State: Reno's campaign: It's not all that folksy

TALLAHASSEE -- Beneath the surface of Janet Reno's homespun, aw-shucks campaign for governor lies a well-organized, well-financed battalion of experienced fundraisers, pollsters and media consultants.

For more than three months, Reno's well-heeled Miami friends have conducted polls, conducted focus groups and laid the groundwork for a campaign to challenge Gov. Jeb Bush in 2002.

While Reno made headlines driving around the state in her red pickup truck and making coy statements about whether she would run, this small group of experts was putting together a campaign and waiting for Reno to say the word.

On Tuesday, Reno issued a simple typed statement saying she was running for governor. She allowed reporters to question her in five-minute installments, politely turning away anyone who wanted to stick around and learn more about her campaign.

The behind-the-scenes group includes:

Hugh A. Westbrook, 56, a millionaire hospice-care executive who has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Democrats over the past 20 years. He and his wife, Carole Shields Westbrook, a former head of the liberal group People for the American Way, are longtime Reno supporters who have been urging her for years to run for statewide office. He opened a political committee Aug. 10.

Gary A. Barron, 46, former deputy treasurer of the Democratic National Committee who served in the presidential administrations of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and as southern finance director for the presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis. He moved to Florida in 1993 and owns a promotional products firm in Aventura. Barron is Reno's campaign finance chairman.

Frank Greer, 55, a Washington media consultant who has handled campaigns for former President Bill Clinton, former Gov. Lawton Chiles and former Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder. Greer has been highly successful at making Democrats acceptable to Southern voters. Greer will be a key media consultant.

Susan Vodicka, 53, a longtime Reno friend who is president of the Vodicka-Quintero Group, a Miami public affairs consulting business. Vodicka and Reno met in the early 1970s. Vodicka has been working as a volunteer adviser all summer and was named campaign manager this week. Her firm is expected to handle media relations.

Alan Greer, 62, a partner in the Miami law firm of Richman, Greer, Weil and Brumbaugh. A longtime friend, Greer (no relation to the media consultant) spent time during the early '70s playing racquetball games with Reno, Talbot "Sandy" D'Alemberte, now president of Florida State University, and editorial cartoonist Don Wright. Greer's wife, U.S. District Judge Patricia Seitz, and Reno were the first women hired at Steel Hector, one of the state's best-known law firms.

Over the summer, Reno relied on her friends to organize focus groups and study the results of polls. She also spent a lot of time conferring with her sister Maggy Hurchalla, a former Martin County commissioner.

How would voters react to her Parkinson's disease? Would they vote for her if her hands were visibly shaking? How do Florida voters feel about the things she did as U.S. attorney general? How would she be perceived around the state?

"The focus groups helped her become comfortable with the opportunity she has to do something," Alan Greer said. "Some people in the party were telling her she was crazy and would ruin it for everyone."

"With Janet, you are best advised to just lay out the facts and let her make up her mind," Greer said.

Reno apparently began thinking about running for governor after making a trip to Tallahassee in March to speak at a ceremony for the unveiling of a portrait of former Gov. Buddy MacKay.

At that ceremony in the rotunda of the state Capitol, Reno challenged young people to view public service in the tradition established by MacKay and Chiles, referring to it as "an important calling."

Vodicka traveled with Reno that day. She recalls Reno started asking probing questions on the way home.

"She asked who was running for governor, and said she sure hoped somebody good would emerge," Vodicka recalled Friday.

A few weeks later, Reno was asking Vodicka about former U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Pete Peterson and what sort of candidate he might be. Peterson is one of several prominent Democrats who entered the race before Reno.

"I didn't think that (running for governor) was going through her mind," Vodicka said. "She was asking other friends, too. It was clearly a process. She was very deliberate about it."

Alan Greer also got a call from Reno last spring as she began to think seriously about running.

"She thought she had come home to write and teach and found herself getting madder and madder," Greer recalled in a telephone interview Friday. "She loves this state, and she saw the state contracting on itself instead of growing into one of the four or five greatest states in the nation. She saw us going the other way."

Westbrook joined the circle sometime in early April. He had dinner at the home of former Miami-Dade School Board member Janet McAliley with Reno and others. Reno brought up the subject and said her visit to Tallahassee left her with the feeling that "things didn't feel right." She didn't like the policy direction Gov. Bush was taking the state in.

It was McAliley who suggested to Reno that she run against Bush, Westbrook said Friday.

"She said, "I'm thinking about it," Westbrook recalled.

That was all he needed.

Westbrook had long considered Reno a potential statewide candidate. While he was helping to raise money for a senatorial campaign committee headed by U.S. Sen. Bob Graham in 1994, he tried to recruit Reno to oppose then-U.S. Sen. Connie Mack. She declined.

But this year Reno set off in her truck, making speeches and meeting voters around the state. She spent part of every Sunday in a different African American church.

Westbrook set up the focus groups and paid for them with money from his political committee. Reno paid her own travel expenses but did not participate in the focus group or polling decisions, she said.

Reno could not legally participate without opening a campaign account, a step she did not take until Tuesday.

Westbrook also paid for a statewide poll. He says the results were encouraging and indicate that Reno would be received favorably in all areas of the state and showed her dramatically outpolling all of the other Democrats.

Frank Greer, the media consultant, compares a Reno candidacy with Chiles' campaigns, saying he thinks Florida voters will respond well to a highly independent woman who "shoots straight."

"I think she can win it," Greer said. "If you could see the outpouring of support. . . . I have the feeling this will be a phenomenon, not a campaign, a happening that transcends normal political calculation."

On Aug. 10, Westbrook formed "Citizens for Compassionate Care," a political committee to "promote good government and compassionate health care through support for candidates seeking elected office."

The committee has yet to file a report listing contributions and expenditures but listed an initial $50,000 in its bank account.

As the chief executive officer of Vitas Healthcare Corp., Westbrook presides over the nation's biggest for profit hospice service provider. He lives in a $2.2-million house in Coral Gables and has a summer home in Highlands, N.C.

While donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democrats, Westbrook managed to get laws passed in the Florida Legislature and Congress to help his businesses.

In 1979, when Westbrook wanted to boost the fortunes of his nonprofit hospice company, he used his connection with Dade state legislators to gain the passage of a last-minute law that established procedures for licensing the company. And when Westbrook decided to convert the nonprofit business to a for-profit one, he got legislators to pass a law exempting his company, and only his, from a law that prohibited hospices from being owned by a profitmaking business.

And in the early 1980s as hospices across the nation were struggling financially, Westbrook used his federal connections to help get a law passed that allows Medicare and Medicaid to provide advance payments for services provided by hospices.

Westbrook and Barron once served as the top two officers for Vote Now '96, a Miami nonprofit committee that came under the scrutiny of the Justice Department and Congress in 1997 for allegedly soliciting charitable contributions for a partisan purpose.

Nothing ever came of the various investigations, which Westbrook labeled as "highly partisan."

- Researchers Caryn Baird and Stephanie Scruggs contributed to this report

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