Mel Martínez
Melquíades Rafael Ruiz Martínez is a Cuban-American lobbyist and former politician who served as a United States senator from Florida from 2005 to 2009 and as general chairman of the Republican Party from November 2006 until October 19, 2007. Previously, Martínez served as the 12th secretary of housing and urban development from 2001 to 2004 under President George W. Bush.
Martínez resigned his United States Cabinet post on August 12, 2004, to run for the open U.S. Senate seat in Florida being vacated by retiring Democratic Senator Bob Graham. Martínez secured the Republican nomination and narrowly defeated the Democratic nominee, Betty Castor. His election made him the first Cuban-American to serve in the U.S. Senate. On December 2, 2008, Martínez announced he would not be running for re-election to the Senate in 2010.
On August 7, 2009, CNN and the Orlando Sentinel reported that Martínez would be resigning from his Senate seat. Later that month, Governor Charlie Crist announced that he would appoint George LeMieux as the successor to Martínez for the remaining year and a half of the Senate term.
Two weeks after Martínez resigned his Senate seat, The Hill reported that he would become a lobbyist and partner at international firm DLA Piper. He left DLA Piper in August 2010 to become chairman of Chase Bank Florida and its operations in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. Martinez is currently chairman of the Southeast and Latin America for JPMorgan, Chase & Co. Martínez also serves as a co-chair of the Housing Commission at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Early life
Martínez was born in Sagua La Grande, Cuba, the son of Gladys V. and Melquíades C. Martínez. He came to the United States in 1962 as part of a Roman Catholic humanitarian effort called Operation Peter Pan, which brought into the U.S. more than 14,000 children. Catholic charitable groups provided Martinez a temporary home at two youth facilities. At the time Martínez was alone and spoke virtually no English. He graduated from Bishop Moore High School in 1964. He subsequently lived with two foster families, and in 1966 was reunited with his family in Orlando.Martínez received an associate degree from Orlando Junior College in 1967, a bachelor's degree in international affairs from Florida State University, and his Juris Doctor degree from Florida State University College of Law in 1973. He began his legal career working at the Orlando personal injury law firm Wooten Kimbrough, where he became a partner and worked for more than a decade. During his 25 years of law practice in Orlando, he was involved in various civic organizations. He served as vice-president of the board of Catholic Charities of the Orlando Diocese.
Early political career
In 1994, Martínez ran for Lieutenant Governor of Florida on a ticket with pro-life activist Ken Connor, who would later serve as President of the Family Research Council. The Connor/Martínez ticket was defeated in the Republican primary, finishing fifth with 83,945 votes, or 9.31% of the vote.On November 3, 1998, Martínez was elected Orange County Chairman, defeating Republican State Senator John Ostalkiewicz. While in office, Martínez implemented what became known as the "Martínez doctrine," which prohibited development from taking place unless adequate public infrastructure, specifically school capacity, is able to support such development. The doctrine was challenged in court, but its legality was upheld when the Florida Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal to a lower court's ruling. Martínez served as mayor through the end of 2000.
Serving as co-chairman of then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush's 2000 presidential election campaign in Florida, Martínez was a leading fundraiser. He was one of the 25 electors from Florida, who voted for Bush in the 2000 election. While serving as HUD Secretary, Martínez sat as an ex officio member of the President's Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans.
U.S. Senate election, 2004
In November 2004, Martínez was the Republican nominee in the U.S. Senate election to replace retiring Democrat Bob Graham. Much of Martínez's support came from Washington: he was endorsed early by many prominent Republican groups, and publicly supported by key national Republican figures such as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. His Cuban background and his popularity in the battleground Orlando, Florida, region both contributed to his appeal to the statewide GOP in Florida. But Internet magazine Salon reported that Martínez wanted to run for governor in 2006, though the GOP convinced him to run for the Senate two years earlier instead.Primary
Martínez's nomination by the Republican Party was far from certain. He was seriously challenged by former Congressman Bill McCollum. McCollum criticized Martínez's background as a plaintiff's attorney, and many Republicans initially feared that Martínez's nomination would destroy the GOP's ability to criticize Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards' background. Martínez was also said to be soft on tort reform, a major Republican issue in the 2004 race.After a McCollum surge in the final weeks leading up to the primary, Martínez fought back in the last week of the race, putting out mass mailings and television ads that called McCollum "the new darling of homosexual extremists," pointing out that McCollum had sponsored hate crimes legislation while a member of the House of Representatives. Martínez pulled some of the more offensive ads from the air after a personal appeal from Governor Jeb Bush, but never disavowed them. The St. Petersburg Times took the extraordinary step of revoking its endorsement of Martínez in the Republican primary and endorsing McCollum.
