Chris Cate: Welcome to the Fluent in Floridian podcast featuring the Sunshine State’s brightest leaders talking about the issues most important to the people of Florida and it’s millions of weekly visitors. In this episode created by SalterMitchell PR, our executive producer Heidi Otway The president of SalterMitchell PR talks to long-time Republican advisor Mac Stipanovich. This episode of Fluent in Floridian was recorded in front of a live audience made up of members of Leadership FPRA class, a program within the Florida Public Relations Association of which SalterMitchell PR is a member. And you can hear it all right now.

Heidi Otway: Mac Stipanovich is a successful lawyer and was a long-time Florida political operative of the Republican Party. He helped lead governor Bob Martinez to office in the 1980s and advised Jeb Bush on his run for governor in the 1990s. He is revered for his political mind and has been called upon to look at the foremost political issues of the day, including the Trump presidency.

Mac, thank you so much for joining us for this live recording of the Fluent in Floridian podcast. 

Mac Stipanovich: It’s my pleasure.

Heidi Otway: You grew up in Gainesville and went to the University of Florida twice. How did you make your way north to Tallahassee?

Mac Stipanovich: Actually, I was born in Ocala because Williston didn’t have a hospital. And I moved to the big city of Gainesville in the sixth grade and then grew up there. I went in the Marine Corps after I got out of high school, went to Vietnam, and came back and went to college and law school. From law school, I took a job with a law firm in Tampa and got involved in politics down there. I was a history major as an undergraduate. I always viewed current events as history that had just insufficiently aged. And I got involved with Governor Martinez’s mayoral campaign and then became his advisor. And I ran his reelection, continued as his advisor. I was Reagan-Bush director in Florida in ’84, then his campaign manager and director in ’86. And he won, so I came with him to Tallahassee in 1986. 

Heidi Otway: And so you’ve served as an advisor to a number of political leaders in our state, most notably Governor Bob Martinez, but then also Katherine Harris.

Mac Stipanovich: Katherine Harris.

Heidi Otway: Secretary of State.

Mac Stipanovich: She was the Secretary of State. All of these stories are complicated. Jeb had picked Sandy Mortham, who was the Secretary of State, to be his lieutenant governor running mate. And Katherine declared that she was going to run for that non-incumbent office. Through a series of events, Sandy withdrew from the ticket and declared that she would seek reelection after all. Most of the people in Tallahassee flocked back to her, abandoning Katherine because she was the incumbent. And I remember Malcolm Beard, a senator from Tampa, telling me never give up an old friend to make a new friend, and so I stayed with Katherine and she won. She would be an example of someone I advised, senate presidents every now and then, speakers of the house and folks like that.

Heidi Otway: And so your relationship with Katherine Harris and your role with her was actually pivotal when we had the presidential recount in the year 2000, and you were an advisor to her. Can you tell us a little bit about that experience?

Mac Stipanovich: I didn’t have a boat at the time, I had sold my boat. And my first grandchild hadn’t been born. And so I was kind of bored. I was getting a master’s in medieval French history out at FSU. I was in a Latin class when my phone buzzed. And I went outside and it was someone I’ve never named who said, “We’ve got a problem. Can you get into Katherine Harris’ office and help her out?” And I said, “Well, I’ll see.” So I called over there and said, “Do y’all need any help?” And they said, “Boy, do we.”

So I went in on November 9th to advise her, but it was kind of important that people not know I was in there because I have such a partisan profile. And she was projecting a nonpartisan quasi-judicial image.

Heidi Otway: And this was all happening when there was an issue with the ballots during the 2000 Presidential election between-

Mac Stipanovich: Yeah, the election was on the 7th.

Heidi Otway: … George Bush and Al Gore.

Mac Stipanovich: Right, the election was on the 7th and by the 9th, it was clear that there was a problem. I arrived on the 9th. I would come in in the morning through the basement garage in the Capitol, go up to the cabinet level floor, take the stairs up to the plaza level on the interior so people wouldn’t see me.

Heidi Otway: Why is that? Why didn’t they want people to see you support-

Mac Stipanovich: Well, they might have thought that I was cooking the books.

Heidi Otway: Oh.

