Marc Caputo,
Politico’s Florida writer, is making the rounds of the beat he walked for eight years as member of the Miami Herald’s Capitol bureau. It’s the morning the Florida House would blow up the 2015 Regular Session by adjourning three days early and leaving town without writing a state budget. Caputo writes from Miami and had returned to Tallahassee for the final hours of what had become a nine-week debate on health care. The fight made the state Capitol ground zero for the nation’s most contentious public policy debate, ObamaCare.
102 | INFLUENCE SUMMER 2015
He strolled into the Senate press room and received a muted reception from a handful of the members of the Capitol Press Corps. A Legislative Session is like a graduate school seminar taught by Machiavelli; near its end most everyone is mentally exhausted and a bit confused while preparing for a final exam. Their task is trying to understand what’s in the state budget. So no one paused banging away at keyboards or staring intently at laptop monitors when Caputo walked in. Mumbled hellos and a “hey” are heard as he surveyed the room. “Now everybody get back to work so that I can steal your stuff,” he announced, and quickly left the room. Caputo now writes for political junkies. “Florida Playbook,” a morning briefing he