Editor’s note: WorldNetDaily is pleased to have a content-sharing agreement with Insight magazine, the bold Washington publication not afraid to ruffle establishment feathers. Subscribe to Insight at WorldNetDaily’s online store and save 71 percent off the cover price.
The national media tried their best to depict Katherine Harris as a “partisan hack” during the vote recount following the 2000 presidential election. As Florida’s secretary of state, Harris was right in the Center of the Storm, which is the name of the new book she has written about the 36-day recount and her weathering of that storm. The book appeared as Harris was the favorite to replace retiring Republican Rep. Dan Miller of Florida’s 13th District in the U.S. House of Representatives.
At the height of its anti-Harris campaign, the media described her as an appointed official subject to the whims of partisan interests. That was untrue: Harris was elected to office and worked scrupulously to be fair and balanced. They said that as a Florida state senator, the job she held before being elected secretary of state, Harris had done nothing memorable – another deep misrepresentation and one that could have been corrected by the merest glance at her record, which was that of a very active state legislator deeply involved in policy-making and the sponsor of a great deal of successful legislation. The list of untrue charges and innuendo was a long one. Partisan Democrats and liberal polemicists questioned her intelligence (Harris is a graduate of the prestigious Agnes Scott College and holds a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard University). They made fun of the way she dressed and the makeup she wore in vicious (and very catty) terms that seemed right out of an old “Saturday Night Live” sketch.
The New York Times led the pack of those laboring to picture her in unflattering terms, at one time running a 13,000-word article on her that repeated every nasty allegation, yet even former Clinton staffer George Stephanopoulos said it broke no new ground.
Harris’ book discusses these trials and how she handled them. The book, she writes modestly in the introduction, “offers a glimpse into the heart and the soul of a rather ordinary woman who found herself amidst an extraordinary maelstrom, who in consequence had to resolve for herself what really matters most in life.”
Insight: Looking back, with the advantage of hindsight, is there anything you would do differently? Anything you would alter about the way you handled the vote-counting crisis in Florida?
Harris: I know that I followed the law exactly and that none of my detractors has yet been able to point to one letter of the law that I did not follow. I did the right thing and I sleep very well at night.
In that first 48 to 72 hours following the election, no one knew what was going to happen, and no one wanted to make a precipitous move. We carefully followed the law.
It was a very exciting time in which everything was happening at once. High-profile national figures were getting involved. Things were moving fast. I turned to my husband and I said, “What am I going to do?” And my husband – who just had become a citizen of the United States – replied, “It’s simple: You must exercise the most extraordinary integrity because you have to live with yourself for the rest of your life.”
Q: That’s not so simple. There are always many paths that can be taken.
A: We certainly didn’t know the implications of what was happening, even three days in! There could have been strategizing; there might have been a “strategy.” But the issue for us, in the Florida Department of State, was to stay completely separate from either camp [Bush or Gore]. To do that we decided that we would not allow any strategizing among our staff and the political parties.
Of course we were available for any legal questions. But it was my husband who set the course, and he was the only one I heard say what he said. Real character is rare in a world in which there are so many for whom personal integrity means nothing and the ends justify the means.
Q: It must have been deeply frustrating to deal with a press that wanted to believe the worst about you, and which was so lazy that it accepted as fact false information that easily could have been checked – like the notion the media had that you had been appointed secretary of state rather than elected.
A: Oh, it was preposterous! They blatantly printed rumors and innuendo as facts – and not just in the tabloids or as opinion in editorials, but as news reported as fact. That I was not elected was one. Another was that I was appointed by [Florida Gov.] Jeb Bush. Then there was the nonsense that I could start or stop a recount when in essence that decision belongs to a court. And they’ve also said that Florida and Florida alone made these terrible election blunders, when what occurred in Florida had festered across the nation for decades.
Q: What do you mean by festered?
A: No one would address these concerns because no one had the political will to deal with them. By definition, if someone is elected, they get elected based on the laws that existed when they were elected, and they tend to think the system that elected them is without fault. Furthermore, with such limited resources, it is very difficult to build a political consensus for election reform when you’re fighting to advance children’s issues, senior issues and everything in between, but also want to spend, as in Florida’s case, $32 million on a new voting system. It just didn’t rise to the level of necessity.
Q: Another misrepresentation about you was that as a Florida state senator you didn’t initiate much legislation during your four years there. One reporter who covered the Legislature said she could not remember a single bill you had offered that passed, and a lot of people accepted this as fact.
A: In fact, I personally sponsored and led the passage of more than 100 bills. The average for a senator is 10 bills a year. When I ran for the state Senate, we knocked on thousands of household doors and talked and listened to thousands of people, and I heard from them about the challenges they faced and their dreams. So I went to the state Senate with many ideas about programs I wanted to introduce.
Q: What are some of the bills on which you worked that were passed into law and on which you look back with pride?
A: For one, I sponsored merit pay for teachers. We were losing some of our best teachers to posts as administrators because they weren’t being amply honored and rewarded for extraordinary teaching.
Teachers were rewarded according to the amount of time they had put into acquiring their own education. But it did not necessarily follow that this made them gifted teachers.
Then there was my legislation that set up merit scholarships. And I sponsored bills passed in areas such as care for babies addicted through their mothers to crack cocaine. There were bills for penalties on stealing cellphone numbers. We went after white-collar crime in a lot of different ways, such as strengthening what damages may be claimed.
Q: In the chapter in your book that’s entitled “It’s Amazing What You Can Accomplish if You Do Not Care Who Receives the Credit,” you write about how things are accomplished in politics by being a team player.