Mac Stipanovich: I was a Bush liege, I was and am a Bush liege. And so there might have been some questions whether the secretary of state, who was at this point supposed to be dispassionately administering Florida’s election laws, was doing so if I was in there. Now, she did obey the law, but if there was any judgment call to be made, I helped her make it. 

Heidi Otway: So your role, your work with her, actually was shown in the movie Recount that was produced by HBO, the docuseries. We talked earlier about you being portrayed in that. Actually, I was reading they actually have the lines between him and Katherine Harris portrayed in the movie and you can find it online. And there was this line, I wish we had the audio to play this, but I’m going to read it because I thought it was just fascinating. I’m going to tell you what it said online. And this is what the scene said. It’s supposed to be between you and Katherine during the recount.

And it says, Mac: “Listen, Katherine, most people go through their lives never having a chance to make a difference. And those that are lucky enough to have that chance don’t recognize it when it comes. They think it’s down the road and that it’s going to be next year or the year after that. But if you’re a public official wanting to make history, then today is your lucky day darling. You’re about to pick the leader of the free world. And then in the scene, Katherine says: “Don’t you worry, Mac, it’s going to take a lot more than David Letterman making fun of my hair and makeup to knock me down.”

Heidi Otway: Did that really happen?

Mac Stipanovich: Yes, but they made a lot of fun of her hair and makeup. I didn’t know if she was going to be able to stand it or not.

Heidi Otway: Really? So those were true words between you all?

Mac Stipanovich: Yeah, it happens with public officials all the time. They want to make a difference. They think when a challenge comes, they’ll be like one of the people portrayed in Kennedy’s book, Profiles in Courage.

Heidi Otway: Right.

Mac Stipanovich: But it almost never happens. They rationalize it in some way that it’s more important that I be reelected. This is not the moment. This is not important enough for me to sacrifice myself. Nobody hardly ever throws themselves on the grenade.

Heidi Otway: So what was it like seeing yourself portrayed in that movie?

Mac Stipanovich: Well, like I said, Bruce McGill was too short. He portrayed me. Laura Dern portrayed Katherine, who was too tall. So I thought the movie was, as the current president would say, not fair. No, I’m just being facetious. It was okay. It was pretty good. They had to, because of time, truncate a lot of things and condense things. For example, there’s a scene in there, I forget exactly how it works, that actually condensed two or three or four different meetings where we were talking about bringing the election in for a landing.

Heidi Otway: Yeah.

Mac Stipanovich: What we would do if … this was terribly dramatic. We’re talking about I don’t know how many votes were cast nationwide. We were talking about 527 votes. Dade County, were they going to count, did they count? Would Broward finish in time? Was Palm Beach going to finish? What would we do if they submitted partial recounts, which were unlawful? And then the legislature, which never happens so nobody knows about it, was prepared to elect their own delegates. And we would have sent two electoral slates to Washington.

Heidi Otway: Wow!

Mac Stipanovich: But anyway, some of the movie was not totally accurate because, like I said, it was a condensation, but there was nothing in it that was inaccurate.

Heidi Otway: Okay. So for all of our listeners, they may want to go watch it if they haven’t already.

Mac Stipanovich: Yeah, I like the … what was it … the 15th year anniversary maybe in ’17, CNN did a thing.

Heidi Otway: Yeah.

Mac Stipanovich: The CNN thing was more of a documentary, and it was probably less drama, but it was better history.

Heidi Otway: So just last year, another recount in Florida, what were you thinking? This was with the governor’s race.

Mac Stipanovich: It was. All of these races were very close. What that was primarily indicative of is how evenly balanced Florida is politically. I mean, when you talk about a purple state, we’re the poster child for that. Of course, the President was under water in Florida. We elected our first statewide Democrat in a long time, Nikki Fried. The race for the Senate and the governor were very close, both recount close. I did not like the way that went. I thought Governor Scott, now Senator Scott, was wrong to allege fraud because that undermines the public confidence in the electoral system. And representative democracy depends on the people believing that their government is legitimate and that even if they don’t agree with what’s happening, those people belong there because they were fairly elected.

To allege fraud as distinguished from, say incompetence or negligence, the way they did so loudly and so often, fed into a narrative that is really nationwide that you’ll hear again in 2020. If I’m not elected, it’s because I was cheated. If I don’t win, it’s because it was rigged. Those are dangerous messages. I was very disappointed in how Republican candidates at the head of the ticket behaved in 2018.

