Florida Democrat Bob Graham, who served as governor from 1979 to 1987 and as a U.S. senator from 1987 until his 2005 retirement, died Tuesday at the age of 87
. Graham, who won all five of his statewide elections by at least 9 points
, was one of the most popular Democrats in the Sunshine State in recent memory, but he only achieved that status after pulling off a major upset in 1978.
Graham was the son of former state Sen. Ernest Graham, who lost a competitive primary
in 1944 for governor at a time when Florida was ruled by conservative Democrats, as well as the half-brother of Washington Post publisher Philip Graham. Bob Graham became wealthy
through real estate, which included his work transforming the family’s dairy and cattle farm into what is now the suburban community of Miami Lakes.
In 1966, Graham went on to win a state House seat in the Miami area in what was then Dade County (voters renamed it Miami-Dade County in 1997
), and he won a promotion to the upper chamber four years later.
He was serving on the Senate Education Committee in 1974 when a high school teacher named Sue Reilly griped that none of the panel’s members
had any experience teaching. Graham accepted her challenge to instruct a civics class. While he later admitted he didn’t think he’d ever find himself back in a classroom, the experience would unexpectedly set Graham on the path to statewide fame.
But the state senator had yet to make a name for himself when, in 1978, he sought to succeed Gov. Reubin Askew, a fellow Democrat who was termed out. Graham initially struggled to stand out in a field that included
Attorney General Bob Shevin, Lt. Gov. James H. Williams, former Jacksonville Mayor Hans Tanzler, and even former Republican Gov. Claude Kirk.
Graham would later recount that, when his daughter Kendall said she didn’t want to leave her friends in Miami behind to move to the governor’s mansion, his wife Adele responded, “Honey, there is no way on earth your father is ever going to be elected governor.”
But Graham, who was inspired by his experience instructing Reilly’s class and later as a teacher on his own for a full semester, gained media attention by embarking on what he dubbed “Workdays.” The Democrat became famous for spending a full eight-hour day in various roles that included—but were not limited to—teaching, scooping dog poop, policework, installing wiring in Askew’s office, applying for food stamps, and being Santa Claus
.
Graham also expanded his appeal by selecting state Rep. Wayne Mixson, who had a base in North Florida, to be his running mate
. The two went on to campaign as the
“Graham-Cracker ticket.”
Graham also benefited from a law that required candidates to win a majority of the vote to avert a runoff. (The legislature would abolish it in 2005
.) Shevin secured first with 35%, but Graham outpaced Tanzler 25-12
for the crucial second spot.
The second round was a negative affair, with Shevin blasting Graham
as “a man born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who never worked a day in his life.” Graham hit back by attacking the attorney general as a supporter of laws to restrict gun access. And while Graham would often get knocked throughout his long career
for lacking charisma, the St. Petersburg Times famously knocked Shevin as a “politician with a pock-marked face who sweats too much during his dull, earnest speeches.”
Graham beat Shevin in a 54-46 upset
, but he had an easier time in the general election against the Republican nominee, drugstore magnate Jack Eckerd. While Eckerd had only narrowly lost a 1974 Senate race to Democrat Richard Stone
, he struggled to counter Graham’s hard-won outsider image
in what was still a Democratic-dominated state. Graham won 56-44
in what would be the first of a series of decisive victories.
Graham and his wife celebrate his runoff victory
Graham easily secured a second term
in a 65-35 landslide over GOP Rep. Skip Bafalis, but with term limits preventing him from running for reelection in 1986, he set his eyes on challenging Republican Sen. Paula Hawkins. The one-term incumbent had spent her time in office making news in the wrong ways, which included saying that immigrants from Mexico
“are not patriots.” Both sides waged an expensive and acerbic campaign
on the airwaves, but few were surprised when the popular Graham won 55-45
.
Graham, who continued to cultivate a moderate image
in the nation’s capital, secured reelection 65-35
in 1992 against former Rep. Bill Grant; in 1998 he defeated state Sen. Charlie Crist, who at the time was a Republican rising star, 62-38
.
Graham’s popularity in this rapidly growing swing state made him a perennial vice presidential prospect, but he was never chosen. The Washington Post, which was still run by a branch of his family, summed up his limited national appeal
in 2003 when it called him “a sober, conscientious, unfailingly courteous grandfather who couldn’t light up a room with a barrel of Iraqi crude and a Zippo.”
