St. Kate of Sarasota: The Canonization of Katherine Harris

As a result of the 2000 presidential election controversy, the Secretary of State for Florida, Katherine Harris, became an easy target of vilification for her critics.  During her initial national public appearances, in which she announced that the recounts would be certified exactly one week after the election, sexist images of the Mary Kay girl, the fundamentalist with Tammy Faye Bakker foundation and mascara, were the first to be lampooned.  Then the Automatonic, Republican Florida Booster, the Great Enabler for the Bush Brothers, replaced that initial cartoon.  She operated in opposition to the ideal of the self-possessed Hillary Clinton, as Harris was the gushing and antiseptic cheerleader, the spoiled wealthy heiress, and the Stepford wife giving her all to the men in her life.  Finally, her political enemies morphed Harris’s face into the visage of Cruella de Vil, the Glenn Close version of the Disney villain in 101 Dalmatians, wrapped in spotted pelt and smeared with a Bride of Frankenstein make-over, trying to steal Christmas from all the good Democratic children.

These caricatures—like many good caricatures that possess a seed of truth—are not very informative in the end, serving as mere fodder for a Saturday Night Live skit: Will Ferrell and Ana Gasteyer as George W. and Katherine in a one-joke soap opera.  More distressing are the startling images Harris authored for herself and those images her defenders drafted.  Their mirrors reflect an improbable conflation of roles: of the sainted, evangelical Christian improvisation of the matron martyr; of an American Princess, a fetishized adaptation of Princess Diana; and most dramatically, of a protectress of Biblical proportion, an appropriation of Esther of the Old Testament.  Indeed, Katherine Harris exemplifies the model of the post-feminist, post-capitalist saint-celebrity—the new Republican Woman for all seasons. 

Katherine Harris, like President George W. Bush in particular, has successfully embodied the post-World-War-II philosophical and cultural division in the Republican Party, merging the pro-life cultural conservative with the pro-business libertarian, mending the divide between Goldwater and Rockefeller, Reagan and Bush the Elder.  She is the granddaughter of Ben Hill Griffin, Jr., Florida orange magnate and land developer, namesake of the stadium where the University of Florida Gators play football.  Married to millionaire Anders Ebbeson, she became a successful real estate broker, an IBM marketing executive, and a visible member of a variety of Sarasota business, cultural, and political organizations.  Yet, she maintained all the while a strong, evangelical Christian identity, fulfilling her role as a good mother to one daughter and as a devoted and loving wife.   After graduation from Agnes Scott College, Harris attended the L’Abri Fellowship Academy in Switzerland.  L’Abri is a center for fundamentalist Christian study, which argues in its web site that Christianity should be infused not just in the private life, but the public life of the follower.  Thus, the L’Abri Christian is someone who finds relationships to the Bible in all activities, events, and situations, someone who witnesses and testifies continually.   From her first campaign to win a senate seat in the Florida legislature to her battle to win the Secretary of State’s office, Harris imbued her campaigns with messages of pro-business success and evangelical principles.  Indeed, during her first state senate campaign in 1994, the two impulses toward money and toward religion crossed paths; she had received tainted campaign funds, but she returned the contribution immediately, taking the high moral road.  Later, in her second term, she supported a bill that benefited the company that had originally channeled the illegal contribution; thus, Harris remained true to her pro-business leanings, yet without having to compromise her Christian ethics.  While some of us may perceive a contradiction between accumulating wealth, garnering political stature, and proselytizing Christianity—recalling Jesus’ comparison of a rich man’s chance of getting to heaven and that of a camel going through the eye of a needle—Harris and other capitalistic Christian evangelicals resolve that conflict by steeping all their works in religiosity.  It is acceptable to make money if one acquires wealth in a godly, god-fearing, and god-conscious way.

In regarding how Harris and her supporters have perceived Harris as a political martyr, it is important to remember this L’Abri evangelical ideal of the public Christian.   During the election controversy, during news conferences or interviews in her office, Harris situated herself before an “In God We Trust” sign, a rather obvious appropriation of a public motto confirming her Christian identification.  Indeed, in the first days of the election crisis, when Harris was still an unknown state official, Christian-conservative supporters of George W. Bush were relieved to discover that she, too, shared their religious convictions.  Prayer lines appeared on the Internet, offering devotionals on her behalf, with appeals to God to grant “our Katherine” courage in face of her persecution.  One such typical letter projects Harris as the virtuous saint suffering the spite and treachery of evil-doers: 

Our Heavenly Father,

The enemy seeks to destroy a responsible woman who is being persecuted for telling the truth and standing for what is right. Father, we pray that You would silence the enemy and let their venom be spewed on each other, rather than the innocent. Let their continued plotting, scheming, and slandering result in the desire of the entire country, including the media, to expell [sic] them. Father, they persist in calling good, evil; and evil, good. For their purposes are served only through evil.

