Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

With much fanfare -- he's the first Cuban-born US Senator -- Mel Martinez was sworn in yesterday (emphasis mine, of course):

...replacing retiring Democrat Bob Graham and promising to follow his example of finding middle ground between parties on divisive issues.

That's refreshing news, if true.

But my favorite part of the AP article was this:

Martinez hopes [to] show Floridians that he is not the far-right candidate that was depicted during the Senate campaign.
. . .
"I'm a person that can best be judged by my life's work, not by an intense, eight-month campaign of destruction," Martinez said. "In many different ways there was a very inaccurate image of me portrayed in the campaign and a lot of money and effort spent to make sure that occurred."

Very adroit use of the passive voice there. Note that Martinez himself was apparently the victim of inaccuracies at the hands of unspecified others. So let's take a look at his life's work; was -- is -- Martinez a far-right winger? Consider:

• Martinez won the GOP primary against former Congressman Bill McCollum. McCollum, you may recall, was one of the Gingrich Republicans who served as a rabid floor manager during the Clinton impeachment charade. So, one would think, any candidate who opposed someone like McCollum must be a reasonably level-headed candidate. Er, not exactly: the charge which Martinez flung at McCollum to greatest effect was that the latter was "the new darling of the homosexual extremists." His reasoning? McC had supported hate-crimes legislation which would afford protection to gays.
• Martinez also labeled McCollum "anti-family" because of his support for stem-cell research. The St. Petersburg Times originally endorsed Martinez as the GOP candidate, but later took the extraordinary step of rescinding its endorsement. As its editorial said:

  McCollum confronted Martinez and called on him to repudiate his campaign's sleazy, homophobic advertisements. Martinez [initially] refused. Later, he said he "wouldn't be in favor of that kind of rhetoric." ... But the rhetoric calling McCollum "the new darling of the homosexual extremists" and accusing him of making "statements in order to appease ... the radical homosexual lobby" was included in advertising paid for by the Martinez campaign. If Martinez failed to review the ads before they were sent out under his name, he was irresponsible. If he knew what was in the ads and is now trying to distance himself, he is being dishonest.

• Martinez's campaign in the general election, against Betty Castor, followed the Republican playbook: pick one negative note to play, and play the hell out of it. In his case, it was Castor's liberalism. In October, during the week after a Martinez/Castor confrontation with Tim Russert, the former's campaign prepared an ad asserting that Castor was "more liberal than John Kerry" (as are many other people, naturally). Okay, that was maybe politics as usual. But the ad went further; it carefully snipped an excerpt of the Russert show from its context. Russert had asked if the two of them would have voted for the Iraq "war" if they'd known then what they knew now (no WMDs). Martinez said yes. Castor said, "No, knowing what I know now that there are no weapons of mass destruction." Martinez's ad replaced Russert's question with a voiceover, suggesting that the question was about the "war on terror" instead of Iraq, and then omitted everything after the "No" in Castor's answer. When asked about this carefully edited version of reality, the Martinez campaign explained that it was a 30-second ad, in which there was no time to supply all the messy details.
• What about Martinez's government service before this "intense, eight-month campaign of destruction"? (Whoops, sorry Mel -- you were speaking of your destruction at the hands of your opponents!) Probably the best summary is the one by James Goodno, for the National Housing Institute. It covers not only Martinez's tour of duty as W's secretary of HUD, but also his earlier tenure in local government.

So then, can Martinez fairly be called a far-right winger? As Goodno's NHI report says, he does have a history of occasionally standing up to those who helped him get into office. But he also has a take-no-prisoners history of political campaigning, and a tendency as time has gone by to drift further from the center -- and not leftwardly, either. People can change once in office, of course, and maybe Martinez will come to acquire a Bob Graham-like luster after a few years. I'm not counting on it, though. As I've said before, I was never a Nixonite, but when it comes to critically assessing politicians I've always found it handy to rely on the classic advice from RMN's Attorney General, John Mitchell: "Don't watch what we say, watch what we do."

We'll be watching, Mel.