Graham, an ardent opponent of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, decided to test that thesis by running for president in 2004, but his open heart surgery
during the first weeks of his campaign hurt whatever chance he had to secure the nomination.
The senator dropped out well before the primaries and soon announced his retirement. Democrats went on to lose his seat when Republican Mel Martinez narrowly flipped it that fall, and the GOP has held it ever since.
Graham never again sought elected office, though his daughter, Gwen Graham, won a competitive U.S. House race in 2014. She was less successful when she sought her father’s old post, however, losing the primary for governor in 2018.
Correction: This story incorrectly identified Wayne Mixson as a congressman in 1978. He was a state representative.
Sargassum seaweed
is back, and massive amounts of it continue to create major problems across the Caribbean, impacting people’s health, the environment, and the tourism industry. The situation is not new, yet in spite of efforts by governments and international agencies, the effects are worsening.
“Caribbean Matters” first covered the sargassum story
in August 2022, and it is time to revisit. This month, multiple news agencies have tackled this issue.
As the National Ocean Service explains
, the Sargasso Sea is “defined only by ocean currents” and has no land boundaries—it’s the only sea on the planet with that distinction. Notably, it’s named for the destructive algae at the center of this story, which is unique in that it’s rootless, while “[o]ther seaweeds reproduce and begin life on the floor of the ocean.”
Even as sargassum terrorizes coastlines, it provides benefits for many species, National Geographic notes
, with one oceanographer calling it “a golden rainforest.” Clumps of sargassum provide “a kind of canopy”—an edible one.
Its tangled tresses support an astonishing diversity of organisms that hide in and feed off the weed—the larvae and juveniles, according to one study, of 122 different species of fish, as well as hatchling sea turtles, nudibranchs, seahorses, crabs, shrimps, and snails. The seaweed in turn is nourished by the excrement of these organisms.
Larger creatures such as fish and turtles find plenty to eat amid the sargassum, and they attract bigger predators—triggerfish, tripletails, filefish, mahi-mahis, and jacks, on up the chain of life to sharks, tuna, wahoos, and billfish. Tropic birds, shearwaters, petrels, terns, boobies, and other birds of the open ocean roost and forage on sargassum mats.
Unfortunately, sargassum doesn’t stay in the waters of its namesake sea. Several major publications recently raised the alarm about sargassum in multiple stories, including this group effort
:
Caribbean People at Risk from Sargassum Invasion
Project of The BVI Beacon, The Virgin Islands Daily News, América Futura – El País América, Television Jamaica and the RCI Guadeloupe in collaboration with Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
The growing invasion of sargassum in the Caribbean has impacted the quality of life of the islands’ residents. But local governments and some of their metropolises have so far failed to coordinate an international response to address the problem, which scientists believe is triggered by global pollution, the climate crisis, and a shortage of funds to mitigate it.
In another story
from Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, Olivia Losbar writes:
From Poisoning to Skin Diseases: Multiple Effects of Sargassum on Health
In the quiet seaside village of Capesterre on Marie-Galante island in Guadeloupe on April 18, 2023, the air-quality monitoring institute Gwad’Air issued a “red alert” to warn people away from coastal areas. The culprit was sargassum. After washing ashore for days, the floating seaweed was emitting a dangerous level of hydrogen sulfide gas as it rotted on the beach.
[…]
“You know, I love wearing costume jewelry, but now I can’t keep it on my skin for more than a quarter of an hour. They oxidize and make my skin itch. When you see what it does to electrical equipment and metal, you wonder what it does inside your body, to your lungs,” [Guadeloupe business owner Marie-Louise Bade] said.
Thanks to recent research carried out in the French Caribbean — much of which has struggled with similar problems as Marie-Galante — scientists can now better answer that question. They paint a bleak picture. Their studies suggest that the hydrogen sulfide and ammonia gasses released by rotting sargassum can endanger pregnant women, exacerbate respiratory issues like asthma, and cause headaches and memory loss, among other serious health problems. But this knowledge has not been enough to protect Bade and many other Guadeloupe residents.
Even as the French Caribbean has emerged as a regional leader in the fight against sargassum, researchers such as Martinique-based doctor Dabor Resiere have said response efforts there have fallen far short. As a result, many residents regularly face dangerous health risks — and the French government has turned to the world stage to call for an international response to address sargassum as a global problem.
