- Nov 25, 2001
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Husband Takes Schiavo Fight Back to Politicians
CLEARWATER, Fla. ? The curtains are still drawn tight at Michael Schiavo?s home on a quiet cul-de-sac here, and in some ways he remains as private and unknowable as when his wife Terri was the focus of a fervent national debate last year about life and death.
Yet Mr. Schiavo, who won a scorching legal battle to remove his brain-damaged wife?s feeding tube, also remains furious at lawmakers in Tallahassee and Washington who intervened in the case. Hence the creation last winter of TerriPAC, a federal political action committee aimed against politicians who tried to stop Ms. Schiavo?s death, and the debut of Mr. Schiavo, a newly remarried, self-described normal guy, as a political weapon in this year?s midterm elections.
He is an unpolished speaker, sometimes abandoning sentences midstream or grasping for the right words. He did not vote or follow the news until recently, he says, and had never heard of a PAC until strangers suggested he start one late last year.
Still, Mr. Schiavo flew to Connecticut last month to help Ned Lamont, who defeated Senator Joseph I. Lieberman in the Democratic primary. Mr. Schiavo reminded voters that Mr. Lieberman had supported an emergency bill asking a federal court to consider reinserting Ms. Schiavo?s feeding tube days before she died in March 2005. Ms. Schiavo?s parents, who adamantly opposed her death and rejected Mr. Schiavo?s claim that she would have wished it, had pleaded with Congress and President Bush to intervene.
Mr. Schiavo also hand-delivered a caustic letter to Representative Marilyn Musgrave, Republican of Colorado, who outspokenly opposed Ms. Schiavo?s death, and endorsed her Democratic opponent, Angie Paccione. He even attended a bloggers? convention in Las Vegas in June to raise his profile in the online pundit world, hosting a ?privacy roundtable? at the Riviera Hotel.
?He is the human face of government intrusion,? said Ms. Paccione, explaining why she accepted Mr. Schiavo?s offer to appear with her at a news conference July 12. ?We need more individual citizens like him to step up and put an end to it. People trust somebody who looks like them, talks like them and has their experience.?
Representative Jim Davis, a Tampa Democrat running to replace Gov. Jeb Bush, a Republican, widely distributed a letter that Mr. Schiavo wrote after endorsing him in June. Mr. Davis was among the most vigorous opponents of intervention in the Schiavo case, criticizing it on the House floor before Congress enacted the now-famous measure that President Bush cut short his vacation to sign.
Mr. Schiavo said his hastily written book, ?Terri: the Truth? (Dutton Adult, 2006), was meant to be his final say on the events that dominated his life for 15 years. But Democratic operatives looking toward the November elections saw gold in his lingering anger.
When those operatives encouraged Mr. Schiavo not to disappear from the public eye, the man who had kept his mouth tightly shut throughout his quest to end his wife?s life ? once even jumping an eight-foot-high fence behind his house to avoid the news media throng out front ? decided he had more to share.
Driving him, he said, were television and newspaper clips from the end of the case, which he did not scrutinize until several months after his wife died.
?I didn?t pay attention to a lot of it in the last couple weeks because I spent my time with Terri,? Mr. Schiavo, 43, said at his preferred meeting place, a T.G.I. Friday?s near his house in a neighborhood misleadingly called Countryside. ?But when I saw it all, I thought, this is absolutely out of control.
?I had to remind people that what this government did to me, they can do to you.?
Mr. Schiavo?s PAC has made no direct solicitations, but it has raised more than $26,000 in eight months, mostly in contributions of $100 or less made through its Web site, www.terripac.com. The committee is nearly broke at the moment, having contributed a total $4,000 to five Democratic candidates in Florida, Colorado and Texas and spent most of the rest on travel, Web site design and production of a video to help with fund-raising down the road.
?We are not a big financially powerful PAC yet,? said Derek Newton, a Democratic consultant in Miami who sold Mr. Schiavo on the PAC and now serves as its director. ?We are just looking at what makes sense and how we can do it.?
Like Mr. Schiavo, Mr. Newton, 34, is learning as he goes. At first he did not realize that federal PAC?s must disclose donations only of $200 or more, and filed reams of unnecessary paperwork. Though working with Mr. Schiavo could perhaps raise his own profile, Mr. Newton, who ran a mayoral race in Miami in 2004, said he was motivated only by disgust for the politics of the Schiavo case.
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It's good to see politicians who, for their own selfish partisan reasons, tried to intervene in one woman's (and one family's) life, finally taken to task. That includes Lieberman, who also voted for the emergency bill to reinsert Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube.
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