Heidi Otway: So you were a long-time political operative for the Republican Party, where are you now? What are you doing now? Are you still with the party?

Mac Stipanovich: No, I re-registered as an independent, again, on my birthday in 2018. There’s something about my birthday, during the recount, Katherine certified the election results from Florida on my birthday.

Heidi Otway: On your birthday.

Mac Stipanovich: I was in from the 9th until the 26th of November. I was 52. Now, that year I couldn’t go down to the cabinet room where they were certifying the results because literally, the entire world was watching on live television.

Heidi Otway: Of course.

Mac Stipanovich: She was kind enough to put my wife and two daughters in the front row. Nobody knew who they were. And I watched it on television upstairs.

Heidi Otway: Wow! So you switched to become a no party affiliate, independent. What prompted that? What made you do that?

Mac Stipanovich: I consider myself to be a conservative and I don’t believe that the current Republican Party, which is Donald Trump’s Republican Party, is a conservative party. Whether you look at … pick something, the deficit … I think of myself as a fiscal conservative. Whether you think about foreign policy and his dismantlement, if you will, of the entire structure of international relations that the United States built after World War II or the xenophobia and his sometimes, in my judgment, race baiting that, again, characterized the 2018 congressional elections.

I just didn’t feel like that any longer represented who I was. I didn’t think it represented who the Bushes were or who Ronald Reagan was. Now, there may be a day when the party has been purged of this poison, and I will return. But I’m not going to lend my little might to the current Republican Party.

Heidi Otway: I want to go back to what you said about when someone doesn’t win an election, they may allege fraud, you know, looking ahead to the next major election. For our voters that are listening, what would you advise them? What should they be thinking? Go vote, or …

Mac Stipanovich: Well, absolutely, everyone should vote. And I think it’s incumbent on everybody, and this is one of the problems in 2000, and it was a problem in 2018, know how to vote. That sounds silly, but it’s really not. People who are unaccustomed to voting and have been turned out in some wave election or something like that, are much more often to make errors and have their votes invalidated than others. Young people have their votes invalidated at two or three times the rate of other people.

Economically disadvantaged people, you can look at bar charts by race or whatever, in 2000, 527 votes made the difference in that election. 27,000 votes were invalidated in Duval County because of overvoting. 

Heidi Otway: Overvoting?

Mac Stipanovich: Well, there’s several ways to vote improperly. One is particularly with the old paper ballots, and this goes back to the hanging chads and the dimples and stuff like that, is to go to vote, you press Gore, but it doesn’t punch the hole, then you vote for Bush, but the chad doesn’t fall out. It’s just cracked. Who did you vote for, Gore or Bush? Then you get the guy holding the ballot up to the light trying to determine what your intent was.

An overvote is when you vote twice in the same race. What happened in Duval County and in Palm Beach, one of the problems was the butterfly ballot. When two pages fit together, you thought you were voting for Al Gore, and you were voting for one of the random other candidates. In Duval County, the Democrats took an awful lot of people to the poles who were not accustomed to voting. And they said vote for Al Gore on the first page and then vote for anybody else you want to. The problem in Duval County was, in Florida, just about anybody can run for President. There were 17 people on the ballot, so the presidential ballot spilled over onto the second page. So they voted for Gore on the first page, and then voted for somebody else in the presidential election on the second page. The vote is no good. It’s an overvote. They voted twice in the presidential election.

Heidi Otway: Wow!

Mac Stipanovich: So back to your question, vote, know how to vote. 

Heidi Otway: Know how to vote, right.

Mac Stipanovich: And then take somebody to vote with you.

Heidi Otway: Exactly, take someone with you.

Mac Stipanovich: Or two people.

Heidi Otway: Or ten people with you. We’re doing a live taping here with the Leadership Florida Public relations Association here with us in the room. And we have a couple of questions from our audience. So I’m going to ask you a couple of those. 

Mac Stipanovich: Certainly.

Heidi Otway: From Gianna Bonner, who actually with me at SalterMitchell PR, she wants to know, what are your thoughts on how the parties are shifting and how it will affect the 2020 election? 

