ORLANDO, Fla. – Former U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez once heard a story about President Joe Biden.
“I don’t know how much of this is truth and how much of it is Lindsey Graham telling a good story,” Martinez said. “But anyway, so they took a trip to Iraq, which is an 11-hour flight. I think it’s 11 hours. I took it a couple of times. It’s a long flight. And he said, when they were about to take off, he said, ‘Well, Joe, tell me, where did you grow up?’ And (Graham) said, when we landed in Baghdad, (Biden) was still talking.”
So when Martinez, an Orlando-area Republican who served with Biden in the U.S. Senate, saw Biden during the presidential debate against former President Donald Trump in June, Martinez called his decline “astonishing.”
“It is sort of sad to see how much he aged in such a short period of time,” Martinez said.
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Martinez was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004, resigning in 2009. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he crossed paths with Biden often, along with a young senator from Illinois named Barak Obama. Biden chaired the committee from 2007 to 2009. Martinez saw Biden in the Senate as a dealmaker who tried to get things done in a bipartisan way — a style of governing that Martinez supports.
“We were living in a post-9/11 world, and we diverge on some views in terms of the war in Iraq and different things like that,” Martinez said. “So it’s not like we were on the same page all the time by any means, but we did, yeah, when you’re working in a Senate environment, you see one another, you get to know each other. And so I had that great pleasure to know him, and often disagree with him but always liked him.”
Martinez liked Biden enough that in 2016, he told the Wall Street Journal that if Biden had run for president, he would consider supporting him over Trump. And while Martinez acknowledges that Biden the dealmaker got things like the Infrastructure Law done, his presidency turned out to be much more liberal than Martinez expected.
For instance, he called Biden’s criticism of the current Republican Party ideology a “knee-jerk reaction.” He also called the U.S. pullout of Afghanistan in 2021 “disastrous.”
“The only difference I see in the Biden I saw as president is that he leaned far, far more to the left than he did as a senator. There’ll be some senators who would say, ‘No, he was always a real liberal guy.’ I would say, ‘Well, maybe so, but at least he was willing to work with the other side,’” Martinez said.
While today’s Republican Party is more isolationist than Martinez would like, he also believes it and Trump have a “commanding position.”
“I think President Trump has a significant lead and a new candidate, and all the divisions that you know have come about as a result of President Biden aging, as he has, I think makes it very, very difficult for the Democrat nominee to do well,” Martinez said.
That commanding lead extends to a voting bloc Martinez knows well — Cuban-Americans. Martinez fled Cuba in the 60′s as one of the 14,000 children who came to America as part of Operation: Peter Pan. Florida has the largest concentration of Cuban-Americans in the U.S. Martinez doesn’t see much that would lead Cubans to shift support to a Democratic nominee, as Vice President Kamala Harris starts to position herself as the top candidate.
“I think the Cuban community is very, very much behind Trump,” Martinez said. “And I think that, you know, he’s worked at that. He’s earned that. And I think Vice President Harris starts from a very, very disadvantageous position with the Cuban community in Florida. I mean, No. 1, she’s just not known. She really isn’t known. And her profile in terms of California senator and now vice president of President Biden, I don’t think there’s anything particularly about her profile that is going to bring along a lot of Cuban American support.”
But for now, Martinez hopes Biden will be able, once his term is up, to enjoy himself.
“I think he did the right thing for himself or his family and obviously for the country, by pulling out of the way. And I just think he should now enjoy looking back on a very long career and a long service to his country,” Martinez said.
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