After the nasty primary, Martinez was expected to pivot quickly to the center for the general election. But he is continuing to use the same old hardball tactics from the tattered playbook of the Republican Party in Washington. The strategy appears aimed more at energizing the GOP conservative base -- who will certainly also vote for President Bush -- than at winning over independent voters, who might split their tickets with a vote for Kerry.

Last month, for example, in response to Castor television ads emphasizing her support for veterans, Martinez issued news releases attacking the Democrat for accepting campaign donations from the Council for a Livable World, an arms control group. Calling the council a "left-wing, anti-military group," Martinez accused Castor of being weak on defense. It was an almost word-for-word reprise of attacks Republicans used against Democratic Senate candidates who were supported by the council in 2002.

Floridians have begun to notice that Martinez's strings are being pulled from Washington. Orlando Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell recently slammed Martinez for trying to wriggle out of a debate this month with Castor by complaining that "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert was an inappropriate choice as moderator because he did not hail from Florida. Castor's camp suspected that Martinez was really more worried about being pinned to the wall by Russert's tough questions.

The Sentinel's Maxwell, meanwhile, questioned Martinez's sudden emphasis on Florida when much of his staff, despite having Florida ties, are products of the national GOP apparatus in Washington. The columnist singled out the campaign's communications director, Coxe, as "just one out-of-town cog in a Washington campaign that Martinez appears to have little control over." Coxe, whose last campaign job was in Tennessee, countered that she was born in Tampa and worked on Capitol Hill for former Sen. Mack. She said that Martinez is "in complete control of this campaign."

Yet the candidate continues to blame staff for his gaffes, including the news release that called federal agents "armed thugs." Law enforcement groups were outraged, and Martinez found himself again blaming staff. Questioned by CNN's Judy Woodruff on Sept. 28 about the phrase, Martinez said, "No, no. I never said that. And it was something that was put out by someone in the office and immediately withdrawn, as we saw what had happened."

The campaign manager, Scott Barnhard, has been reassigned to oversee paid media and no longer has an office at campaign headquarters; Coxe said his move is unrelated to the Elián controversy. She said a junior staffer was responsible for the "armed thugs" comment. Asked if anyone has been fired for the string of missteps, Coxe said: "Structural changes were made to ensure this campaign is run in a fashion Mel can be proud of. I'm not going to comment any further."

Martinez, meanwhile, has campaigned heavily on his experience as HUD secretary, boasting that his policies have helped millions of African-Americans and Hispanics purchase homes. Yet the St. Petersburg Times reported that Martinez last year blocked release of a potentially embarrassing HUD study assessing whether the nation's largest mortgage lenders have discriminated against minorities. The still secret, taxpayer-funded study focuses on whether credit-scoring systems used by the quasi-governmental Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have resulted in lower credit ratings -- and higher hurdles -- for minorities trying to buy homes. One of Fannie Mae's lobbyists at the time Martinez squelched the report was former Florida Republican Party chairman Al Cardenas, a top Martinez supporter. Martinez told the Times that he had never talked to Cardenas about the study. The candidate said he shelved the report because it was "skewed and would have resulted in a real disruption of the marketplace."

Castor, meanwhile, has been aggressively questioning Martinez's character in her own series of negative television ads. Martinez responded by upping the ante. Last week, he began attacking Castor for her failure to fire professor Sami Al-Arian from USF in the mid- and late 1990s while he was under federal investigation for terrorist ties. Al-Arian goes to trial in January on charges he was a founder and top leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the suicide-bombing group dedicated to the destruction of Israel. Martinez is airing a TV ad in the heavily Jewish areas of southern Florida's Atlantic coast that declares: "Islamic Jihad at USF under Betty Castor."

The ads are not without risk for President Bush, whose 2000 campaign heavily courted Al-Arian and other politically active Muslims who have since been indicted or come under investigation for alleged terrorist activities. Bush posed for a picture with Al-Arian that has appeared widely in Florida newspapers and other publications, such as Newsweek. And Al-Arian worked hard to round up Muslim votes for Bush in Florida in 2000, bragging publicly that his efforts had made the difference in the close race. And so again, this criticism of Castor appears designed to suppress turnout among Florida's Democratic-leaning Jewish voters.

Castor has responded that she did all she could against Al-Arian in the absence of an indictment, suspending him for two years with pay. Yet one of Castor's critics, Bill West, the former Immigration and Naturalization agent who worked the Al-Arian case, appears in the Martinez television ad against Castor. West said Castor bowed to political correctness in coddling Al-Arian. But the Castor campaign pointed out that the former federal agent is a consultant to the Investigative Project in Washington, a research group headed by controversial anti-terrorism "expert" Steven Emerson, whose critics accuse him of trampling the civil liberties of Muslim-Americans. (In 2002, the Investigative Project received $600,000 in funding from the conservative Smith Richardson Foundation, which has also heavily supported the American Enterprise Institute think tank, home to Bush administration stalwarts like vice presidential spouse Lynne Cheney and Defense Department advisor Richard Perle, an architect of the Iraq war.)

Castor spokesman McLaughlin calls the Martinez campaign "the ugly mutated life form of what Lee Atwater started and which today's Republican Party, with the likes of Karl Rove, are continuing. They make stuff up after their polling identifies divisive or polarizing issues that they can use to drive home with ethnic groups or other constituencies."

The closeness of the Florida Senate race was reaffirmed in a survey conducted Oct. 1-2 by Insider Advantage for Creators Syndicate. It put Martinez at 40 percent, Castor at 39 percent, with a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percent. But the most intriguing data in that poll was the large bloc of undecided voters: 21 percent. In their hands lies the fate of both the Florida Senate hopefuls and, possibly, George W. Bush and John Kerry as well.

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