Father we pray for strength and courage for this woman. Let her make no decisions that are not by Your hand. Let her be strong in You, Lord and in the power of Your might. Give her wisdom beyond all understanding—the wisdom that can only come from You. Hide her under the shadow of Your wings until these calamities pass. Bless her and reward her for her faithfulness. In the name of Jesus, Amen.  (Faith)

Later at the inaugural ball, well after the presidential election crisis, in the most famous expression of adoration for Harris, the country singer Larry Gatlin compared her to Joan d’Arc, Rosa Parks, and Mother Teresa.  Once Katherine Harris made her allegiances to God and Party known,  she ascended to a kind of sainthood among politically active, religious conservatives, a martyr protecting the Constitution and the Republic and our homeland.

Remarkably, the web site for the Florida Department of State (as of March 2002, a full fifteen months after the controversy) quietly reinforces this view of Katherine Harris as fundamentalist Christian saint.  First, her photograph appears on the home page for her department; no other Florida state official, not even Governor Jeb Bush, has his or her portrait on the home page of any state department’s web site.  In this image, Harris is decked out in a professionally tailored suit, virtuously white blouse and virginal pearls, and relatively modest make-up, framed by Florida and United States flags.  To be sure, the photograph is not filtered through the light we commonly associate with the portraits from the Lives of the Saints.  Yet, it appears a fetished object, a little too clean, denuded, and perfect.  This image appears no less than three times throughout the entire Department of State web site.  And beneath her portrait on the home page are direct hyper-links to individual press releases, again a feature not found on the home page of any other state office.  While these links also seem benign, a way to provide quick and ready information, six of the eight press releases (again, as of March 2002) defend her actions regarding the 2000 presidential elections or her free use of funds for international travel.  Other Department of State press releases, for instance those dealing with its oversight of the arts and libraries, are imbedded in secondary and tertiary pages of the web site.  Thus, Harris provides immediate access to selective documents that testify to and justify her actions, addressing charges of impropriety about the election raised by The New York Times or about her international travel raised by The Miami Herald.   In brief, the web site becomes a text that reaffirms her saintly image, the protector who still endures the unjust arrows slung by infidels.

While the Department of State’s web site can only subtly hint at Harris’s sainthood, her supporters are free to create virtual shrines in her honor.  One representative e-shrine, entitled Our Katie! Our Hero!, displays a variety of images of Harris:  one, her official Department of State portrait (which reifies its sanctity); another, a still from her second national news conference, where her make-up is more subdued than when she made her first national appearance; and a third, a close-up of Harris’s hand as she signs the final certification document.  Backgrounded in patriotic blue, with red and white lettering, the web site contains animated American flags waving, heaven-bound doves flapping their wings, and one girl-angel holding a rose from which little hearts bubble.  The text is an equally chaotic mixture of religious, political, and apocalyptic slogans and arguments.  On one hand, the web site proclaims that Harris “had to follow the explicit instructions of Florida law,” which might logically mitigate her sainthood (were her acts holy and courageous, or merely legal and convenient?).On the other hand, the web site relishes in the depiction of her enemies and their evil attempts to dishonor her:  “Alan Dershowitz called her ‘a crook’ on CNN. (Well CNN belongs to satan),” and “Gore’s rent-a-thugs have threatened her!” and “The FLORIDA SUPREME COURT JUDGES ARE ALL ANARCHISTS!”  It may be that these shrines are less a tribute to Harris’s sacrifice than they are a platform to launch another virulent and righteous attack against the “DEMONcrats.”  All the same, they chronicle the revered heights Harris has scaled by keeping the faith.

In other, less incendiary tributes, supporters have likened Harris to our most recent and celebrated public martyr, Princess Diana.  During the presidential election imbroglio, supporters urged one another, via web chatrooms, to send flowers as a sign of solidarity for the embattled Secretary of State: “Remember all the flowers at Princess Diana’s funeral. It would really make a statement if we could send enough flowers to flow out into the streets like they did during Diana’s funeral” (Miranda).  This showering of flowers and its echo of the bereavement expressed for Princess Diana’s death were not lost on the media, as conservative cultural critic Rich Galen made the comparison on November 17 “that Secretary of State Katherine Harris is receiving bouquets of flowers from around the country for hanging tough. If this thing goes on past Saturday, Tallahassee may begin to look like Princess Diana’s funeral.”  Thus, this effort to align Katherine Harris’s political martyrdom with the fatal suffering of the glamorous saint of material consumption proved successful. 