Infrastructure in Decay and Tap-Water Tasting Like Bad Eggs in the British Virgin Islands
Virgin Gorda is known for laidback luxury. It is the second-most populated of the British Virgin Islands (BVI). It boasts swanky seaside villas, a five-star beach resort built by Laurance Rockefeller in the 1960’s, and the billionaires’ yachting playground of North Sound. But in mid-August 2023,Virgin Gorda residents started complaining about the fetid odour of their tap water.
“When you take a shower, you come out smelling like sulphur dioxide — like bad eggs,” construction contractor Christina Yates said at the time.
The problem was widespread across The Valley, which is home to most of the island’s approximately 4,000 residents. Some said the water burned or gave them a rash when they showered. Others said it killed their house plants when they watered them. And soon, many residents had no tap water at all for hours or days at a time.
As the complaints grew louder, the government offered an explanation that many residents had suspected: Sargassum had entered the intake pipe at the desalination plant that produces most of the island’s public water. This problem had exacerbated longstanding issues with the water distribution system, leading to rationing that cut the supply nearly in half.
María Mónica Monsalve and Krista Campbell at El País explain how the helpful smaller patches of “canopy” sargassum provide in the Sargasso Sea can become a death trap elsewhere
.
A decade of sargassum damage is suffocating Caribbean ecosystems
From Colombia’s north coast to Mexico, corals, mangroves and turtle nests are threatened by the massive influx of floating seaweed
While small amounts of sargassum benefit marine life, the large blooms since 2011 have disrupted the ecological balance in potentially irreversible ways. The algae further stresses Caribbean reefs already threatened by mass coral bleaching due to climate change. Sargassum patches cover up sea turtle nesting sites and overwhelm mangroves, important nurseries for aquatic species. In some areas, beaches have eroded due to algae removal using heavy machinery, with fishermen noting a significant decline in daily catches.
[…]
While floating sargassum can offer a healthy habitat, large amounts onshore can suffocate specific organisms, says James Foley, oceans manager at The Nature Conservancy.“In places like coastal Belize, the issue gets worse because floating sargassum traps a bunch of marine litter — trash from rivers flowing into the Caribbean from Central America. So, it turns into quite a toxic situation.”
Foley explains that floating sargassum acts as a barrier, blocking light and hindering organisms below from photosynthesizing. A 2021 study in Climate Change Ecology
examined three bays in Quintana Roo and found that light filtration drops by up to 73% under floating sargassum patches, and water temperatures can rise by up to 5°C (9°F).
Moving into more familiar outlets, Freeman Rogers, Olivia Losbar, Maria Mónica Monsalve, Krista Campbell and Suzanne Carlson took a big-picture look at the sargassum crisis
for The Guardian.
Toxic gas, livelihoods under threat and power outages: how a seaweed causes chaos in Caribbean
Leaders have failed to tackle invasion of sargassum, which may have a bumper year in 2024
Schools evacuated due to toxic gas. Smelly tap water at home. Tourist operators and fishers struggling to stay in business. Job losses. Power outages affecting tens of thousands of people at a time. Dangerous health problems. Even lives lost.
Such crises were some of the consequences of sargassum seaweed in the islands of the Caribbean
in 2023, which have become common in the region since 2011, when massive blooms began inundating the shorelines in the spring and summer months.
On 18 April 2023 in Guadeloupe, the air-quality monitoring agency Gwad’Air advised vulnerable people to leave some areas because of toxic levels of gas produced by sargassum. Six weeks later, about 600 miles to the north-west, it blocked an intake pipe at an electricity plant at Punta Catalina in the Dominican Republic. One of the facility’s units was forced to temporarily shut down, and a 20-year-old diver named Elías Poling later drowned while trying to fix the problem.
Sound at sea, sargassum buries beaches and threatens tourismMillions of tons of yellow-brown algae that have been swirling about in a region of the tropical Atlantic known as the Sargasso Sea are now breaking loose and landing on Florida shores
The Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt was coined by scientists about the same time that oceanographer Ajit Subramaniam, who has run scientific research expeditions in the South Atlantic for 25 years, is credited for first coming across the endless blotches of sargassum in 2018 during one of his expeditions.
