The Trouble With Reno

By Tim Padgett/Boca Raton With Reporting by Michael Peltier/Tallahassee

It's Women's Equality Day, a sweltering Sunday afternoon at a Unitarian church in Boca Raton. You can tell it is Janet Reno's turf by the way the National Organization for Women crowd hangs on every word of the first female U.S. Attorney General. Whoever the first female U.S. President is, Reno says, she will listen more closely to "all Americans, like the single mother who feels alone and frustrated." But then Reno says something that leaves the N.O.W. women, dressed in suffragist purple, looking puzzled. She talks about "the young white man who wants to be an FBI agent but feels he doesn't have a chance because of affirmative action." Huh?

It's not the kind of sympathy usually expressed at a feminist rally. But if Reno wants to be the first female Governor of Florida--she is expected to announce this week--this is the kind of "centrist" note she will have to sound in her speeches. Often. On the one hand, since most of Florida's Democratic voters are in liberal South Florida, where Reno lives, the primary is hers to lose. But if her party wants to unseat Republican Governor Jeb Bush in 2002--exacting revenge for last fall's disputed presidential election and dealing a mid-term body blow to Jeb's brother George W. Bush--the candidate needs to woo conservative voters in central and north Florida. If Reno does run, Democratic leaders like Florida Senator Bill Nelson won't be holding the kind of dance party Saturday Night Live threw for her on TV last January. Nelson said as much this summer (though he has since softened his tone) when he warned that Bush's challenger has got to be "perceived as a mainstream person."

Since the Florida campaign carries such high national stakes, the two parties combined may raise a staggering $50 million to wage it. The irony is that Reno, whose celebrity could make fund raising outside Florida easier, is being tagged by so many as a liability inside the state. So far she polls better against Bush than the half a dozen other Democratic hopefuls. However, the President's younger brother thumped her 54% to 39% in a recent survey by the Mason-Dixon firm, with only 7% undecided. Reno enjoys a reputation as a principled leader who does what she thinks is right. But at the same time she bears the image of an arrogant prosecutor who often made wrong or inept moves in cases like Waco and Elian. "The Republicans will absolutely crucify her with negative ads," says prominent Florida attorney Dexter Douglass, who helped lead Al Gore's Tallahassee legal team during the presidential recount.

Reno tells TIME that she is ready to parry. She notes that as America's top cop she oversaw a drop in national crime statistics eight years in a row. As for her chances against Bush: "Folks in the [Florida] Panhandle know as well as folks in Miami that the base line for excellence in areas like education, criminal justice and the environment should be higher here." What about her Parkinson's disease? As Reno, 63, travels the state in a red Ford pickup, her de facto campaign symbol, her illness hardly seems an issue. Says ex-N.O.W. president Patricia Ireland, another South Florida denizen urging Reno to run: "The same people knocking her are the ones who said Hillary Clinton couldn't sell herself outside New York City." She adds that if Democrats must win the north Florida vote that eluded Gore last year, they must also retain the massive black anti-Jeb Bush turnout that kept Gore neck and neck with W. in the state.

Liberals say that will be harder for the candidate already anointed by centrist Democrats: former Panhandle Congressman Douglas (Pete) Peterson, a former Vietnam prisoner of war who returned to that Southeast Asian country in 1997 as Bill Clinton's U.S. ambassador. Fans tout Peterson as a Democratic John McCain; detractors say he is McCain without the charisma. But Nelson and Florida's senior Senator, Bob Graham, sent top Democratic fund raisers to Hanoi last spring to lure Peterson home. As he and his Vietnamese wife Vi Le were packing in May, Reno broke the blind-siding news that she too might run--setting up a potential north-south rift that could weaken the Democrats as they prepare to battle Bush.

Peterson so far polls 32% against Bush. But he keeps the Governor at 48% and leaves a 20% chunk undecided. It's the kind of math the centrists like. Peterson would first have to vanquish Reno in the primary, which means, he acknowledges, taking on the onerous task of convincing Democrats that he can "appeal ultimately to a wider section of voters than Democrats." Still, unless they can transform Peterson into a more galvanizing pol or make Reno more appealing to Floridians above Lake Okeechobee, the Democrats look about as likely to win as the alligators that Reno's late mother used to wrestle--and beat.

--With reporting by Michael Peltier/Tallahassee