In some respects, Harris evidently aspires to live something of the American Princess’s life in her station as the Florida Secretary of State.  Her well documented foreign travels (costing over $100,000 for her first two years in office, more than twice what the Governor’s travels cost the state during the same period of time), her preference for four-star hotels and other luxuries suggest a certain sense of privilege.  Indeed, Harris has been most defensive about these reports, rationalizing that her travels were done for the benefit of the state’s commerce and economy.  Even a year after the election, findings continued to plague Harris and her office with charges of inappropriate use of first-class travel for staff and unapproved personal use of cell phones.  Rather than diminish her lifestyle as the state executive on the go, Harris decided to fire her office’s auditor in late September, 2001.  Relative to other state officers, Harris seems to live a little more royally, especially in light of the events of September 11 and the subsequent one-billion-dollar deficit in the Florida budget.

The irony, of course, is that Diana Spencer hardly represents the fundamentalist Christian martyr—bulimic adulterer, advocate for AIDS research, friend to gay celebrities, Oprah-ized victim, and Versace maven.   However, if we elect to view Princess Diana (circa 1981) and Katherine Harris selectively, we may see some common bonds in the reductive images of a Princess, of one chosen, of one who suffers, and of one who gains male favor by her beauty and fulfillment of duty.  Indeed, Lady Diana before her marriage to Charles represented the perfect Thatcher-era Princess: virginal, marginally educated, demure, beautiful, and ready to breed.  Upon the presentation of her second male heir, Diana had more than fulfilled all expectations, and after that moment, the slow dissolution of her life fed our appetites for the sensational and the pathetic.  In a sense, we witness Katherine Harris also taking on the role of the Princess, expected to do her duty with grace, beauty, and silence, despite the fact that everything she does is reviewed and managed by political handlers.  Having done her job well, Harris earned the privilege of being the centerpiece, the “Belle” of the inaugural ball, and it was her opportunity to reconstruct her image, to demonstrate she could pass as the Princess. And while she did not get that dance with the newly-crowned King—it would have been too unseemly for President Bush to embrace the woman many still saw as the electoral swindler—she did receive confirmation where it counted:  interviews by Diane Sawyer and Larry King.  In the aftermath then, it must seem especially tiresome for Harris to be held accountable for cell phone and hotel charges, mere pittances surely beneath her!  

However, the most astounding appropriation of sainthood is how Katherine Harris identified herself with Esther in the Bible.  According to The Miami Herald, Harris confirmed this comparison in an e-mail on November 9, just two days after the election, to a correspondent who likened her to Esther:

. . . [T]hank you for your thoughts. This was the exact conversation and prayer that I shared with my sister last night. I re-read a book about Esther. She has always been the specific character in the Bible that I have admired. Thank you so much for your encouragement and your prayers. Katherine.   (Bridges, Yardley, and Long).

In reports to The Washington Post, Harris would “melodramatically” exclaim to her staff, “If I perish, I perish,” until they protested, “No more Esther stories!” (Drehle, et al.).  That Harris would find comfort in the story of a Biblical heroine saving her own people certainly agrees with the L’Abri mindset, of locating Biblical significance in one’s public life.  That Harris would appropriate a Jewish queen and deliverer as her heroine might also reflect callowness and self-absorption on her part.  Before proceeding with my argument, I think it is worth reviewing the story of Esther in the Old Testament.

The Book of Esther begins with Persian King Ahasuerus banishing his wife, Queen Vashti, for her refusal to obey his orders.  He ultimately replaces Vashti with Esther, who has waited two years in his harem to be chosen for her beauty, “her favor.”  Esther’s uncle is Mordecai, a member of the King’s court, and she demonstrates obedience to Mordecai by following his instructions to reveal to the King an assassination plot against him and to conceal from the King her Jewishness and kinship to Mordecai.  Adhering to these instructions further ingratiates the new queen to her king.  Another member of King Ahasuerus’ court, Haman, is appointed as a prime minister, but he has taken offense against Mordecai for his Jewishness.  Haman devises a plan to kill Mordecai and all the Jews in Persia, securing the King’s approval through an edict that permits Haman and his followers to slaughter all the Jews in the kingdom.  Mordecai petitions Esther to intervene on behalf of her people, but Esther initially refuses out of fear for her own life, believing the King will also include her in his edict.  Mordecai reminds Esther of her duty as a Jew, claiming that she achieved her royal status “for such a time as this” (Esther, 4:14).   Esther properly defers to her uncle and agrees to apply her favor to the King. 