In the Republican primary on August 31, Martínez won a decisive victory over McCollum. Shortly afterward, he spoke alongside President Bush at the 2004 Republican National Convention on September 2.
During part of his tenure in the Senate, Martínez sat at the Candy desk.
General election
Martínez defeated his Democratic opponent, Betty Castor, in a very close election that was preceded by numerous negative television ads from both campaigns. Martínez's margin of victory was small enough that a winner was not declared until Castor conceded the day after the election.Twelve of Martinez's 25 stops on taxpayer-funded domestic trips as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in 2003 were to Florida cities, at the same time that he was also campaigning for Senate in Florida.
President Bush won in Florida by 52%-47%, but Martínez only won 49.5%-48.4%, with a margin of about 70,000 votes. Martínez did much worse than Bush in the Tampa area, such as in Hillsborough, and Pinellas counties, and in smaller counties such as Liberty and Lafayette. The only counties that Martínez won that Bush did not were Orange and Miami-Dade.
Campaign reporting violation
In August 2006, the Martínez campaign acknowledged that the 2004 campaign had been under review by the Federal Election Commission for more than a year. Following the 2004 election, Martínez originally reported that his $12-million campaign had about $115,000 in debt, according to FEC documents. But a revision showed his campaign instead owed $685,000 in election expenses. The campaign spent about $300,000 in accounting and attorney's fees related to the 2004 campaign. On October 28, 2008, Republican Sen. Mel Martínez agreed to pay $99,000 in fines for his campaign's failure to comply with federal election laws, including its acceptance of excess contributions, records show. An FEC audit found Martínez's campaign accepted a total of $313,235 in contributions that exceeded limits from 186 donors. The fine was agreed to by the FEC on Sep 10 and was posted a month later in its database.The organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission in August 2006 that alleged Martínez illegally accepted more than $60,000 from the Bacardi beverage company in the campaign. CREW alleged Bacardi violated the Federal Election Campaign Act and FEC regulations by soliciting contributions from a list of the corporation's vendors for these campaigns, and by using corporate funds to pay for food and beverages at campaign events held in the company's corporate headquarters on May 11, 2004. An amended complaint by CREW in October 2006 alleged similar behavior by Bacardi for Democratic Senator Bill Nelson's 2006 re-election campaign. In April 2007, the FEC notified CREW it had reviewed the allegations against Bacardi, the Martínez campaign and the Nelson campaign, found no reason to believe any of the alleged violations occurred, and closed the matter.
Staffing controversies
On April 6, 2005, Martínez accepted the resignation of his legal counsel, Brian Darling, who was responsible for writing and circulating the Schiavo memo related to the Terry Schiavo case.Martínez immediately denied all knowledge of Darling's involvement in the situation, noting that he himself had inadvertently passed a copy of the memo to Democratic Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, believing that it was nothing more than an outline of the Republican proposal. Martínez asserted that the memo "was intended to be a working draft," stating that Darling "doesn't really know how I got it."
The Schiavo memo is the third incident in which Martínez accepted broad responsibility while laying blame upon a staffer for the underlying deed. During the Republican primary, a staffer was blamed for a passage in a campaign flyer painting his opponent Bill McCollum as a servant of the "radical homosexual lobby." Shortly thereafter another staffer was blamed for labeling federal agents involved in the Elián González affair as "armed thugs."
In spite of Martínez's vocal objections to homosexual issues such as gay marriage, he employed two gay men in his 2004 Senate campaign.