Politics: Charming and Disarming
Matti and Me: A Conversation
“They’ve got to be positive questions,” Mayor Bower implored her audience at the start. “This year, I like to start positive.”
So, after previous questioners in the dining room at David’s Cafe Tuesday had had their turns, I took up my racquet and served Matti my “positive” submission to the morning’s dialogue:
“How positive are you that Jorge Gonzalez will still be city manager at the end of this year?”
Not missing a beat, the mayor volleyed back her briefest answer all morning:
“Very.”
Whatever reaction to that answer may have registered on the face of Jonah Wolfson – who was standing off to the side of the room – I missed.
I then served a follow-up whose answer should have been so obvious, yet I wanted to get it on record:
“Does he have your vote?”
“Yes.”
(There you go, Jorge. You’ve got at least one vote, but hers was never in doubt. One down, three to go.)
As I turned to sit down – and sensing that my second, one-word answer in a row had been served to me, over the net, within the baseline, volley all done, match over – came words two through twelve:
“How positive are you that you’re going to be alive tomorrow?”
Ace!
The others laughed. I laughed. Abuela Alcaldesa had lobbed in a last, unreturned serve I hadn’t seen coming.
Dissecting her answer, though, I’m not sure what that portends for the future-uncertain, fingernail-biting city manager. (You may have her vote in the bag, Jorge, but I wouldn’t suggest abandoning that Google search of “rental moving trucks.”)
And so Mayor Matti begins her fifth year as the Beach’s first lady, one of her great performances – orchestrating last month’s unanimous No vote on casinos – only now receding into her rear-view mirror.
Also in that mirror: The vanquishing of not one, not 2, but 3 younger challengers nine weeks ago. She still harbors some bitterness about that election, her final. After Tuesday’s Breakfast Club session had adjourned, and all her audience had dispersed, she asked me to sit down with her at an abandoned table, and we talked for twenty minutes, mostly about her impressions of the Police Athletic League and the controversial comment she uttered at last month’s commission meeting that has since raised the hackles of PAL leaders, past and present. The time was ripe for a clarification.
“Maybe that was a little strong. The reason that I say that they don’t do anything – which is really loosely said; they do, they do – but the reason I get upset is because when I first got to Miami Beach was in the second grade. There was no program in the parks for children because the majority of the people that lived here were elderly. I remember the first Halloween people didn’t want to open the door because they were old, they didn’t like kids. They didn’t really identify with how Halloween was done.
When the 1980 Mariel boatlift happened, “the parks had nothing in place for the influx of children, and neither did the PAL.” Nobody was sponsoring recreational activities for children who could not afford to pay.
“So what happened was we had to bring in Gelber, and activists, and the Girls and Boys Clubs.” One child, Bower recalls, was run over playing in the street – “they were afraid to go to the park.”
“We had to bring in another organization. There were many arguments about it. My argument was, Do something in this park to get these kids off the streets. This was around the time I was in the PTA. I was very into kids and trying to bring in another organization and put them right next door, [one] that would let the kids go in without paying. That’s why I loosely say that they’re not doing anything.
“They were always unhappy about the Boys and Girls Clubs, but the Boys and Girls Clubs have always taken in older children. If you look at the PAL, what they do is they raise a lot of money to build this beautiful building [in Flamingo Park] and what do they do there? They have a gym and they rent out. They don’t provide programs.
As president of the Beach High PTA, Bower and her crew used to raise money for the school from fees collected from Boat Show attendees parking in the school lot. “I got very angry because they brought in the PAL to sell the hot dogs. I said, ‘Why are you putting the PAL here to raise money when the band could be raising money for the band selling the hot dogs, [as well as] all the other clubs – the Key Club, whatever they have there. Give them days and let everybody raise money for themselves.’
“That’s what I was trying to tell [Steve Cohen]. ‘Bubba, I fought that battle and couldn’t get to first base.’”
I understand, I said to her, from what you said on the 14th that you had at one time wanted to serve on the PAL board.
“Right.”
And they wouldn’t let you because you…
“Because I’m picky!”