After preparing two banquets for King Ahaseurus and Haman, Esther reveals her Jewish identity to her husband, pleading for the life of the Jews, exposing Haman’s plot against her people, and unveiling Mordecai’s hand in foiling the earlier assassination plot against the King.  Because she has proven herself and won King Ahaseurus’ favor by her past submissiveness, the King receives Esther’s petition most approvingly.  In response, he grants Esther all of Haman’s possessions and grants Mordecai Haman’s position; Haman and his entire family are promptly executed.  King Ahaseurus then issues a counter-edict, permitting the Jews to kill their enemies, which they quickly and categorically carry out.  In celebration of this victory, Mordecai establishes the Feast of Purim as a remembrance of Esther’s deliverance of the Jews from Haman’s designs.  The book closes with Mordecai receiving an exalted station of greatness, being named King Ahasuerus’ second-in-command, becoming the most powerful Jew in the kingdom.

Clearly the historical account of Esther itself is especially meaningful to Jews in the Twenty-first Century, a sign of saving themselves from genocide at the hands of a hateful and cruel individual.  But the Biblical account suffers complications on its own terms:  A story that purports to celebrate Jewish identity has for its heroine someone who hides her Jewish identity for advantage in the court; a story that aims to honor Jewish courage features an heroic act that does not seem to involve a grave sacrifice, as Esther has clearly won the King’s favor already.  And while the story may be a celebration of a woman’s power, male authority, whether avuncular or regal, regulates that power. 

Obviously, Esther the Jew provides Harris the evangelical Christian an even more problematic model.  Essentially, Harris asserts that, like Esther, she was born “for such a time as this,” to be tested and to vanquish her people’s enemies.  The appeal of Esther to Harris must also derive from Esther’s subservience to men, from her winning their favor by her obedience and beauty, and from her privileged status in the Persian court, having the most feminine influence over the King himself.  When Harris adopts Esther’s mantle, the comparisons are meant to confirm Harris’s own beauty, subservience, and central role. Importantly, the account of Esther provides the model of the bad queen (here, it is not hard to think of Hillary Clinton)—the subversive woman who actually speaks out and disobeys her husband.  It is interesting that the men of the King’s court conspire to get rid of Queen Vashti not because she is a threat in herself to the kingdom, but because she might actually inspire other women to speak out against their husbands.   The analogy thus casts Harris in the role of the good queen, the savior of her people, who finally defeats the forces that have brought the infidel Clinton into office and attempted to install Gore as his replacement. 

But this identification quickly gets muddled.  Esther’s unveiling of her Jewish identity enables a mass vengeance against her people’s enemies. In an ironic Old Testament twist, the Jews are given the same order as their enemies, one that permits them to slaughter first before being slaughtered themselves.  However, in the present instance Harris must continually prove her impartiality, maintain repeatedly that she is objectively following the law, and deny her identity as a Republican politician.  Indeed, in her decision on November 15 not to accept hand-counted ballots, she ends her public statement with a common refrain:  “I want to reassure the public that my decision in this process has been made carefully, consistently, independently and I believe correctly” (“Text of Katherine Harris’ Remarks”).  To be sure, her steadfast claim that she could make judgments apart from her Republican identity is a claim to place all her actions beyond question and scrutiny.  Of course, Harris’s ostensible denial of her own Republican-ness, her insistence on her impartiality, actually contributed to her Republican candidate’s victory, a reversal of Esther’s acceptance of her Jewish identity that saved her people.   The parallel fails because Esther embraces her identity, whereas Harris must efface her identity.

Equally self-serving, Harris’s self-comparison to Esther places the Democrats in the role as the enemy, an enemy that must be vanquished in its entirety, by the most ruthless and ingenious ways.  Obviously this analogy exaggerates the division between the combatants and enlarges Harris’s role in the controversy.  The threat against Esther’s people was a genuine threat of genocide—only her intervention would prevent it from occurring.  Harris simply was fighting for the outcome of an election with her side having the ultimate trump cards in the Republican-dominated Florida State Legislature, the Republican Florida Governor’s Office, and the conservative United States Supreme Court. The Democrats’ only advantage was with the liberal Florida State Supreme Court and the Democratic-dominated Election Board of Palm Beach County.  Thus, the comparison distorts Harris’ own contribution to her cause, as if she were the sole and ultimate defender of her party.   Moreover, Esther seems content with her lot after her moment in the sun—at least the author of Esther found no more to say of her after Mordecai honors her faithfulness in the Feast of Purim.  Harris, however, believed that her participation as the co-chair of the Florida campaign to elect George W. Bush would win her an appointment in the Bush administration; she then hoped that her good works as the chief election officer would grant her an ambassadorship (von Drehle, et al.).  Because her partisanship had made her damaged goods, at least in the national arena, the Bush team did not repay her in kind. 

