Campaign 2000: Take Note of Bob Graham

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Graham is an able if not exactly charismatic Senator with a good track record on education and environmental issues. This isn't his first experience as a potential running mate. Gore aced him out in 1992. In 1988 Michael Dukakis came calling but discovered Graham had played an adulterous husband in a Jimmy Buffett video called Who's the Blonde Stranger? Graham confessed that he had perhaps shown poor judgment. But that wasn't the problem. "They were concerned I hadn't listed any payment on my financial-disclosure form," Graham says. "But Jimmy never paid me a dime."

Graham does have a weakness for music. Friends and relatives roll their eyes when he breaks into one of his favorite campaign ditties: "I'm a Florida cracker, I'm a Graham cracker." "He'll sing it at the drop of a hat," says historian and Truman biographer David McCullough, whose son Bill is married to Graham's daughter Cissy. When grief-stricken Miamians took to the streets two weeks ago as news spread that Elian Gonzalez was returning to Cuba, Graham began composing a sympathetic operetta, setting the little boy's saga to music. In a mythic scene, Elian's mother emerges slowly from the ocean, her gown drenched, and softly, in a voice that gradually grows louder, she sings of her loss. "She's like the commentator in Evita," Graham explains, humming a few bars. Can he work in a Tennessee waltz?