When Carlos Smith walks into the room, he does so with purpose, a smile, a brisk bit of wit and, generally, a jacket. Even early in the morning. Call it confidence, call it politics, call it whatever you need to, but there’s no getting around his charm or his smirks made relevant by the political knowledge holding up their corners. He’s the real deal. We grabbed a gab and some coffee with Smith to talk about how he got from where he was – riding a backstage rollercoaster as fast-talking legislative aide to former Democratic state representatives Scott Randolph and Joe Saunders (seriously, it’s a lot of fast-talking and typing work) – to where he is today. Smith stepped down from his position as Orange County Democratic party chairman this summer to pursue a higher rung on the political ladder as a progressive state representative for District 49. He also stepped up off the (oft-lacking) liberal candidate-bench and into the dust of the Floridian political limelight.
“I’ve always been the person working behind the scenes,” he says.
Well that’s about to change.
Watermark: So, what exactly made you leap at this potentially futile political opportunity?
Carlos Smith: Just to backtrack a little bit, this wasn’t my profession. This wasn’t my career path; I wasn’t supposed to work in politics. You know, after I graduated from UCF in ‘03, I managed a Men’s Wearhouse store for eight years. That was my thing, you know: I graduated with a business degree with a marketing specialty track, and I had worked that job part-time in college, and so as soon as I graduated, I instantly started the management track. And then, 2008 happened, and President Obama was elected. And that was a big deal, because to me, I felt a personal connection to his candidacy; it made me open my eyes and realize that he was the type of candidate that I wanted to help get elected to office. OK, so you know, we checked the box. We got him elected. Now what, right? So, that was when I kind of tried to change course, which is really hard, because if you’re in your mid-to-late 20s, you’ve already set on a career path. I kind of felt a little bit like that, but I was trying to figure out a way, “Well how do I switch out one entire profession and career for something else?” and I didn’t even know what that something else was. I just knew that I wanted to be involved, and I wanted to be part of the political process.
It wasn’t so much idealism as realism, then?
I’ve seen, I’ve seen what people go through from several different vantage points. And I think that that’s really helpful, not just being in able to understandwhat working class people go through, the struggles that they live every day, but also the different vantage points in the process, you know the process of lawmaking is a very complicated, very… yeah, it’s really convoluted. You know, it is kind of a rich system. But I understand the system and I know how to work it to the advantage of the people we are advocating for. Of course, real working class people who don’t have a voice in government. Intersectionality is such a big deal to me. It’s such a big deal to me because when you look at Florida’s changing demographics, you see that minority voices are not represented in state government, or local government for that matter. You know, Florida is becoming more Hispanic, is becoming a bit younger, more educated, a lot of millennials [relocating], especially in my district. You don’t really get to see that in government. I’m sure you can say it’s getting more gay. I don’t know that that’s true, but people are out. And I think minority representation in government is important, because we are the communities that are affected the most by policy that is being passed in Tallahassee.
And these are exactly the people being targeted by our Republican Legislature.
Well, we have some work to do – progressives, Democrats have work to do be in the majority in the House or the Senate, or obviously have a Democrat in the Governor’s mansion. That will make a huge impact in what policies determine and set for the people of Florida. In the meantime, we have a seat at the table, and we influence policies, but, a lot of the time, our job to be effective, is to stop bad policies.
Do you think that Tallahassee is becoming more amenable to the inevitability of gay rights, especially in the wake of the marriage-equality decision?
Well, let me give you one anecdote. This year, this session, you know, after winning the most historic Florida Supreme Court ruling that recognized the freedom of marriage for same-sex couples, people started getting married in January. But then when all of the champagne was put away, when the confetti was swept up, we faced real backlash in Tallahassee. It was serious. It was real. It was aggressive. You know our opponents were ready and willing to lash out at us. And the odds were stacked against us. You know, the Republicans have a super majority in the House. They have a majority in the Senate. They occupy the Governor’s mansion. The conventional wisdom is that they get what they want. They wanted to make it a crime for a transgender person to use a public restroom. They wanted to reinstate the ban on gay adoption with a backdoor religious exemption to allow adoption agencies to deny child placement to same-sex couples, and bring us back to 1977.
But they failed.
Here’s what’s so remarkable. Consider all we’ve just said. Consider the political barriers. No one would have believed you had you been told in advance, this is going to be the year that we will appeal the 1977 ban on adoption put in place by Anita Bryant. That Rick Scott would be the governor signing that bill into law, and that this legislature would be the body that handed him that bill to sign. You wouldn’t have believed me if I’d told you that the same time, they also would have pushed hard to impose this bathroom bill to make it a crime for a transgender person to use a public restroom, and that the pushback would have been so much harder that it killed the bill and now made it dead, dead on arrival, as a policy proposal in 2016. The same with the adoption-discrimination bill. No one would have believed that you’d have, had you had told them that all of those things would happen in the period of a few months in the legislature. That environment, being able to do all of those things in that political environment in particular is what inspires me and keeps me optimistic that we can do a lot of really incredible things in the future, even under difficult circumstances.
Not to toot your horn too much, but it’s been remarkable watching your rise in the Democratic ranks of Orange County. What’s been most remarkable for you, Mr. Remarkable?
Seriously? I mean when you called me and told me that Watermark had decided to do this, and feature me in this way, feature my story in this way, it was really humbling. And I was kind of taken aback,and it made me – it made me appreciate this year. It made me appreciate the path that we’ve all kind of taken together as a community, because there’s a lot of people around us, a lot of people around me, who have helped to make all of this happen. That they worked; that they worked hard.
