Former Atty. Gen. Janet Reno reshaped Florida’s race for governor Tuesday with a homespun announcement that she’s seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination.
“I just woke up one morning and it seemed that the pieces were falling into place. It was the right thing,” Reno said while seated in the screened porch of her pine and cypress home of five decades.
“I came home thinking I’d done my duty,” said Reno, the 63-year-old former Miami prosecutor who became a national figure as the Clinton administration’s attorney general for eight years. “But then I just became concerned about the direction that Florida is going.”
Reno becomes the front-runner in a crowded field of Democrats hoping to challenge Republican Gov. Jeb Bush.
An intuitive politician relying on gut and heart more than polls, Reno strikes some as a candidate with the populist traits that helped the late Gov. Lawton Chiles win two terms, including one by fending off a challenge from Bush.
But after nearly eight years as attorney general, Reno carries some of the Clinton administration’s heaviest baggage.
This includes a 51-day standoff with federal agents at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, that ended in April 1993 with Reno ordering officers to use tear gas and cult members apparently setting a fire that killed about 80 people. It also includes Reno’s forced removal of 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez from Miami and return to his father in Cuba last year.