On his first full day as governor, Bob Graham did not pose for photographs or look to make headlines. Despite the freezing temperatures, he paused on his walk to work to talk with a sanitation worker. Having spent one of his more than 400 famous “workdays” as a sanitation worker himself, Graham took the time to connect with the man. Our current leaders could learn a thing or two from Graham.
What Graham knew, and what Florida leadership has abandoned, is that governing is fundamentally an act of attention. You cannot make good decisions for people whose reality you have not acknowledged. You cannot write good policy about lives you have never bothered to understand. He recognized first and foremost that attention is the currency of leadership.
Graham’s generation understood the importance of long-term investments that pay off over decades. They used hard-earned political capital to solve practical problems: improving education so every Floridian has a path to economic mobility, championing conservation to sustain natural beauty for decades and implementing growth management laws that kept developers from paving Florida into incoherence. Today, leaders treat these issues as ideological battlegrounds, valued for the conflict and headlines they generate.
This disconnect trickles down into legislation that overlooks everyday struggles, budgets that ignore urgent needs, and elected officials who mistake loudness for leadership. Political outrage is rewarded over competence.
History has taught us that outrage politics has a predictable cost. Florida’s property insurance market remains perilous, with over a dozen insurers leaving the state in recent years. Premiums now rival mortgage payments for many homeowners, and workforce housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable.
When those in power prefer conflict to fixes, they inevitably undermine the institutions built to serve everyday Floridians. Through its voucher programs, the Florida that once led the South in per-pupil spending, is now draining neighborhood schools of needed resources, diverting billions in public dollars to private and charter schools with less accountability and little supervision. All the while, the public schools that serve the overwhelming majority of Florida’s children are now punished with enrollment volatility and ensuing budget cuts.
Too many leaders do not ask whether a policy will help people, they ask if it will help their narrative. Florida is one of 10 states that has not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Expansion would result in over 800,000 Floridians gaining access to coverage, while generating billions in revenue. Though the federal government covers 90 cents of every dollar, Florida leaders continue to deny expansion because accepting it would mean conceding a point to the other side. And Floridians suffer because the costs of the uninsured are passed on to the insured through higher premiums.
What many fail to recognize is that while ideological victories do not compound, institutional decay does. Declining test scores linked to underfunded schools cannot be fixed in a single budget cycle. Insurance premiums are not going to be solved by talking points on the campaign trail. The bill for our leaders’ short-termism may be deferred, but it always comes due, the price paid by those who can least afford to wait.
The hard, necessary work of smart governing is often unglamorous. It requires patience and acceptance that the results of today’s choices may not come to fruition for decades. It requires humility, a willingness to lay groundwork that someone else will cut the ribbon on. Our best leaders have always chosen the public’s interest over personal accolades.
Florida has produced leaders up for the challenge before. It can again. But it requires leaders who are willing to put Floridians first, who focus on competence over conflict, the daily grind over provocation. Voters reward these leaders — Bob Graham won election after election by landslide margins despite being a Democrat in a state shifting to the right. He did so because Floridians trusted he would always put their interests first. If Florida is to meet the challenges ahead, it will require leaders who govern with the same discipline of attention that defined Graham’s career; leaders who measure success not by headlines made, but by problems solved and futures improved.
Patrick O’Bryant is an attorney in Tallahassee. The views expressed are his own.
