Senate candidate fights low-profile image. Backers: Democrat would be tougher foe for McConnell
Senate candidate fights low-profile image
Backers: Democrat would be tougher foe for McConnell
By Andrew Wolfson
Courier-Journal
May 4, 2008
He is a squeaky clean entrepreneur who helped transform a bankrupt family company into a global leader that sold for $72.9 million.
He is supported by popular Democrats like Dave Armstrong, David Karem and Romano Mazzoli, and prominent Louisville families, including the Browns and Greenebaums.
But in a SurveyUSA poll of 1,600 Kentuckians taken last month, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Greg Fischer came in at only 9 percent in a field of seven, trailing front-runner Bruce Lunsford by 38 points and barely edging “undecided.”
On its Web site of candidates, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee misspelled Fischer’s name for weeks, until the newspaper called it about the error.
“You can make an argument that he is the best candidate because he’s the least-flawed candidate,” said Democratic campaign consultant Danny Briscoe, who is not working for any candidates in the May 20 primary. “But nobody knows him, and I don’t think he has a chance to win.”
Fischer, 50, a political neophyte who claims to have never considered running for any public office until last fall, is undaunted. “I like my position,” he said in a recent interview. “People are not happy with Lunsford, and they see me as a person of integrity.”
Though he may trail Lunsford now, Fischer said he expects to prevail by “telling voters the truth about my record and the truth about Bruce’s record.”
Democrats like Karem, a retired state senator, say Fischer would pose a stronger challenge in the fall to Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is likely to pounce on Lunsford’s checkered business record.
“Greg has absolutely no baggage whatsoever,” Karem said. “I am absolutely convinced he is as honorable a person who I’ve come across in years who wants to run for public office.”
Fischer is probably less well known than his extremely successful father, businessman George Fischer, who made his first fortune when he built, then sold, a localcomputer company before serving as Gov. John Y. Brown Jr.’s cabinet secretary.
But Greg Fischer has carved his own name in Louisville business circles.
First, with his three brothers, he turned around SerVend, a virtually moribund ice and beverage dispensing company that had four employees when his father bought it in 1980. On the strength of a patented dispenser that Greg Fischer co-invented a few years later, the company grew into a $60 million-a-year industry leader before the family sold it in 1997.
“That machine made our company,” George Fischer said.
More recently, as head of his own venture capital firm, Iceberg Ventures, Greg Fischer has seeded new businesses like MedVenture Technology Corp., a medical device maker, and rescued Dant Clayton Corp., a once ailing bleacher and seat manufacturer that now also designs and builds high school and college stadiums. Fischer is its chief executive.
Business associates say he is highly organized, analytical and hardworking—both on the job and in community affairs, such as when he helped raise $25 million for the Louisville Science Center as its chairman and a longtime board member.
“I don’t think he has a mean bone in his body, but he is persistent and relentless beyond belief,” said Bruce Merrick, Dant Clayton’s chairman and co-founder.
Michele Leonard, who moved to Louisville eight years ago to work as executive assistant at bCatalyst Advisors, another venture capital company in which Fischer invested, said she was struck by “how kind he was to me, a mere secretary. He’s intelligent, honest and caring. He believes in getting down to business and getting it done right.”
But even some of Fischer’s friends question whether he’s too reserved and low-key to succeed on the stump.
In his introductory campaign commercial, for example, Briscoe said Fischer sounded like “he was going to a funeral” as he intoned phrases like, “How will we build a better tomorrow?”
“He doesn’t come across forcefully,” said Briscoe, who added that he is not supporting any candidate but is friends with Fischer’s parents. “You have a chance of falling asleep.”
Former Gov. Julian Carroll said he invited Fischer to speak at a fundraiser in January at the Red Mile racetrack in Lexington and found “he just doesn’t excite a crowd.” Carroll is now supporting Lunsford.
