Politics & Power Quote by George Smathers

There is a breezy, almost folksy confidence in Smathers's "make a long story short" that masks how hard-nosed the maneuver really is. The line reads like casual recollection, but it sketches a classic mid-century political tactic: use a "favorite son" candidacy as a spoiler, a bargaining chip, and a shield against outsiders. Smathers isn’t talking about winning the presidency so much as controlling Florida’s delegate math and, by extension, his own leverage.

The context matters: this is the Democratic Party in the early 1960s, when state delegations, local machines, and regional bosses still had real power. Florida was emerging as a crucial prize, and two national figures - Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy - threatened to carve it up between them, each gaining momentum and institutional support. Smathers’s solution is opportunistic and surgical: insert himself as the home-state candidate so neither camp can claim a clean victory, forcing both to negotiate with him.

The subtext is less about ideology than about jurisdiction. "Favorite son" is coded language for gatekeeping: Florida’s political class asserting that it will not be treated as a mere resource to be harvested by ambitious men from Washington and Massachusetts. Smathers positions himself as protector of the state’s political dignity while quietly ensuring he becomes the indispensable middleman. It’s retail politics recast as chess: a local figure pretending to run for the top job in order to strengthen his hand in the room where the real decisions get made.