Mac Stipanovich: Both parties are, in my judgment, are radicalizing. And both are moving toward the extremes at the same time. The Republican Party has moved faster, quicker than the Democratic Party. Basically, the change probably began with the ’64 election with Goldwater. And then from that, there’s been a domino effect of events that have increasingly radicalized the Republican Party.

The Republican Party today is really not, as I said before, a conservative party, like Edmund Burke conservatives, people who conserve, who believe that change should be incremental and that believe in tradition and prescription. You can see it today in Florida as the Republican Party in the legislature works hand over fist to dismantle, almost all at once, traditional public education. Well, that’s not conservative, that’s radical. You may think it’s a good idea. You may think that it’s not happening fast enough, but it’s not conservative.

What the Republican Party is today and what Donald Trump represents is right-wing populism. And populism has been present in the United States and in American politics since the beginning. Prior to World War II, it was mostly left-wing populism, Huey Long, folks like William Jennings Bryan. Post World War II, it became right-wing populism. During that period of time, you always had that element in the Republican Party that represented that view of the world. And that view of the world is, basically, one of grievance, that there are international bankers, there are pointy-headed intellectuals at our universities. There are people who look down their nose at me. And I want to get them. They’re conspiring against me.

There are a number of books, and I say this for the young people here, that people might want to take a look at. One of these is a small book that everyone should read called, How Democracies Die. It was written my two Harvard professors. It was published last year. It talks about the guardrails of democracy. It’s very good. And then there’s an old historian, very well-known, Richard Hofstadter, who wrote several essays and books in the 60s. He was prescient. He could foresee what might happen. And he talks about the paranoia in American politics. Everybody is paranoid, there’s these conspiracies. They’re out to get me. It’s not because I’m a dumb ass or that I’m lazy or anything else. The reason it’s not working for me is because I got screwed.

There’s another book, Populism in American Politics, I forget the name of the author. And these were written pre-Trump. So these are not reactions to Trump. And they’re very interesting. And they’re very informative, and they give you some context in which to judge what’s going on.

The Democrats are almost as bad now. They’re rushing pall-mall to the left with identity politics, income redistribution, all of these other things that many folks find attractive, particularly if they are one of the people who would be advantaged by the identity politics and who have been slighted in the past. Or if they don’t have a lot of money and they would like some of mine. What’s happening though, is that the middle is eroding. And because somebody is center-right like Gwen Graham in the Democrat primary for governor last time, can’t win. Or excuse me, center-left, or Adam Putnam, center-right in the Republican Party.

Then you’re not going to find much moderation. You’re going to find all sorts of partisanship. And our system, it only became clear relatively recently, is geared to feed that. There are people serving in the Florida legislature who only got 29% of the vote because they were in a heavy Republican district in the panhandle. A Democrat wasn’t going to win, and so the craziest right-wing guy in the race in a five or six candidate field gets 29% of the vote and is sitting in the Florida legislature.

There are structural things that we might be able to do that would change these dynamics, but it’s highly unlikely. We will do until people start voting and voting properly. One of them would be a jungle primary like-

Heidi Otway: A jungle primary?

Mac Stipanovich: … like they have in California. You can’t nominate the most extreme person in each party. We’ll have a primary in September. Everybody is on the ballot, the top two finishers face off in November. It could be two Democrats, it could be two Republicans, it could be one of each. But what happens then is, to be in the top two, you can’t be crazy.

Heidi Otway: So what do you think the role of social media is in politics? I mean, do you think that has helped fuel where we are today?

Mac Stipanovich: Yeah, I think so. People analogize it all the time to the invention of the printing press. And the invention of the printing press was a huge cultural and political dislocation. If you thought about it long enough, and you thought about the printing press and you always think about the Gutenberg Bible and stuff like that. It wasn’t just that, it was books, it was tracts, and everything else. It resulted in more religious conflict because those kinds of ideas were now readily available to other people. It helped foster Protestantism, which helped foster the Thirty Years’ War, which helped foster …

So this is similar to that. It’s interesting. I’m from Williston originally, as I said. My mother was a beautician with a high school education. My father was a plumber with a GED. I went to college on the GI Bill, so I don’t feel like I was born in the lap of luxury, but I’m an elitist. I believe in Jefferson’s aristocracy of merit and virtue. I’m not a leveler. So do I think that somebody is better than somebody else? Yeah. Do I think that someone who graduated from Harvard or has an advanced degree from the University of Chicago and has worked in foreign policy for 25 years knows more about foreign policy that some guy sitting on a bar stool with his butt crack showing in Des Moines nursing his third boilermaker? Yeah, I do. He doesn’t, but I do. But, if there’s enough of them, all you’ve got to do is tell them how smart they are and they’ll vote for you.

