy" at the same time, very helpful in the summer time.
So lets get away from the idea that Florida is, except for geography, Southern. If Fred Thompson is going to prevail in Florida he's going to have to craft appealing and coherent positions on the important issues of the day, and convince voters that he's the leader we need. Regardless of what some clueless commentators seem to think, Thompson won't be able to drawl himself to a win here.
_______________________________________________________
Listen to This, Pilgrim
TAMPA -- Most of the celebrations of John Wayne's centennial took place in May, the month the Duke was born in 1907. But there were three more tips of the cowboy hat to the Duke last month in an unexpected place, the symphony hall.
Three symphony halls to be exact, in the major cities of the Tampa Bay Area, where the Florida Orchestra's first pops program of the season, "A Salute to the Duke," featured music from four of John Wayne's great westerns. The concerts, well-attended and rousing successes by the way, were the brainchild of Richard Kaufman, principal pops conductor of the Florida Orchestra.
Kaufman, a personable fellow who eschews the honorific "maestro" as so much hoo-hah," also regularly conducts the Dallas Symphony, Orange County's Pacific Symphony, and does guest gigs across the country and in Europe. He's conducted and/or recorded with such as the London Symphony Orchestra, The Brandenburg Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. He's a well-respected music man, and obviously a frequent flyer.
What Kaufman also is -- and this is what makes last weekend's events as surprising as they were enjoyable -- is a man of Hollywood. A native and lifelong resident of L.A., it probably increased Kaufman's chances of going into that company-town's main industry that his Youth League baseball coach was Burt Lancaster. Kaufman is convinced the movie Bad New Bears is modeled after his and Lancaster's Youth League team.
It was music, not acting, that that got Kaufman -- who has played the violin since age 7 -- into the flicks. He played for the scores of such classics as Jaws, Close Encounters, Saturday Night Fever, Animal House, and Rooster Cogburn. He's conducted for Andy Williams, Mary Martin, Nanette Fabray, and Art Garfunkel. He's recorded with artists such as Barbara Streisand, John Denver, Burt Bacharach, and Ray Charles. He was music coordinator for MGM for 18 years. He's coached actors in musical roles, folks like Jack Nicholson, Dudley Moore, Tom Hanks, and Susan Sarandon.
All these names and all this pedigree are to establish that Kaufman is a man of Hollywood and a man of the movie industry, an industry, most of whose current members can be counted on to have a view of the world about 180 degrees out from the Duke's. Many of these folks have a pretty jaundiced view of the Duke himself. "John Wayne" is often used as an adjective in contemporary Hollywood, and not a flattering one. So it was a privilege and a pleasure to meet with Kaufman before a rehearsal last week, and to listen to a true fan of the Duke and of western movies, the old westerns before the anti-heroes moved into town.
Kaufman on the Duke:
"I've always been fascinated with John Wayne as an actor. He just had such a strong presence on the screen. Some people followed his politics and thought he was an extraordinary American, and others thought he was out of touch. I've described him as 'Mt. Rushmore with Legs.' I mean, think about Mt. Rushmore and the quality of people there. He'd be right at home there, wouldn't he?
"If you had to choose an entertainer who most embodied patriotism and a love of country, there's no one else you could choose but the Duke. I mean how can you disagree with someone who loved his country, cared about its future, valued its heritage, and who held people accountable who lived in a country that gave them liberty and freedom. He established for many what being 'a real American' was. How many actors have that effect on people?
"We're talking about an actor who had standards in his life, moral and ethical values that he stood by. Most of his movies showed the difference between right and wrong. And today you just don't find that all that often. You find people making a lot of excuses, and trying to find reasons why it's OK to be wrong. Or, if they're wrong, trying to blame somebody else for their being wrong. But John Wayne told is like it was -- absolutely straight ahead."
Exactly so. Why is this so hard for most in today's Hollywood to understand? Tens of millions of regular Americans have been able to figure this out easily enough for more than half a century now. This is part of why the Duke's movies are still being rented, purchased, and watched. And why any list of America's favorite actors always includes the Duke, more than 30 years after he made his last movie (The Shootist -- 1976). For many of a certain age, John Wayne is America.
IN ADDITION TO BEING morality plays and great action stories, the Duke's movies feature some fine music by some first-rate composers. Kaufman and the Florida Orchestra gave us music from The Comancheros, The Alamo, True Grit, and The Cowboys. (That is, after Kaufman asked the audience to remember our servicemen and women overseas and then led the orchestra in a high-octane rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner" -- Duke would have liked that.) The composers were Elmer Bernstein, Dimitri Tiomkin, and John Williams, three of Hollywood's best. Yes, the guy who wrote the music for Star Wars, E.T., and Indiana Jones (Williams) also wrote the music for The Cowboys, one of the Duke's best horse operas.
"I've done this music with the Chicago Symphony, with the Pacific Symphony, and the musicians really enjoy it," Kaufman said. "They get a chance to stretch out and plant their feet and off they go. Some like it better than playing Mahler. It's truly valuable music. It's inspiring, it's exciting, and it can stand by itself without the film and the dialogue and the soundtrack. It's not easy music for the orchestra to play, but it's rousing stuff. It gets your blood flowing. It's very beautiful too."
Right again, as Kaufman and the Florida Orchestra demonstrated in this weekend's concerts. Friday night's performance at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center fetched me in, along with about 700 other Duke fans, to hear the soaring themes and rousing rhythms that supported the Duke's heroic struggles on the silver screen. Not a bad turnout considering it was high-school football night, and that the University of South Florida was playing the biggest game of its football history against West By-God Virginia just a couple of miles away. Like elsewhere in the republic, the old cowpoke hasn't been forgotten in Tampa. Kaufman and the Florida Orchestra did a great job of stoking those fond but old memories.
I don't know if the Florida Orchestra musicians liked playing this cowboy music more than they like playing Mahler. I've heard them play Mahler, and they're very good at this too. But old Gustav had his gloomy side, and his music reflects this. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why he doesn't have an airport named after him like the Duke does.
In the old West there was an expression that denoted an agreeable guy who was skilled at his job and could be depended on to pull his weight and be there when you needed him. The expression was, "He'll do to ride the river with." Surely we could have said that about the Duke. I believe we can say it about Richard Kaufman as well. A Hollywood guy, and a great American. A Bad News Bear who turned out well.
back to front page
|