ARCHIVES OF LEAD STORIES
October 14, 2004
Democratic activists focusing
on Florida
Virgil Wright
ORLANDO, Fla. — As Tamika Pierce, a single
mother with three children, makes an impassioned plea for an increase
in the Sunshine State’s minimum wage, an unusual pair of
visitors wait for their turn to speak.
Former Massachusetts Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II and comedian
Al Franken sit perched on stools behind her to add some star power
to the event promoting Question 5, a state ballot initiative to
hike the minimum wage from $5.15 to $6.15 an hour.
Out in the audience at the Oak Ridge High School gym, over 400
people, most of them union activists and community activists,
listen as Pierce reels off the benefits of a hike in the minimum
wage.
“People here are working three jobs and still not getting
by,” says Pierce. “Passing this question will put
a $350 million shot in the arm for working families in Florida.
We need to knock on doors. We need to make phone calls. We need
to let people know they can vote themselves a raise.”
Of the estimated 850,000 workers who would benefit, 65 percent
are women and over half are people of color.
Here in Orange County, many work in or around the fantasy-lands
of the Magic Kingdom — a surreal counterpart to the “Two
Americas” featured in the Democratic vice presidential nominee’s
campaign rhetoric.
To the out-of-state visitors, the popular ballot measure —
polling about 78 percent approval statewide — is not just
a legitimate cause in its own right but a means to another end
— the election of U.S. Sen. John F. Kerry to the White House.
The Kerry campaign asked Kennedy and Franken to appear at the
rally after strategists hitched their wagon to an issue they believe
will attract African American voters to the ballot and boost their
own cause.
With just three weeks to go before the Nov. 2 election, Kerry
numbers-crunchers see central Florida as ground zero in the battle
to win the state’s critical 21 electoral votes and achieve
the goal of regime change on Pennsylvania Avenue.
With the northern tier of Florida expected to support Bush and
the southern tier to back Kerry, the key to winning the state
is considered black turnout among the low-slung stucco homes and
strip malls of the state’s humid midriff.
Resentment over black voter disenfranchisement in the 2000 election
in Florida won’t be enough, say concerned Democratic leaders,
to ensure a groundswell of turnout in November.
Franken, wearing rumpled khakis and fiddling constantly with his
oversized horn-rimmed glasses, makes a bitterly amusing case to
rouse voters to the cause.
“Rush Limbaugh said on national radio that 75 percent of
minimum wage employees are teenagers working their first job,”
says Franken. “You know what? He lied. I sent researchers
to the Bureau of Labor Statistics who found out that 61 percent
of those earning the minimum wage are over the age of 20 and many
of them are the sole supporters of their families.”
Taking to the stage after Franken, Kennedy frames the upcoming
contest “as the most important election of our lifetime”
while urging those in the crowd to get their friends and neighbors
to register to vote and get out to the polls.
“George Bush doesn’t care about the people in this
room. George Bush doesn’t care about the people earning
minimum wage. All George Bush cares about are his rich friends
and the special interests who are pouring money into his campaign,”
says Kennedy, who now serves as chairman of the nonprofit Citizens
Energy Corporation in Boston.
“This election is especially important to people of color
because this election was stolen four years ago. If the votes
of every African American who went to the polls in Florida had
actually been counted, Al Gore would be president and we’d
all be a lot better off.”
Kennedy’s riff gets interrupted by a woman in a camouflage
tee shirt who shouts through a megaphone, “I’m fired
up! Can’t take no mo! Bush, Bush, has got to go!”
The crowd erupts. An elderly man in the back holds up a stack
of absentee ballots. “Come sign up! Vote early! Vote early!”
As the speeches end, political aides scramble around the room,
getting down names and phone numbers and making plans for canvassing
the neighborhoods around the school, where many of the homes have
blue tarps stretched over hurricane-damaged roofs.
“You know what you need to do,” says state Sen. Tony
Hill as he closes the program. “We have a mission.”
Back
to Lead Story Archives
Home
Page
