Katherine Harris Has Problems

You all remember Katherine Harris, right? She was the state election official in Florida during the 2000 recount, the one that looked and acted like a Stepford wife with a short in the wiring. Well now she's running for the Senate from Florida and running into major problems. Her third campaign manager has now quit, complaining of her bizarre and abusive behavior. She's in hot water for taking illegal campaign contributions from the same defense contractor who was convicted of bribing Duke Cunningham as well. And now this latest defection:

Katherine Harris' Senate campaign staff is leaving again, and the description of working for the Republican congresswoman plays like a scene out of "Mommie Dearest."

Harris is prone to tantrums, wants to be treated like a princess, micromanages, fixates on minutia while ignoring the big picture, and sometimes does exactly opposite of what advisers tell her with bad results that they have to clean up later, staff members said.

And those who quit her campaign earlier aren't the least bit surprised:

t's a story that's been told before. When her first campaign staff left in April, the same description of Harris was given by those who quit the effort to unseat Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson.

"That's exactly like what happened," said Ed Rollins, a strategist that left the campaign in April. "Everything is someone else's fault. If there's not a Starbucks coffee house within distance, it's someone else's fault."

But leaving staff members speaking on condition of anonymity described a work situation that became intolerable. Sure, they had heard that Harris was tough to work for, but they said they thought it couldn't be as bad as described. They ended up finding it worse than they imagined.

This didn't come as a surprise to Rollins, who served as President Reagan's political director and ran Ross Perot's presidential campaign in 1992.

"Katherine is probably the worst micromanager I have ever seen and her instincts are 100 percent wrong," Rollins said. "After a while you say, 'Why am I putting up with this crap?'"

He said Harris was condescending and abusive to Hodas', Thomas' and Ingram's predecessors - Jamie Miller, Megan Ortagus and Morgan Dobbs. She constantly complained about just about everything, Rollins said. Campaign crowds were too small, Nelson was getting more press and speeches weren't right.

"Katherine has her own guest worker program. No one will ever be able to live up to her expectations because it's not a team effort. It's all about her," Rollins said.

And the funny thing is that anyone could have predicted this back in 2000. Some books you really can judge by their cover and that was one of them. She was out of her depth as a state election official, for crying out loud. She has no business anywhere near a Senate race.