It has been growing at such a rate as to alarm scientists. Two years ago, the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt grew to a combined 24.2 million tons — about four times the weight of the Great Pyramid of Giza — and it was recognized as the largest macroalgae bloom in the world.
After the sargassum died back that winter, it regrew in 2023 to a swath that stretched some 5,000 miles long and 300 miles wide, extending from West Africa to the Gulf of Mexico and weighed in at some 13 million tons.
Tourism, of course, is a major source of revenue across the Caribbean and Florida, and sargassum-covered beaches understandably aren’t appealing to visitors.
In another collaboration
, Suzanne Carlson of The Virgin Islands Daily News and Rafael Díaz from the Center for Investigative Journalism explain how the costs of containment and removal too often fall on the local resorts.
Caribbean resorts, tourism operators pay high price for sargassum
The 2023 sargassum season started early at the Bolongo Bay Beach Resort on St. Thomas in the United States Virgin Islands. Around the end of March, staff launched the response system they have devised over the years in the absence of any official guidance from the government: hand-raking the beaches and spreading the seaweed to dry on the grounds of the 65-room property, which is nestled in a cove on the southern side of the island of about 50,000 people.
As usual, the family-owned resort had to foot the full bill for the response.
It is not alone. Without a national sargassum management strategy or a dedicated pool of funding from the V.I. government, the financial burden for cleaning the shorelines in the territory has often fallen squarely on resorts, yacht charterers and other tourism operators.
“We’re in the millions of dollars being spent on mitigation over the last decade,” said Lisa Hamilton, President of the V.I. Hotel and Tourism Association. Often these costs come on top of lost revenue as tourists increasingly select their vacation destinations to avoid affected beaches.
There are groups attempting to find uses for the seaweed.
#CARIBBEAN
: This initiative is part of the regional Sargassum Products for Climate Resilience Project, funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which recently concluded a multi-country monitoring mission.
— CaribbeanNewsNetwork (@caribbeannewsuk) April 12, 2024
Field trials on the horizon for Sargassum-derived fertilizer
The Sargassum-derived plant growth enhancer will be tested on crops such as tomatoes, watermelons, and sweet potatoes
A multi-country mission to monitor progress with the regional Sargassum Products for Climate Resilience Project
, funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, has recently concluded. Representatives from the Caribbean Regional Fisheries Mechanism (CRFM) and the New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research Limited (PFR) met with key partners in Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, and Jamaica in February and March 2024, to review progress and plan future activities.
Based on the successful outcome of recent scientific studies and greenhouse trials for a Sargassum-derived liquid fertilizer, the partners will commence field trials within the next few weeks. These efforts, which will be advanced in collaboration with the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI) and regional private sector partners, signal promising progress towards valorization of Sargassum and strengthening the Caribbean’s food security and climate resilience.
“Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the cost of fertilizers has skyrocketed, and farmers across the region need more affordable, high-quality fertilizers to improve their yields, especially in the stressful environment brought about by warmer temperatures and drought conditions. Anything that we can do to improve the supply and reduce costs and dependence on imports will be impactful,” Milton Haughton, Executive Director, CRFM Secretariat, stated.
Here’s hoping that this initiative comes to fruition, and that governments—including our own—will increase efforts to mitigate the damages of the spread of sargassum.
Join me in the comments for more, and for the weekly Caribbean News Roundup.
Donald Trump attacked late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel
in an early morning all-over-the-map social media post Wednesday. That night, Kimmel told his audience that he learned about Trump’s latest attack on him from all the text messages waiting for him when he woke up.
“Usually, like, I’ll have maybe four,” he said. “I had 100 because it appears that I once again ruffled the feathers of our Kentucky Fried former president who is—apparently, with all that’s going on—still smarting from my joke about him at the Oscars.”
After reading Trump’s Truth Social screed
out loud, Kimmel joked, “My first thought is I’m impressed by his use of the word ‘vaunted.’ He was even able to spell it correctly, which is really good!” He added, “But literally everything else is not just wrong, but ‘maybe we should be worried about him’ wrong. Like, ‘maybe we should take the keys away from grandpa’ wrong.”
Kimmel then fact-checked Trump’s rant.
