Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
NELSON’S FAREWELL
Senator laments lost bipartisanship, discusses his political contributions after decades in office
On the Friday before Christmas, U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson sat in an airport terminal, waiting for a flight home to Florida.
He was talking to a reporter on the phone about his five decades in politics when he had to pause halfway through the conversation to take another call.
It was the incoming House Minority Leader Steny Hoyer. Nelson, a three-term Democratic senator approaching his final days in office, was still trying to pass one more bill.
“I can’t summarize for you 18 years,” Nelson said. “It goes up to the very last minute.”
Nelson, 76, was coming off a bitter defeat to Gov. Rick Scott in November’s election, a race separated by barely 10,000 votes out of 8 million, so close that it triggered the first statewide hand recount in Florida history.
Now, with retirement just days away, Nelson still didn’t really know what the future held.
“I haven’t been able to hold my head up enough to look over the horizon,” Nelson said, as a last-minute demand by President Trump was leading up to a federal shutdown. “I’m still
“People vote a party first instead of the individual, and that’s dramatically different from when I started in the House as well as the Senate.” U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson
trying to keep the government of the U.S. funded as I speak.”
‘One of the giants’
“It’s self-evident to me that Bill, from the earliest years – even going back before high school, was always destined for public service,” said Hugh Normile, an attorney who grew up with Nelson in Melbourne. “Everything he did, every decision he made, he wanted to be in public service.”
In 1972, Nelson met his wife, Grace, and that same year an opening came up in the state Legislature in Brevard County.
“She has been by my side ever since in politics,” Nelson said. “As well as in life.”
From the state House, he moved to the U.S. House in 1979, representing a district that also included Orlando and Central Florida, where he’s lived for the past decade. But he gave up the seat to run for governor in 1990, losing to Lawton Chiles in the Democratic primary in what would be his only loss until 2018.
In 1994, he was elected state insurance commissioner and treasurer. Nelson then returned to Washington in 2000, defeating Republican Bill McCollum to serve with thenU.S. Sen. Bob Graham as Florida’s junior senator.
“In the Senate, there’s an old saying: ‘You’re either a workhorse or a showhorse,’” Graham said. “And Bill was certainly one of the workhorses.
“Bill was a wonderful colleague, always looking for opportunities to collaborate for the benefit of Florida,” Graham added.
Nelson later served alongside Republican Sens. Mel Martinez and then Marco Rubio, who on the floor of the Senate said Nelson would go down as one of “the giants of Florida political history.”
“I cannot recall a single time in our eight years of service together in which he did anything to harm me or embarrass me or in any way create unnecessary conflict,” Rubio said. “Our staffs would travel together across the state, and sometimes people would be shocked by it … as if somehow Republicans and Democrats are supposed to be allergic to one another.”
‘Serving your people’
Despite a good relationship with Rubio, Nelson lamented about how opposing sides in politics have grown ever farther apart.
“The biggest change over the years has been the increasing partisanship,” he said. “People vote a party first instead of the individual, and that’s dramatically different from when I started in the House as well as the Senate.”
When he first ran for Congress in 1972, his Brevard district voted nearly 75 percent for President Nixon, a Republican.
“And I got 75 percent,” Nelson said. “See, they were picking the individual. And that happened not only in that election but my election to the Senate in 2000, and again in 2006 and 2012.”
But in 2018, two years into the Trump administration, the divide between red and blue had grown sharp. Ironically, it was the Democratic primary victory of progressive Andrew Gillum for governor that was expected to bolster the chances of Nelson, considered too moderate for the times.
In the end, however, Nelson was the one who outpolled Gillum, who lost to Republican Ron DeSantis by about 32,000 votes.
But Nelson couldn’t overcome Scott, who poured almost $64 million of his own money into the race and portrayed Nelson as old, confused and in office for too long.
Nelson, who talked about the friends he made in his time in Congress, including Richard Shelby of Alabama and other Republicans, would not comment about Scott, whom he referred to only as “my opponent.”
Scott, in his victory statement, said he thanked Nelson for his years of public service.
Nelson is perhaps most identified with the space program, having gone up himself in the Space Shuttle Columbia in 1986 and co-sponsoring the NASA bill in 2010 that paved the way for trips to the Moon and Mars.
But outgoing senator, who seemed stung by Scott’s attacks on his record that portrayed him as an “empty suit,” wanted to talk about more than his work promoting NASA.
He said he took the lead on Everglades restoration after Graham left the Senate in 2004 and that he was proud of helping to prevent oil drilling off the Florida coasts.
Nelson also pointed to his record of consumer legislation that included a bill signed just this year by Trump that bars airlines from bumping passengers from an overbooked flight who’ve already boarded, and his hand in writing the Affordable Care Act in 2009 as a member of the Senate Finance Committee.
“It’s an incredibly long list of legislation, but there’s more to it in serving as a senator than just passing bills,” he said. “It’s serving your people.”
‘It’s going to be different’
Normile, who was with Nelson during the wild swings of Election night when first his lead vanished but then slowly made up the gap enough to trigger a recount, counted off the same list of “what-ifs” that many Nelson supporters had.
What if the Broward ballot hadn’t been badly designed and caused thousands to skip the Senate race, he said. What if Brevard, long GOPleaning but which had come out strongly for Nelson in the past, had just given him 50 percent of its votes instead of 43. Other Democrats have faulted Nelson for his outreach to Hispanics as too little and too late, despite Nelson’s long record advocating for Puerto Rico.
“It could have easily gone the other way,” Normile said. “Now, he will have another chapter in his life.”
Former Republican U.S Rep. John Mica, who met Nelson when both attended the University of Florida, also suddenly found himself retired after decades in Washington when he lost re-election in 2016. His advice to Nelson: Relax. Travel. Take some time for himself.
“It’s going to be different,” Mica said.
For Nelson, beyond donating his papers to a yet-to-be-named university to establish an institute dedicated to leadership, ethics and public service, he said he was too busy to think about retirement.
The Space Frontier Act he was monitoring from the airport, a bill he said was extremely important to Kennedy Space Center, was stuck in the House.
“These kinds of fights go on all the time,” Nelson said. “But my role models were the Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill and Republican Leader Bob Michel back in the late ‘70s and ‘80s. They were friends to begin with, and they fought like the dickens. But when the time came to get things done, they sat down and negotiated and did what they had to do to get things done.”
As late as 2010, Nelson said, people in Congress still got along, for the most part.
“You’ve got to have people of good will to come together regardless of party” he said. “It’s gone tribal now.”