Miami Herald - October 17, 2004
Nathalie Gouillou, ngouillou@herald.com

When Laura Leyva headed back home from a mall in Hialeah on Monday afternoon, she had wore down another pair of black heels and had swollen feet -- again.

Leyva wasn't on a shopping frenzy but on a mission to sell her vision. Her spiel: "Hi, my name is Laura Leyva; I'm your candidate for District 111, and I'm a Democrat -- please vote for me."

The district, which is nearly 75 percent Hispanic and majority Republican, includes South Miami, west Coral Gables, West Miami, Virginia Gardens, Miami Springs and western Hialeah.

With no political background, 35-year-old Leyva figured running for office the first time wasn't going to be easy. She was right.

"I knew it was going to be hard but not that hard," Leyva said.

For the past month, the owner of Physician Consultants -- a company that provides consulting to healthcare organizations -- has been running her campaign the old-fashioned way, knocking on people's doors.

"I want my voters to know who I am and what I stand for," she said.

Her opponent, incumbent Marco Rubio -- who won the state seat at a January 2000 special election -- is a bit better prepared for battle.

With a sizable campaign chest of $146,000, Rubio's ads have already hit air waves and public television.

Rubio said he also is familiar with a more grassroots-type campaign, because he, too, armed with a list of voters, has been walking the district and knocking on doors.

"I do that year round at least one Monday a month and one weekend a month," Rubio said, adding he often updates his voters with newsletters about his work in Tallahassee.

Lately Rubio, an attorney with Becker & Poliakoff, has had a very special kind of help at his campaign headquarters -- that of his 4-year-old daughter, Amanda.

"This weekend she helped us getting some letters ready for voters voting absentee," Rubio said. "She helped put stamps on the envelopes."

A married father of two -- Rubio also has a 2-year-old named Daniella -- he's had to learn to juggle his parental obligations with his frequent Tallahassee trips.

Up to now, he said he's found a way to fulfill both.

"My daughters are still young," Rubio said. "Out of the nine weeks [in Tallahassee], I try to get them there four or five weeks."

In Tallahassee, Rubio said there isn't much for kids to do. But Amanda, who was born during Rubio's first year as a legislator, walks Florida's capitol just as if it were home, he said.

"She just loves to be around," Rubio said. "She thinks she has her office there."

Leyva's first step into politics haven't been as smooth -- and it's not always fair game. Two weeks away from the Nov. 2 election, Leyva said all of the 38 signs she put on the streets are gone.

Paying for the signs, Leyva said, consumed a big part of her modest $14,000 campaign chest -- mostly raised from friends and family.

"I ordered about 50; I put out 38 of them, and all the 38 are gone," Leyva said.

Rubio said each year, candidates complain about their signs getting stolen, but he believes nothing more than a gardener or the wind are to blame for knocking them down.

"A hundred things happen to signs; I think this has been a pretty fair campaign," Rubio said.

Rubio, a Cuban American born in Miami, spent his early childhood living in Las Vegas, after his father -- a bartender at a Miami hotel -- took the family of five to the city of lights, hoping for a better life.

"In Las Vegas you could live and work and make a lot of money," Rubio said. "It was a very different place than it is now."

Rubio returned to Miami and received his bachelor's in political science, before earning his law degree at the University of Miami in 1996.

Leyva, who also has a bachelor's in political science, opted for a career in the medical field. Her dad is a surgeon.

The move took her away from her native Miami to Santo Domingo's La Universidad Central del Este Medical School.

There, she said she grew interested in the fight against HIV and learned to appreciate things she had taken for granted -- like water and air conditioning.

"We'd had no water practically every day, and I knew that at 7:30 [a.m.] the electricity would go off. That was my alarm clock because my air conditioning would stop." Leyva said.

Back in Miami she founded Family AIDS Coalition, a nonprofit agency that provides services for Hispanics affected by HIV.

And it was at an HIV seminar that Leyva said she realized she could reunite with her political studies.

'I was attending a seminar and people told me: `You look like a fighter; we need somebody like you in Tallahassee,' " Leyva said. 'I thought, `Yeah, I can do that.' "

For Rubio, the move from attorney to West Miami commissioner -- where he sat for four years -- to legislator was a natural one, he said.

"I was really interested in the fact that this is really a country run by laws when the majority of history has been governed by men," Rubio said. "And legislation is the craft of joining laws."

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