He conceded that Trump calling him “stupid Jimmy Kimmel” was a debatable fact. But he took issue with Trump’s claim that Kimmel is not only bad at hosting the Academy Awards, but he was somehow responsible for the show’s “big ratings drop”—a “weird” assertion, Kimmel said, because ratings were up this year.
Does the late-night comedian suffer from “Trump derangement syndrome,” as the Donald claims?
“There’s only one person who suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Kimmel said. “His name is Donald Trump.”
Kimmel noted that a big part of Trump’s attack on him seems to be rooted in his inability to distinguish Kimmel from Academy Award-winning actor Al Pacino.
“Now, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I wish I was Al Pacino. I’m just not.”
As for Trump’s insistence that Kimmel’s wife, along with people behind the scenes of the show, were begging Kimmel to not read Trump’s Truth Social attack live on air during the Academy Awards broadcast, Kimmel gave this hilarious blow-by-blow account of how that all went down.
What happened is they showed me what he posted. I looked at it. I said, ‘Oh, I’m going to read this.’
My wife went, ‘Oh no.’
I said, ‘Oh yes.’
And that was that. That was the whole story.
Kimmel said he wasn’t planning to accept hosting duties again, even though he’s been asked, but now that Trump weighed in on it, he has to consider it.
“You know what? Maybe you can watch on the TV in the rec room at Rikers with all the guys,” he said.
And since it clearly still bothers Trump, Kimmel played the clip of him making fun of Trump at the Academy Awards by reading out Trump’s attack on him.
Kimmel then reminded the audience that his show received better ratings than Trump would have you believe, with a graph showing that ratings have increased in the two years Kimmel has hosted.
“I just want to say that that is not ‘down.’ You want to know what ‘down’ looks like?” Kimmel asked, before putting up a graph showing stock plummeting
. “This is the value of Truth Social stock, your company. That’s ‘down.'”
Zachary Mueller is the senior research director for America’s Voice and America’s Voice Education Fund. He brings his expertise on immigration politics to talk about how much money the GOP is using to promote its racist immigration campaigns.
A new abortion rights advocacy organization, Montanans Securing Reproductive Rights, officially launched its ballot initiative
, which aims to enshrine abortion rights in Montana’s state constitution. If the petition drive succeeds, it will make abortion central to the 2024 campaign and likely give vulnerable Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, a staunch abortion rights supporter
, a boost.
“Abortion is a topic that’s become politicized and stigmatized, but in reality, we all love someone or are someone who’s had an abortion,” Martha Fuller, CEO and president of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Montana, said during the official launch event. “We can no longer let politicians threaten access to the lifesaving, essential care that thousands of Montanans need and deserve. Montanans must act now to proactively secure our right to abortion.”
If the group succeeds in gaining enough qualified signatures for the ballot, it will join about a dozen states
in making abortion a driving issue in the 2024 campaign, potentially salvaging the Democrats’ Senate majority. Montana would be joining battleground states where Democrats are on defense, including Arizona
and Nevada
.
The Senate Democrats’ campaign arm has already reserved $2 million
in radio ads for Tester, part of the more than $300 million that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and associated super PACs are spending, not just to defend the majority but to grow it. And abortion is going to be key to both aims.
Take Florida, for example, where former Democratic Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell sees a huge opportunity in her bid to defeat GOP Sen. Rick Scott. “It hasn’t been just Democrats. This is not a partisan issue for people living here in the state of Florida,” she told Daily Kos
. Having abortion on the ballot, she said, is an “incredible opportunity” for abortion supporters “to exercise their rights to vote and to choose what is best for our bodies and for our own lives.”
Abortion has always been a salient issue for voters in the red states of Ohio
—where Sen. Sherrod Brown is also defending his seat—and Kansas
. Abortion rights victories there—as well as the landslide victory
of Democrat Marilyn Lands in Alabama—already have Republicans looking over their shoulders.
It’s an old story, but it never gets old: Democrats just whooped Republicans in fundraising—again. This week on “The Downballot” podcast, we’re running through some of the most eye-popping numbers Democrats hauled in during the first quarter of the year (Sherrod Brown! Jon Tester! Colin Allred!) and the comparatively weak performances we’re seeing from Republicans almost across the board. The GOP hopes to make up the gap by relying on self-funders, but a campaign without a strong fundraising network can be dangerously hollow.
