Buddy MacKay, who served as Florida's governor for 23 days after the death of Lawton Chiles, has died at the age of 91.
Former Florida Gov. Buddy MacKay, who lost to Jeb Bush in 1998 but still served 23 days in office after the sudden death of Gov. Lawton Chiles, has died. He was 91. The former Democratic governor took a nap after lunch at his home in Ocklawaha, Florida, on Tuesday and never woke up, his son Ken MacKay told The Associated Press.Buddy MacKay, Chiles' lieutenant governor for two terms, had been trounced by Bush in the 1998 gubernatorial election when Chiles died six weeks later on Dec.
12, 1998, at the governor's mansion. That put MacKay in the top job for three weeks, where he focused on overseeing the final stages of the transition to Bush's administration. “It was overwhelmingly sad,” MacKay recalled in a 2012 interview with The Associated Press. '(Chiles had) gotten that far through his term and it all just stopped. For me, there was nothing but to be a caretaker and try to help with the transition. The main thing we could do was stay out of the way.”'He was very, very sensitive to the fact he was there as the final caretaker,' the late Democratic political strategist and MacKay adviser Jim Krog once said. 'He was clearly conscious of the fact that he was governor and there were some loose ends that needed to be tied up.' MacKay was out of politics in 1990 when he persuaded Chiles, who had retired from the U.S. Senate two years earlier, to run for governor against incumbent Republican Bob Martinez. The Chiles-MacKay team was elected that November and again in 1994. MacKay, who also served in the Florida Legislature and U.S. House of Representatives, ran statewide three times and lost each time, but never lost his quiet sense of humor. “I got out of politics because of illness,” he said the day after being defeated by Bus
FLORIDA GOVERNOR DEATH BUDDY MACKAY LAWTON CHILES JEB BUSH
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