Ridiculous? Sure. But in a town where even the most bizarre rumor of a Castro association quickly jumps like a virus from the coffeeshop counter to the Spanish-language talk-radio airwaves, this summer's county mayoral hopefuls are taking every accusation seriously. Cuban-exile voters remain Miami's electoral kingmakers, and with more than 80 percent of el exilio's votes going to George W. Bush in 2000, staying on the right side of that equation -- literally and figuratively -- is crucial to victory.
Or at least it was crucial. With no less than six viable candidates duking it out in the August 31 mayoral contest -- Carlos Alvarez, José Cancela, Miguel Diaz de la Portilla, Maurice Ferré, Jay Love, and Jimmy Morales -- a runoff election is assured. For the first time in recent history, that runoff is being held not two weeks later but rather on November 2, as part of the Bush/Kerry showdown.
If past presidential battles are any guide, Miami's voter turnout will more than double from the traditional sparse crowd that greets its mayor's races. And Cuban Americans will suddenly find their influence counterbalanced by Anglo and black voters -- whose support gave Miami-Dade to Bill Clinton in 1996 by 107,744 votes, and to Al Gore in 2000 by 39,246 votes.
That Democratic margin may be shrinking, but Newton says he and Morales are still counting on it. "Kerry is going to win Dade," he argues. "He may win by only 30,000 to 40,000 votes, but that's more than enough for me." While the rest of the mayoral field is holding Kerry at arm's length, fearful of offending Cuban-exile sensibilities, Morales hopes to embrace Kerry. Says Newton: "We just become the Democratic candidate -- the Anglo, black, progressive candidate. And everybody else goes wherever they go."
Morales himself has hardly made a secret of this notion. As he told Kulchur when he first launched his county hall bid: "My strategy is focused on holding my own in the Hispanic community," leaving the rest of the field to carve up the Cuban vote among themselves. "I'm going to campaign strongly in the Anglo, black, Haitian, and Jewish communities." It's the same tactic he used to get elected to the county commission in 1996, and re-elected in 2000, despite doubts that a pro-gay rights, reformist candidate who is only -- gulp -- half-Cuban could ever win his district.
Of course, such a strategy only works countywide with a presidential-level turnout. And just who pushed the county commission to delay the mayoral runoff until November 2? Why, none other than Jimmy Morales.
Such a move may have been self-serving, but Morales's fellow commissioners also found it impossible to resist: Not only did it save taxpayers several hundred thousand dollars, it guaranteed greater participation. "It's hard to say you favor fewer voters going to the polls," laughs Newton in appreciation of Morales's shrewdness. "His opponents may call Jimmy a lot of things, but being stupid isn't one of them."
Newton may have relationships with several key Kerry campaign staffers (he was Kerry's Cedar Rapids-area field director in the Iowa caucus, where a surprise victory rescued the senator's presidential run), but one of Morales's chief opponents appears determined to neutralize those connections. Newton says José Cancela's allies have persuaded Kerry not to wade into the mayoral race, despite his scheduled Miami visits aimed at peeling Cuban votes away from Bush.
Close ties to Kerry abound in the Cancela camp. One of Cancela's most notable endorsers, Rep. Kendrick Meek, is Kerry's Florida campaign chairman, introducing him at local rallies and speaking on behalf of the presidential nominee at last week's Democratic convention in Boston. Cancela's pollster, Sergio Bendixen, is co-founder of the New Democrat Network, a national advocacy group spending millions on Kerry television ads targeted at Hispanic voters in battleground states, including Florida. And Cancela's own campaign manager, Fernand Amandi, is the son of Fernando Amandi, a retired Cuban-American and Republican banking executive who's drawn widespread attention by crossing party lines to become vice chairman of Kerry's national finance committee, raising more than $100,000 so far.
So might Fernand Amandi be enlisting his father to help conjure up a joint Kerry-Cancela appearance? Don't hold your breath. "I don't comment on anything my dad is doing," Fernand icily informs Kulchur. "He focuses on his personal political activities, and I do mine." As for Kerry, "he shouldn't have an impact one way or another, given that José Cancela's candidacy is about bringing people together."
To Bendixen, just back from the Boston convention, Cancela's fence-sitting is aimed at looking past November 2, to his eventual administration. "Unfortunately this presidential race is not only going to be ideologically divisive, it's going to be ethnically divisive," Bendixen tells Kulchur in a phone conversation. "For somebody running for office for the first time, to come in as either the Democratic mayor or the Republican mayor, José feels it would be a very strong liability." Besides, he adds, "he's got a lot of friends who are for Bush. As your paper pointed out, he once even contributed to Bush. He's got friends on both sides." (Last year Cancela gave $2000 contributions to both Bush and the Democratic National Committee.)