Fischer said voters have responded well to his first television ad, describing it as “genuine” and “authentic.” And he offers no apologies for not being a show-stopper.
“What is important to me is not who gets the limelight,” he said, “but who gets the job done.”
Fischer also has aired a more aggressive attack ad in which an actress describes unethical practices at Vencor, the nursing home company Lunsford ran.
The ad prompted Lunsford to run his own spot criticizing Fischer’s.
Lunsford’s press secretary, Allison Haley, said it wasn’t because the campaign considers Fischer a serious threat. “No matter how far ahead we are in the primary,” she said, “we’re not going to let Greg Fischer do McConnell’s dirty work and lie about Bruce’s record without making sure voters know the truth.”
Hard work began early
Fischer grew up the second-oldest of five children, four of them boys. His father was an IBM executive at the time, and the family moved around the country before returning to Louisville and settling off Lime Kiln Lane in 1969 when Fischer was 11.
George and Mary Lee Fischer didn’t believe in giving children an allowance, they said, so young Greg rolled tennis courts, tarred roofs and unloaded salmon from fishing boats in Kodiak, Alaska, as he made his way through Trinity High School and then Vanderbilt University.
“We were raised in a family where you had to work to get your spending money,” he said.
He said his mother, who volunteered 10 hours a week for Meals on Wheels while raising a family, “taught me that if you can help people, you help people.” He said his father showed him that “everybody deserves the same dignity and respect, regardless of their station in life.”
After backpacking around Europe and Asia after college, Fischer joined SerVend, which was then run out of a garage in Sellersburg, Ind.
A few years later, at age 25, he and engineer Jerry Landers stumbled upon what became patent No. 4,641,763—a way to cool drinks and dispense ice from the same cabinet. “It held more ice and dispensed more cold drinks than any product had done before,” Fischer said.
He handled outside sales and later ran the company, in which his younger brothers Mark, Paul and Chris—now host of an ESPN fishing and adventure show—also went to work.
A 1985 Louisville Times story described Greg Fischer as direct. “Being brothers helped because they don’t waste time and words trying to be nice to each other,” the story said.
As the convenience store industry boomed, so did SerVend, until it was bought out by Manitowoc Co. Inc., a Wisconsin company that still owns it. Fischer won’t say how much he got of the $72.9 million sale price, other than to say his share has provided “a comfortable living.”
He and his wife, Alexandra Gerassimides, a physician, and their four teenage children live in a 5,706-square-foot, $1.7 million home on Spring Drive in the Highlands.
His Senate financial disclosure statement shows he has assets between $7.5 million and $25.2 million, and that Dant Clayton pays him a $171,786 salary.
But Karem said, “If you sit down and talk to him, the term ‘rich’ would never enter your mind. He is totally in touch with the average person.”
Fischer, who so far has lent his campaign $530,000, won’t say how much of his own fortune he is willing to spend. Carroll said he balked at a suggestion that he had to commit at least $5 million to win.
Fischer’s campaign reported raising an additional $546,264 from contributors in the first quarter this year, for a total of more $1 million, while Lunsford had reported raising more than $800,000, including a $530,000 loan he made to his campaign. McConnell has raised more than $12 million for the race.
“The equation for victory involves far more than money,” Fischer said. “It takes tens of thousands of people spreading your message.”
Campaign startles family
His decision to seek public office shocked his family and friends, who thought he was too private to run.
“I had been telling him for years that he ought to be running for something because he’s the type of person I’d like to see in government,” said Dr. Jon Klein, a kidney doctor. “He would say no, I don’t want to do that.
“But if you ask Greg, he decided he just had enough.”
Fischer said the last straw was President Bush’s veto last October of a bill that would have expanded federal health insurance for the children of the working poor.
“I just thought the country was going in the wrong direction and somebody should step up to take the fight to McConnell,” he said.
He said his biggest disagreement with the Senate minority leader is over his support for “Bush’s tax cuts for the rich” and the “never-ending war in Iraq.”
