The best amusement prize should go to Katherine Harris in this election cycle. This article
Ex-Harris aides provide peek into campaign is just priceless.
Aides also painted a picture of Harris as someone who was obsessive about her appearance.
Harris, 49, frequently wore tight-fitting outfits, low-cut tops or short skirts that several aides said they considered inappropriate for a middle-aged Senate candidate.
At least one aide went shopping with Harris to help her find more suitable clothing, but there was little change in her apparel.
Even when the press noted her sexy outfits, such as when she wore a form-fitting hot pink shirt while riding a horse at the Arcadia rodeo, Harris found it amusing, the aides said.
Harris, whose heavy makeup was often the butt of jokes during the 2000 election recount, "would talk about makeup... in a weird, creepy, obsessive way," said a former aide.
And she would frequently tell her female staff, "I'd much rather be pretty than wealthy," the aide said.
Harris, who never had children -- she has an adult stepdaughter -- also would tell her female aides she regretted not having children.
"Freeze your eggs," because you'll eventually want to have children, she told one of her aides.
This is getting even weirder...
She chastised speechwriters, press secretaries, fund-raisers, even travel aides who drove her from one event to another.
For those travel aides, a top priority was to get her Starbucks coffee, no matter where she was campaigning, "and God help him if it wasn't hot," an aide said
Several aides said Harris was so obsessed with Starbucks coffee she insisted that Starbucks locations be mapped out when she was traveling from one campaign stop to another.
...
Another time, the aide said, he went to dinner with other staffers after a full day of campaigning while Harris was attending a church conference in Fort Lauderdale. By the time he returned, Harris had called the campaign manager to find out where the aide was so he could bring her something to drink. The aide said he was incredulous because there was a water fountain nearby.
"She literally yelled at me in the hallway," the aide said. "She said, 'Never, ever do that again.' I just walked away."
"There was a great deal of fear and loathing," among the staff, Dornan said. "I dreaded having to talk to her on a daily basis. Nine times out of 10, she was berating me for the most minute things."
Several of Harris' top advisers -- including Ed Goeas, Ed Rollins, Adam Goodman and Fred Asbell -- met at least three times with Harris -- in Tampa, Sarasota and Washington -- in what Dornan called "come to Jesus" meetings to confront her treatment of staff.
Something is terribly wrong with this bitch.
Former aides said Harris is nice to new employees, but the "honeymoon" period lasts only a week or two. Then she is biting in her criticisms and dismissive of her aides' input.
"The day Katherine hired me, I thought she was the sweetest human being I'd ever met," Dornan said. "When Katherine was in a good mood and things seemed to be going well.... She was as nice as she could be, but it was just a side you didn't see very often."
Dornan recalled another incident when Harris arrived at a major rally after most of the guests instead of being there to greet them as they arrived.
"She went ballistic," he said. "She told me I'd ruined her life," and screamed and cried in frustration. "It was a performance that will go down in history."
Harris micromanaged every aspect of the campaign, campaign managers and staffers said. Dornan recalled that after he'd shown Harris the campaign's headquarters, she gave him a diagram the next day showing where every staff person's desk should be located.
"I was just flabbergasted that a candidate of this magnitude was digging this deep into the minutia of the campaign," Dornan said.
Harris would spend hours rewriting news releases about minor subjects such as the appointment of a low-level staff member, rather than concentrating on what he called her most important task: soliciting campaign contributions from potential donors.
And her fund-raising has been far less successful than Democrat Nelson's.
Harris also routinely belittled the efforts of her press aides and speech writers, saying their writing was "the worst she had ever seen," and spending hours rewriting their work, one aide said.
Once, her staff took a speech Harris had rewritten, saved it for about two months, and then gave it back to her as a proposed speech. Harris called it "terrible."
When the staff informed her she had written it, she said, "I guess I had a bad day."
Something is terribly wrong with this bitch, she really needs some therapy. Remember this is freepers' favourite candidate in 2006 election.