It remains one of the most vivid memories in my nine years spent as a political consultant: a moment of tremendous victory, Sept. 3, 1996, at the Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections voting center.
I was representing Margo Fischer, the spunky wife of then-St. Pete Mayor David Fischer, in her first run for office, a shot to replace Peter Rudy Wallace in the Florida House of Representatives. You would have thought her marriage to the mayor would give her a tremendous advantage; it did not.
Margo was running in a Democratic primary against then-City Councilwoman Martha Maddux, who had more experience, more civic involvement, more name recognition — plus the all-important recommendation of the St. Petersburg Times' editorial page.
So there I was, one of Fischer's campaign consultants, watching the vote totals projected onto a wall at the voting center as batches of precincts were counted. My counterpart from the Maddux campaign, former state Rep. Mary Figg, was there too, a cell phone permanently affixed to her ear as she gleefully relayed the early results back to — I imagined — Maddux herself.
It was my first election night on the other side of the fence, having abandoned 13 years at various newspapers to get into the political game firsthand. And at nearly every update of precincts counted, my client was behind.
I drank in a moment of pure schadenfreude.
I thought about Margo and her political career — and how it mirrored the fall of Florida's Democratic Party — last week after hearing of her death on Oct. 7 at age 58.
It was a shock to many of her friends, some of whom didn't know of her fight against breast cancer, others who thought she had beaten it. On a Wednesday five days later, a who's who of St. Petersburg civic leaders numbering more than 700 overflowed the Maximo Presbyterian Church to pay their respects.
Margo was one of the most competitive persons I ever met. That theme kept coming up again and again at the funeral, according to one friend who attended. Like the time Margo started sailing and convinced an all-female crew to take part in a long race. Despite running hours behind the field and many in the crew getting seasick, Margo implored them on, refusing to use the sailboat's engine to speed them home, fighting to finish the race on her own terms.
She approached politics the same way. Maybe it was her upbringing, living as a kid in public housing in Youngstown, Ohio, with a single mother. She moved to St. Petersburg and worked at various jobs — including flight attendant — before settling into the world of finance as an investment banker and adviser. Margo met and married David Fischer, who ran a firm that specialized in municipal financing.
In 1991, David ran for mayor of St. Petersburg, at the time a position that meant no more than being chairman of the City Council. (The office was converted to a "strong mayor" form of government by the voters in 1993, a change that he opposed but a role that he assumed when he was re-elected that year.)
Margo managed her husband's 1991 campaign, a brutal race against former state Rep. Dennis McDonald. It was Margo who cracked the whip, organized the grassroots volunteers and ran the organization. My former partner, Mary Repper, called her "the general."
Fischer spent just two years in the state House. It was not a great time to be a Democrat; the tide had turned Republican, conservative Christian Daniel Webster was speaker of the House and Margo sat in the back of the chambers in a minority.
She worked on education issues, with little real success, as Gov. Jeb Bush was rolling out his A+ Plan that introduced standardized testing and a propensity toward vouchers for private schools.
When her re-election campaign rolled around in 1998, the Republican she'd beaten two years earlier, Frank Farkas, signed up for round two. Fischer had a few weaknesses: she was one of only 12 legislators who voted against a pension increase for police and firefighters, and thus earned a spot in their campaign cross-hairs. Farkas pummeled her unmercifully in newspaper ads and mailers as the wife of St. Pete's mayor, transferring dissatisfaction with David onto Margo.
But Fischer's biggest disadvantage was her party, and her devotion to it. Early in the campaign, House Democratic leaders Lois Frankel (now mayor of West Palm Beach) and Debbie Wasserman-Schulz (now in Congress) blew into town for back-to-back-to-back meetings with their candidates in Tampa Bay. Repper and I accompanied Fischer to the strategy session, a meeting that Repper now recalls as one of the most bitter she attended in three decades in national politics. Instead of working on ways for Fischer to win, Repper and I were identified as a problem because we had a bipartisan firm that represented both Republicans and Democrats. Demanding total loyalty is not unique to Democrats; Tom DeLay has made a career out of squeezing lobbyists who wouldn't hew to a fully Republican world.
In the end, we were cut out of the loop, and Fischer was left at the mercy of out-of-town political hotshots who downplayed the damage that Farkas' attacks were inflicting, made no provisions to pump up absentee voting and failed to use the grassroots adequately. At a time when the party needed to step up its game, to adopt newer technologies and strategies, the Democrats seemed dumbstruck — and even unaware — that their decades-old methods and messages were losing ground.
In the end, Fischer lost by 1,623 votes. My firm's two other Democratic legislative clients, state Rep. Mary Brennan and House hopeful Martha Lenderman, similarly were quarantined by the state party strategists and were crushed in the same train wreck that claimed Fischer.
It was my last Democratic legislative campaign.
It was not Fischer's; she tried a 2000 comeback against Farkas, part of a statewide Democratic effort to regain legislative seats and control of the House and Senate.
She lost by 5,000 votes.
She deserved better.
Political Whore can be reached by e-mail at wayne.garcia@weeklyplanet.com or by telephone at 813-739-4805.
This article appears in Oct 19-25, 2005.