Heidi Otway: Right, and then have them get on social media.

Mac Stipanovich: That’s right. And all of y’all are on Twitter or Facebook, actually, you’re not on Facebook because all the old people are on Facebook. Apparently, young people are somewhere else. But it’s crazy. I mean, the crap people believe just stuns me. People I know post stuff, and I want to go over and smother them with a pillow just to put them out of their misery.

Heidi Otway: That’s not nice. That paves the way for the next question that comes from Liz Lytle with the Orlando chapter of the Florida Public Relations Association. And she wants to know what role did you play in forming the Never Trump coalition? What is the biggest challenge you faced in forming it? And you’re an independent now and-

Mac Stipanovich: Well, let me say this. I didn’t have any organizational role in anything because one, there is no organization to my knowledge.

Heidi Otway: Okay. 

Mac Stipanovich: There are like-minded people who have stood out over time. And I want to say to those of you here who believe in the President and believe in what he stands for that when I disagree with you viscerally, and this goes back to how we’re fragmenting and falling apart. There is a difference between being my adversary and being my enemy. And one of the ways democracies die is democracy requires two things. It requires mutual tolerance that I will listen to what you have to say. I may disagree with you. And if you win the election, I will grit my teeth and I will deal with it.

And it requires institutional forbearance. Just because I have the power to do something doesn’t mean that it’s right for me to do it. An example of institutional forbearance that’s under tremendous pressure right now is in Senate, the requirement for substantive legislation, you need 60 votes. The President is always saying 51, 51 because he’s got 53. The restoration of felon’s rights right now in the Florida legislature. What they appear to be about to do, they probably have the power to do, but the power to do wrong does not make it right. So institutional forbearance, I think we actually live in a very dangerous time.

Heidi Otway: How so?

Mac Stipanovich: Well, if you look at some of the things that get said on social media, the reactions of some of the other people, I don’t think it’s beyond the realm of possibility there could be violence and serious violence. Now I was young and y’all’s age in the late 60s, ’68 particularly, early 70s. I mean, I’ve seen fighting in the streets. I’ve seen National Guardsmen shot students on college campuses. And so this is not maybe even the greatest crisis the nation has ever faced. The Civil War would certainly take precedence over that. But this is a crisis, make no mistake about it.

What America is, what it means, and what it’s going to be is at stake. Everybody in this room has a stake in it. You think your voice doesn’t matter? It does matter. It matters when you go to the polls. It matters when you talk to somebody at the gym. It matters. Do what you can, and it’ll, hopefully, work out for the best.

One of the problems with the Republican Party now is that its organizing principle is fear. A philosopher named Isaiah Berlin wrote this wonderful little book called Personal Impressions. It was little short biographical sketches of a lot of people he had met over the years. When he was writing about Franklin Roosevelt, he said that one of Roosevelt’s greatest strengths was that he did not fear the future. He felt that whatever might come would be grist for his mill.

MAGA, Make America Great Again, is about fear of the future. It’s really make America 1956 again. In that book, How Democracies Die, these historians point out, and if you think about it, there had never been an example in history in which a dominant majority gracefully accepted becoming a not dominant minority. And I think you’re seeing some of that stress now. If the demographics of the United States change, as pressure happens, the cultural stresses are tremendous, tremendous. And you can see it manifest itself in some of these wedge issues like immigration.

What’s wrong with immigration at the end of the day? When you drill down on it, it’s not the maid making the bed at the Disney hotel. It’s not the guy picking tomatoes down in Ruskin. It’s the fear that they’ll vote, that those brown people will vote. You can go on social media or any place, I saw one this morning, 422,000 people got out of jury duty in California last year by declaring that they were not citizens, but they were registered to vote. That is a lie. That is a lie, but people believe it.