A: I learned the principles I put into my book the hard way – they’re not Howdy-Doody anecdotes. Once I began proposing these ideas the committee chairmen began to adopt them into their committee bills. At first it was annoying because I had worked so hard doing the research. But I learned that if you don’t care who gets the credit, you can do amazing things.
Q: Were you always interested in politics?
A: I grew up in a political family, but I really did not like politics. I never wanted to be in the field. My friends used to say, “Oh, you’ll marry a senator one day.” They never thought I would become one.
I was a Lyndon Baines Johnson intern in Washington. While I very much enjoyed my experience on the House side, I was disillusioned by the process and the things I saw on the Senate side.
Q: Disillusioned in what way?
A: I was very young and idealistic. It was a real shock for a young woman who grew up in a rural setting and with high ethical and moral standards learned from traditional parents. I never had seen those values challenged, and it was good to be reassured through experience that our family’s values truly were mine as well.
Q: That’s the same feeling that you had after your 36-day ordeal with the recount, isn’t it?
A: Now that I’m on the other side of that experience, I know that integrity is tested not only by doing the right thing when no one else is looking but also by doing it calmly when the whole world is watching and you’re right in the middle of the storm.
But you know what? Character still is built and tested on a moment-by-moment basis, in day-to-day activities, in the small things. If you can’t be honest, if you don’t have integrity in the little things, it corrupts the whole. I’ve believed that from childhood, and it helped me remain steady during the long recount.
Q: You came to look upon the experience as an opportunity to undertake election reform, didn’t you?
A: This did create a unique opportunity, and Florida is leading the nation on election reform, according to [University of Virginia political-science professor] Larry Sabato. The Florida Legislature passed virtually every aspect of my [election-reform] bill.
And we also funded it. In the most recent election cycle, we put $6 million into a set-aside for voter education and for testing. Even so, some did experience problems. It is amazing what can happen: In some cases they didn’t give keys to poll workers to admit them into the buildings, and in others they didn’t plug the election systems into the electrical outlet.
Q: But won’t human error always be a problem no matter what steps are taken to eliminate it?
A: Certainly, which is why test runs, trial runs, are significant and can make a difference.
To understand Florida elections it is necessary to understand the state’s unique system of elections governance. This is something the national press never understood. We’re a very decentralized system. The supervisors of elections are constitutional officers in each of the 67 counties and, consequently, they have total autonomy over their budget designs and their elections systems as well as over who is added or taken off the voter rolls. In this last election cycle, 65 of the 67 counties got it right.
Q: What will be your main concerns when you take your place in the House of Representatives early next year?
A: I know that they just passed an election-reform bill so I’ll see how that goes. I think I’ll also campaign for finance reform. We’ll see what happens in the courts with that and, if more needs to be done, I hope to be involved.
Otherwise, my focus is going to be on issues that are very important in my district, such as financial security. My constituents are very concerned about assuring a strong economy: more and better-paying jobs.
The trade initiatives [such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas] have been absolutely crucial to the district. Questions about the economy and free trade are high-profile issues for me. When I was chairwoman of the Florida Senate’s Commerce and Economic Opportunities Committee, Florida moved from 42nd to first in the nation as a state in which to start a business or to grow an existing business.
Q: Have you taken a position on Iraq and the problems that country poses for our nation?
A: Yes. From the onset, I’ve been strongly supporting the president on this issue. I think he made the case to the American people especially well in his Cincinnati speech. It was very strong, and it was astonishing that the networks didn’t think it was important enough to carry it live across the board!
Saddam Hussein has violated Iraq’s commitment to the United Nations, and now the U.N. must concentrate on applying high standards and an authentic commitment to peace and freedom.
Q: Do you have any advice for someone not media savvy on how to handle reporters when they fail to do their homework or seem to be out to destroy a reputation?
A: I think that with the 24-hour news cycle we can be inundated with the media, particularly people in elected office. Perhaps there’s too much media.
Even so, it is very difficult for citizens who care about the news to find a countervailing balance to the dominant liberal opinion. Obviously Fox News offers such balance. Insight magazine and the Washington Times supply countervailing balance. But we don’t have that across the nation or even in my hometown, where I’ve been egregiously misrepresented in what I’ve said and done.
Everyone will tell you, “Don’t worry, no one believes what they read or see on the news.” But I say, absent another opinion, a balancing of views with another side to the news, you can’t get the facts to the people, so the impression they have is what they read in the newspapers and see on television.
News does move people. The media have an extraordinary responsibility, but it seems that some of them have an ax to grind and a real angst to have only their point of view accepted. As I say, opinion no longer is restricted to the editorial pages. It’s insidious when opinion appears throughout a newspaper as if it were news reporting.
Q: How would you like your role during the Florida presidential-election recount to be remembered?
A: If I had to sum up what I would want people to say about me, I would want them to say, “She followed the law.” And I would do it again.
It is very disappointing to know you did the right thing for all the right reasons, that your motives are pure, and then to have everyone misjudge you. It is almost Shakespearean. Certainly it’s very tough and it is humiliating. But these people who misjudged me don’t know me. They only know what a very liberal national media have reported. Perhaps it will take a lifetime to turn around this false image because I will have to do it one person at a time.
Purchase autographed copies of “Center of the Storm” at WorldNetDaily’s online store.
Stephen Goode is a senior writer for Insight magazine.
WATCH: Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Is this his biggest rally ever?
WND Staff