But with passions rising across the red-and-blue chasm, can Cancela really be all things to all people? Bendixen hands off the phone to Cancela himself, conveniently in his office to talk strategy. "This community is divided enough," Cancela insists. "We don't need to bring partisan politics into the fray."
Back at the Morales campaign headquarters, those are fighting words. "We are going to partisan this race," Newton promises with a discernible touch of spite. "Cancela's insistence on not choosing a side in the presidential election is horrible. Democrats are not going to understand why you go to Democratic clubs, why you stand with Carrie Meek and throw around your Democratic Party registration card, and then you go write a check to the president."
For Miami's political junkies, divining the Herald's election endorsements is a complex science worthy of vintage Kremlinology. Depending on your personal spin, the paper is either a shameless apologist for el exilio or deeply biased against any Cuban American who would dare challenge the Anglo power elite. Long before the drama of Elian, as far back as 1985's mayoral victory of Xavier Suarez over Raul Masvidal, the Herald's political editor, Tom Fiedler (now its executive editor), wrote that "the rumor going around Little Havana is that the Herald really preferred Suarez the best and only used Masvidal as a feint. Follow this reasoning, now: Because the newspaper knows that its endorsement actually hurts candidates in Little Havana, it endorsed Masvidal with the knowledge that Suarez would be the beneficiary of a backlash.... Clever, huh?"
Conspiracy buffs got a fresh burst of inspiration when the Herald's editorial board sent detailed questionnaires to each of the county mayoral candidates, called in the field for a personal meeting, and then placed the candidates' questionnaire answers on the paper's Website on Sunday, July 25. The kicker? The questionnaires were inadvertently posted with one editorial board member's pithy comments handwritten in the margins.
According to José Cancela, those scrawls belonged not to just any board member but to the editor of the Herald's editorial page, Joe Oglesby. (During his meeting with the editorial board, Cancela witnessed Oglesby writing his thoughts on the questionnaires.) Accidental or not, posting Oglesby's notes, Cancela says, "was very inappropriate. They're going to be making an [endorsement] decision pretty soon. Those comments are out of line." Following a perplexed call from Cancela's campaign, scrubbed versions of the questionnaires were online by the next morning.
For the curious, Oglesby was impressed by Cancela's call to remove from the county commission the ability to award contracts. "Will ruffle feathers," he wrote alongside that idea. He was less moved by Cancela's proposal to secure higher pay for teachers and implement the state constitutional amendment calling for smaller class sizes: "How pay for this?"
Miguel Diaz de la Portilla's string of endorsements from Hispanic pols was met with "Any outreach to other groups?" And his glib call to "remove lobbyists from the equation" drew a big circle and a "How?" Carlos Alvarez also drew skepticism with his vague pledge to "restore faith in county government." That got a "details please." Alvarez no doubt has other issues on his mind, such as buying a caller-ID machine. Like his fellow mayoral candidates, the former Miami-Dade police chief's home address and private phone numbers were also posted online, serving up some tempting crank-call fodder.
If the raw number of written remarks is any indication, Oglesby seemed most taken with Maurice Ferré, starring and highlighting several of his passages on civic policy. (Neither Jimmy Morales nor fringe candidates D.C. Blue and Dave Slater received a single comment.) The questionnaire asked Ferré for his "special skills." He answered by touting his record as "president of a construction material company from 1963 to 1978, taking it public to the American Stock Exchange and turning it from losses to profits, with sales of over $100 million per year and almost 2000 employees." That achievement garnered an "impressive" from Oglesby.
Yet Ferré left out the punch line: In 1976 he drove his family's construction company, Maule Industries, into bankruptcy, throwing its workers onto the unemployment line and leaving behind millions in debt. Then serving as mayor of Miami, Ferré also claimed to be broke himself. His unpaid creditors spent the next decade scratching their heads over his still-comfortable lifestyle, a mystery finally solved in 1989 when a Miami court found that Ferré had hidden $1.4 million in "consulting fees" in a bank account under his wife's name. He was ordered to hand over the entire sum.
Perhaps Oglesby, a Herald reporter in 1976, was merely being sarcastic with his comment. Indeed plenty of snarky words come to mind in describing Ferré's business maneuvers. But the only thing "impressive" is the degree of chutzpah required of such an individual in seeking a return to public office.