The caravans are coming. Somebody said this morning the President got a big bump out of the Mueller deal, now we’re on a little of a downhill slide. It’s about time for a caravan to make an appearance.

Heidi Otway: Right. Did it happen yet?

Mac Stipanovich: No, but it’ll probably happen tomorrow afternoon once he gets through with this current Tweet storm. The Muslim thing, it’s white fright is what it is.

Heidi Otway: So you’ve been seeing this change, and it’s a radicalization of the parties. And now you’re an independent, so you’re in the middle. Right?

Mac Stipanovich: Yeah, my wife and I talked about it. She did it right after the election and I hung around for a long time. It’s not like a jungle primary, but it’s like an open primary. I’ll watch, for example, the Presidential election develop and I’ll decide in advance whether I want to vote in the Republican primary or the Democrat primary, then I’ll register in that party. Then I’ll vote and then I’ll withdraw again and I’ll wait until I see the next election. And then I’ll register in the party where I think I can make a difference.

Heidi Otway: Well, that aligns with the question that Roger Pynn just had. And he wants to know, now that you’re an independent, how would you choose in the 2020 election between Donald Trump and one of the very left-leaning progressives.

Mac Stipanovich: Well, it would, obviously, depend on who’s on the ballot. If Donald Trump is on the ballot, which you can certainly expect that he would be, they would have to nominate Beelzebub before I wouldn’t vote for him. But if you look at the Democrat field, that’s a ton of people that don’t appeal to me. I kind of like Amy Klobuchar. I gave old Beto some money against Ted Cruz but that was more of a statement about Ted Cruz than it was about Beto. Joe Biden, well, hell, he and I could take a nap in the afternoon together, you know, as old as we are.

So I might find somebody to vote for over there. But the problem is, and this has been the problem with the Republican Party, Democrats may not nominate somebody who can win. They’ll nominate somebody who’s crazier than Trump and then Democrats won’t go vote again. What the hell is wrong with Broward County? Why won’t those people vote?

Heidi Otway: Switching gears to Florida, we have a new governor. You’ve worked with governors in the past. What are your thoughts on our current governor?

Mac Stipanovich: I think that the current governor is doing really well. I opposed him, mostly because he’s a Trump votery. His campaign was distressingly one-dimensional. It was I’m for Trump and I’m not that crook from Tallahassee. That was the entire campaign. But if you look at a man who, what, is a Yale undergraduate, Harvard Law, naval officer, served in Congress. He may be more right-wing than many of us, maybe more right-wing than me, but it’s hard to believe that he’s stupid. And he’s proved not to be stupid. He’s made some excellent appointments. Some I don’t agree with, some I have.

He’s shown himself, compared to Governor Scott, to be very able as a communicator and a politician. He’s probably off to the best start of almost any governor in recent memory. I mean, Rick Scott could not have started any worse. Jeb didn’t have a great time. Lawton Chiles, for all of his experience, got off to a very rough start. This governor is off to a very good start.

He has the opportunity, and I don’t think he’s so inclined, to cure some of the things that we’ve talked about, to bring us more together. He’s done some things that are counterintuitive, for example, on the environment and some other things. He supports some things that I’m kind of ambivalent about and, you know, we can all just play governor here together. What would you do if you were the governor?

For the longest time, the people who now dominate the Republican Party were in a box. We kept them in a box. We rolled them out on Election Day to help win elections, and we put them back in the box. They’ve had different names over the years. They were McCarthyites. They thought Eisenhower was a communist. They were John Birchards. They were movement conservatives. They were religious conservatives. They were tea partiers. They were the same people, the same hard nuts in the Republican Party, about 30%. Now they’re 80%. We’ve got to get them back in the box.

Now, the governor could lead us to a more moderate place, maybe more conservative than many of the people woulg truly like, but a more moderate place. So when you look at something like sanctuary cities, what is going on there? Is he just feeding the tiger a little bit to make it purr because it doesn’t really do any harm because Florida doesn’t have any sanctuary cities? So by passing legislation prohibiting sanctuary cities, it’s not really doing any harm is one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is you are feeding the tiger and you’re letting it believe that things that it believes that are wrong are true, that there are sanctuary cities, that Florida is in some sort of danger from immigrants.