With the dissolution of the Florida Secretary of State position as an elected office, Katherine Harris now must go on her own to continue her political ambitions, to seek in 2002 the open Congressional seat in her home district, Sarasota, a sure bastion of Republicanism.  In fact, in her October 2, 2001, announcement to run for Congress, Harris prefaced her announcement, citing that the terrorist attacks of September 11 as an inspiration for her to run for higher office.  A year after the presidential election crisis, Harris still saw her mission to run for office as an answer to a higher calling, a saintly duty, in her announcement.  She was not above applying the tragedy to reify this self-image.  Further, she asserted that she was running to serve “this president, and our nation”  (“Florida’s Harris to Run for Congress”).   Forgetting to mention her duty to her potential constituents of Florida’s Thirteenth Congressional District, Harris announced her allegiance to her president (not “the” president, but “this” president), attempting to extend her role as Esther serving her Persian King.  Thus, one could very well question the sincerity or depth of Harris’s adoption of Esther as an alter ego, given Harris’s public ambition.   Perhaps it is not the Christian Harris but the capitalistic Harris who believes there should be a material pay-off to one who has lived “for such a time as this.”

Given that the Bible itself offers relatively few relevant models for the ambitious female Republican partisan, it is hardly surprising the analogy between Harris and Esther is weak.   This analogy could suggest a central deficiency in seeking rather simplified and uncritical applications between the Bible and our daily lives.  To be sure, the allure must be attractive, to see one’s own actions set on a Biblical scale that Cecil B. de Mille would envy, to see oneself cast as a squeaky clean Jennifer Jones, perhaps, and the Persian King portrayed by a suntanned and virile Charlton Heston.  While much has been rumored about possible romantic connections between Harris and the Bushes, I give no credence to them.  Perhaps, if I am to be charitable, it may really be enough for Katherine Harris just to see George W. Bush as her commander-in-chief, smiling, winking, indebted to her in some unspeakable, soulful way.  It may be she requires no greater reward.

We have no record of Esther after the slaughter of her enemies, but I sometimes think that it is in that moment, that after-glow, when the analogy to Katherine Harris works.  By these women’s favors, Mordecai and George W. Bush ascend to their rightful places in government.  These women’s hands have no blood on them, nothing of the dirty work of revenge, and they return to their subservience and silence, and no doubt reverence is paid them—a little luxury, a feast, an invitation to the inaugural ball—well after their moments of importance and attention have passed.

James Brock

College of Arts & Sciences

Florida Gulf Coast University

10501 FGCU Blvd. South

Fort Myers, FL 33965

Works Cited

Bridges, Tyler,  William Yardley, and Phil Long.  “Harris Gets Deluge of Praise.”  The Miami Herald.  21 Nov. 2000. 

<http://www.miami.com/herald/special/news/elect2000/decision/098897.htm> 1 March 2002.

Faith.  Posting #5 to “Pray for Katherine Harris.”  FreeRepublic.com Forum. 15 Nov. 2000. < http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a12cf044467.htm> 1 Mar. 2002.

Florida Department of State.  Web site. <http://www.dos.state.fl.us/>  1 Mar. 2002.

“Florida’s Harris to Run for Congress.”  CNN.Com.  Web site.  2 Oct. 2001.

< http://www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/10/02/harris.reut/index.html>  1 Mar. 2002.

Galen, Rich.  “Rich Galen’s Mullings.”  FrontPage Magazine.  17 Nov. 2000. 

< http://www.frontpagemag.com/guestcolumnists/galen/2000/rg11-20-00.htm>  1 Mar. 2002.

L’Abri Fellowship.  Web site.  < http://www.labri.org/> 1 Mar. 2002.

Miranda.  Posting #47 to “Send Flowers to Secretary of State Katherine Harris.”  FreeRepublic.com Forum. 16 Nov. 2000. 

< http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a1312500803.htm> 1 Mar. 2002.

New English Translation Bible.

Our Katie! Our Hero!  Personal Web site. <http://prinfla.tripod.com/Kate.html> 1 Mar. 2002.

“Text of Katherine Harris’ Remarks.”  St. Petersburg Times Online.  1 Mar. 2002. <http://www.sptimes.com/News/111600/Election2000/Text_of_Katherine_Har.shtml>  1 March 2002.

von Drehle, David, Jo Becker, Ellen Nakashima,and Lois Romano.  “A ‘Queen’ Kept Clock Running.” The Washington Post  30 Jan. 2001: A01.