From out of her lifetime experience as a community activist, fund raiser, school booster, and more, she has learned that “when you really want to help [others], you really have to work it. Nobody says it’s easy.”
The PAL gives out turkeys once a year, she noted, “but to me, that’s nothing because a child needs something every day while the parent is at work or while the parent is not taking care of them. They need to go someplace and learn something, and play with other kids, and I don’t see that happening.
“We need more programs that kids that can’t afford” can benefit from. “The [city] pools are free because I battled very hard for it. I battled for those families that can’t afford this stuff.”
Why does she think PAL isn’t as it could be?
“I think it’s because they don’t change people. Maybe the same people are there all the time. I believe in term limits. We have term limits, this is my last term. I believe in new blood coming in.”
It was from there that we segued into a discussion of the anemic turnout in November’s city election.
“It’s such a small percentage of people who vote. I like to go out and try to inspire people to run and why they should vote, and one of my quotes I always say is, Somebody else makes the choice for you, because you’re not voting. You’re letting people make the choice for you who’s going to change your life or not.
“I had a very nasty campaign this last time. Nasty campaign.” Recalling a 19-year-old acquaintance of hers who is “very passionate” about life: “She would cry and say, ‘Why do they say these things,’ and I said, ‘honey, this is what politics is.’ Such nastiness is “the same thing that keeps good people out” and afraid to run for public office.
Matti never just wants you to know what she thinks but turns the table on you and wants to know what you think. She is still trying to figure out her opponents from the fall race, even now, two months later.
“Let me ask you: What kind of candidates were they? Why do you think the press gave them such credibility?”
Of Laura Rivero-Levey: “She’s lived here, she has children, she’s a person from the community. I think she has more credibility.” But of Dave Crystal: “I’d never heard of him before, and the other guy that didn’t even live in Miami Beach?” She was referring to the opponent for whom she reserved her harshest assessment, comedian Steve Berke, who blamed Bower for having “bankrupted” the city and crooned, in a video posted at his campaign website, “If you want our city to grow / Then that old lady has got to go!”
Not sure myself of his origins, I asked the mayor, Was he not from Miami Beach? Had he not been born here?
“He lives across the bay someplace. Nobody ever called him on that. I wasn’t going to call him on that,” Bower declared. “Let the people have whoever they think.”
“Michael Putney had him on his show. Michael Putney! And he called me and wanted me…”
You didn’t appear on that one, I recalled of the Sunday talk show appearance which Matti snubbed Putney, Levey, and Berke by passing up.
“I said no. ‘You’re giving credibility to him.’ And I told [Putney], ‘When I ran against Simon Cruz [in 2007], that was [an election with] two credible candidates. I said [to Putney], ‘You didn’t ask us to go on television. Then we could have debated, had a good debate, two candidates that know the issues.’ Please.
Before Matti and I went our separate ways, I asked her if she had any pet project for the new year.
Not quite. “Projects change and priorities change. What is a priority today could become a big disaster, you have to address it, drop everything else and take care of that particular one.”
Then, she added: “The convention center, actually is one. I might not be alive before it’s done, but…”
“Trustfully, you will,” I interjected.
I’ve got a feeling that the sheer indomitable drive that propels this “old lady” will keep her around for a long time, long enough to eventually attend the ribbon-cutting of that new convention center she’s hoping for.
I’m pretty positive about that.
BLAME IT ON THE BROWNIE ON THE DESSERT MENU
David Kelsey’s resolution for the new year? To lose weight. As he told his Tuesday Morning Breakfast Club gathering the other day, that resolution met an untimely death, however, thanks to a night out. At Joe’s Stone Crab.
Okay. Let’s try this again. For those of you were confused by the misprinted Hitchens quote about Newt Gingrich from two weeks ago, and then by the (failed) attempt to correct it last week, here (I hope) is the damn quote, in its entirety: “He has a Tyrannosaurus Rex skull in his office; he has a Tyrannosaurus Rex skull in his skull.” There. Done. (This quote now has had a longer shelf life in this paper these last three weeks than did Newtie’s meteoric ascent to the top of the GOP field.)
