at the firm of Pajcic & Pajcic <\/a>(with his late brother Gary) that he and his wife Anne became leading philanthropists, and for decades supported Democratic candidates and causes.<\/p>\nAnne Pajcic died in 2021.<\/p>\n
With his flowing gray hair, Pajcic could pass for an aging rock-and-roller. He describes himself in those days as naive and politically shortsighted.<\/p>\n
Raised in Jacksonville, he was high school class valedictorian and an all-state basketball player who graduated with honors from Princeton and Harvard Law School.<\/p>\n
Those should be glittering political assets. But Martinez\u2019s TV ads skewered Pajcic\u2019s image, showing him in bow ties and horn-rimmed glasses, the picture of geeky, Ivy League liberalism.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople were probably voting on image,\u201d he said, \u201cand the image they got was that I was this too-liberal young guy\u201d \u2014 which of course he was.<\/p>\n
Analyzing Pajcic\u2019s votes, Republicans found an opponent who favored decriminalizing marijuana, same-sex marriage and allowing gay couples to adopt, issues that were way before their time in Florida.<\/p>\n
Pajcic also opposed the death penalty. He supported allowing convenience stores to sell adult magazines if they were covered behind the register.<\/p>\n
A mastermind of the Martinez triumph was Mac Stipanovich, a swaggering GOP operative who watched as Jim Smith ripped Pajcic as too liberal, and finished off the job in November.<\/p>\n
Pajcic \u201ctried to reinvent himself as not being that liberal,\u201d Stipanovich recalled.<\/p>\n
The Democrat had long since switched from glasses to contacts, \u201cbut I put them back on him just to needle his a\u2013,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
It worked to perfection. After the election, Pajcic said, his wife bought him a new red Jeep, and one day a man recognized him outside a store.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat your Jeep?\u201d Pajcic recalled the man saying. \u201cMan, if I\u2019d known that, I would have voted for you!\u201d<\/p>\n
The L-word \u2014 liberal \u2014 had become a toxic, supremely effective tool in statewide campaigns. Even left-leaning newspapers abandoned Pajcic for Martinez. (The Fort Lauderdale News\/Sun-Sentinel and Miami Herald both endorsed the Republican.)<\/p>\n
In later years, Pajcic considers his greatest political accomplishment to be his support of his friend, Nat Glover, who was elected Duval County sheriff in the 1990s \u2014 the first Black sheriff elected since Reconstruction in Florida.<\/p>\n
Pajcic would have been a good governor. Taxes likely would have gone up a bit, but Florida surely would have been better off in the long run. It wasn\u2019t to be.<\/p>\n
Martinez didn\u2019t fare so well, either, and after four rocky years, he lost to Democrat Lawton Chiles.<\/p>\n
Pajcic has mostly fond memories of his nearly 12 years as a state legislator, during which he championed environmental protection and public education and once proposed a small tax increase to protect rivers and wetlands.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlmost everybody was committed to trying to do the right thing, which is different from nowadays,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Steve Bousquet is Opinion Editor of the South Florida Sun Sentinel and a columnist in Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Florida Democrats appeared to be riding high in 1986. But they weren\u2019t. The popular Bob Graham was in…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":320916,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5136],"tags":[5229,8541,11890,3188,723,7310,1370,1269,16837,62,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-320915","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-jacksonville","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-columnists","10":"tag-commentary","11":"tag-fl","12":"tag-florida","13":"tag-jacksonville","14":"tag-latest-headlines","15":"tag-opinion","16":"tag-opinion-columnists","17":"tag-sports","18":"tag-united-states","19":"tag-united-states-of-america","20":"tag-unitedstates","21":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","22":"tag-us","23":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115411672494801051","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=320915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320915\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/320916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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