I don’t know which he’s doing. He’s a young man, he’s 40 years old. He undoubtedly would like to be President of the United States. After two terms, he’ll be 48 years old. He has every opportunity to do that, but the ground is shifting in every election in America. We were just talking about that. And he needs to look down the road, not over his shoulder, and govern in a way that will put him in the position that he wants to be in eight to ten years from now, which is not the position he was in last fall when he was campaigning.

Heidi Otway: Okay. You’ve shared some very deep insight into the political landscape, and we know that you’re a part of pop culture and had a huge influence on what happened with the 2000 election. I was telling everyone before we started that if you Google your name, you would get pages and pages of information about your history and what you’ve accomplished. I just want to ask you, what is something that people don’t know about you?

Mac Stipanovich: Well, one of them would be my wife is totally unimpressed by all of that crap. We went tooth and nail over who is going to empty the dishwasher this morning. I kept trying to explain to her, I’m very famous, I’m very important. She was having none of it. What is something that somebody doesn’t know about me? I’ll tell you something that a lot of people don’t know about me, but it’s true. I am an introvert.

Heidi Otway: Really?

Mac Stipanovich: Yep. You wouldn’t know it because I’ve trained myself not to be an introvert. But when I was young, all I wanted to do was stay and the house and read. My mother used to whip me back when that was still okay to make me go outside and play. And so if you were to give me enough money to continue to live in the style to which I’ve become accustomed, I would promise to go away and not to ever talk to anybody again.

Heidi Otway: Wow, that’s interesting. So what are you doing now?

Mac Stipanovich: Well, I have a team of folks who work with me. So I don’t work as hard as I used to. I’ve been over to the capitol maybe two or three times so far this session as opposed to in the old days, I would have been over there two or three times by this time today. I continue to read a lot, I like to read, which is again, maybe part of the introversion. My wife was hoping that I would develop a hobby like working in the yard, but instead, I’ve chosen logic. I like to sit around and study logic. I think maybe the reason for that is because everyone is so illogical and just as crazy as run over dogs. I just kind of sit there and sketch it out.

And I have my grandchildren, I have five grandchildren. Going back to when I was insulting people from FSU earlier, most people want their children to grow up and become secretary general of the United Nations or chairman of General Motors and all that. I just wanted my girls to live down the street. So I intentionally undereducated them, I sent them to FSU.

Heidi Otway: He’s a Gator for all of our listeners.

Mac Stipanovich: And one lives a mile and a half from me, and the other lives three miles from me. And all five of my grandchildren, I see them almost every day. I’ll pick up two of them today. And so that keeps me pretty busy.

Heidi Otway: Does that make you hopeful, your grandchildren and your role?

Mac Stipanovich: What it does is, it makes me clannish.

Heidi Otway: Clannish?

Mac Stipanovich: Yeah, when I look at the big broad spectrum of things that are going on in the world and going in America, and sometimes I feel so helpless that I can’t fix it. I can’t do anything about it. I can’t make it better even though I try. I can try to protect them. I can try to teach them something.

Heidi Otway: Teach them how to vote.

Mac Stipanovich: I could teach them how to vote, although I think I’m going to have to talk to my oldest grandson about how he’s going to vote. He and I may have some differences. The little ones, they’re all with me.

Heidi Otway: Well, Mac, thank you so much for being a guest on the Fluent in Floridian podcast. We really appreciate your insight and information that you’ve shared. And I hope that our listeners got a lot of knowledge and will go and learn how to vote so that we can have more representation in the ballot box in the future. 

Mac Stipanovich: Thank you very much.

Heidi Otway: So thank you.

Mac Stipanovich: Thank you.

Chris Cate: Thanks for listening to the Fluent in Floridian podcast. This show is executive produced by April Salter with additional support provided by Heidi Otway and the team at SalterMitchell PR. If you need help telling your Florida story, SalterMitchell PR has you covered by offering issues management, process communications, social media, advocacy, and media relations assistance. You can learn more about SalterMitchell PR at saltermitchellpr.com. You can also learn more about the Fluent in Floridian podcast and listen to every episode of the show at fluentinfloridian.com or by searching for the show using your favorite podcast app. Have a great day.

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