Fischer said what distinguishes him from Lunsford “is our pasts.”
“I have led a life of character,” Fischer said. “I have a business history that is productive. I don’t have a record of political misjudgment.”
In his campaign materials, Fischer boasts that he has “created thousands of American jobs, including good-paying union jobs,” though in an interview he acknowledged that it would be more accurate to say his companies have created “over 1,000 jobs.” One of the companies he’s funded, Vogt Ice, is a union shop, while Dant Clayton is not.
And not all his ventures have flourished.
MedVenture this year had to refund $124,000 in incentives to the city of Jeffersonville, Ind., for failing to reach its projected payroll. And bCatalyst, which he formed with six partners in 2000 as a business “accelerator” to start up high-tech companies, fizzled when the Internet boom burst, and it is now more of a business brokerage, said Kent Oyler, one of the partners.
‘Common sense’ Democrat
Fischer describes himself as a “common sense, fiscally conservative” Democrat.
He said he supports raising the minimum wage and ending tax breaks for oil companies.
On the war in Iraq, he said it’s time to bring our soldiers home “in a swift, safe and responsible manner.”
He and 30 other Democratic challengers have endorsed a plan that says troop drawdowns should begin immediately and continue until no troops remain in Iraq. The plan, devised by national security experts, retired generals and some members of Congress, doesn’t set a deadline, but it says there is “no military solution” to the crisis.
Fischer said he doesn’t own guns, but he called hunting an American pastime. “I think hunting is good,” he said.
On the proposed constitutional amendment to ban burning of the American flag, which McConnell has opposed on First Amendment grounds, Fischer would say only, “I believe in free speech.”
He said abortion needs to be “safe” and “legal” but “most of all, rare.”
On energy, he says “a real pursuit of clean coal, as well as renewable energy alternatives like wind, solar, hydroelectric and biofuels,” will help ease global warming and transition to a cleaner, greener and brighter economy.
He said he would vote to end tax breaks for oil and gas companies and vote for incentives for automakers to build more efficient vehicles and to increase tax breaks for homeowners and businesses to become more energy efficient.
And on immigration, he said, “We need to make sure people are obeying the law,” but he believes there are too many immigrants here illegally “to send everybody back to their homelands.”
Understanding the world
Fischer said he met his wife at a Valentine’s Day party in 1982; a friend had taken him there to meet another woman, but when he saw Gerassimides, “I knew she was the one.”
Her parents had immigrated to America from Greece shortly after a civil war in that country ended in 1949, then moved back to Greece in 1970.
She returned to the U.S. to attend Berea College at the suggestion of a teacher who’d gone there, then went to medical school at the University of Louisville. She is now a pathologist who practices part time.
She and Fischer have raised their four children in Assumption Greek Orthodox Church, and Fischer attends services at the church in Lyndon, where his wife is president, although he said he remains a Catholic. He said all four children have attended Catholic schools.
Fischer said his own travels—and his wife’s family in Greece—have given him an appreciation and understanding of the world and foreign affairs.
“We have raised our kids as global citizens, in addition to being proud Americans,” he said. “We are all inhabitants of the planet.”
Fischer borrows his philosophy of teamwork and self-improvement from the principles of quality management, which he spells out in slogans such as the “Four C’s of Commitment” (cooperation, collaboration, competence and coordination) and the “Five Revolutions of Management” (leadership, speed, customer focus, total participation and mutual learning).
He said he divides his own life into “daily,” “breakthrough” and “continuous improvement” work.
He has tried to apply the same principles to his campaign.
“The Fischer for Senate campaign is relentless in the pursuit of continuous and breakthrough improvement for all our systems and relationships,” it says on his campaign Web site. “We believe that positive people with passion and winning attitudes produce superior results and are fun to be around. Our individual and collective effort will leave the world a better place.”
To Fischer, the slogans are more than jargon.
“This is my philosophy of life,” he said.
