ORLANDO

It's impolite to notice, but notice they do on the campaign trail: Janet Reno is a lot of woman. She's 6' 11/2" barefoot, 6' 13/4" in her sensible flats. Perhaps no other Clinton cabinet member aroused such disparate passions as the former attorney general and current Florida gubernatorial candidate. As befits a human Rorschach test, she has been called many things--by her champions, everything from "Mother Teresa" (Florida attorney general Bob Butterworth) to "pure oxygen in a city with thin air" (Time magazine) to a "folk hero" (herself); by her critics, everything from "the most corrupt attorney general" in history to "Janet Reno Clouseau."

But when they meet her in person, most people, fan or foe, have a more rudimentary reaction to the outsized Reno. They approach her with all the subtlety you'd expect at a Sasquatch sighting. "Wow, she's much taller than I thought," one rally attendee says in Tallahassee. "She's quite large, I hear she's over 6'4"," gasps a health department official in Tampa.

From Reno's perspective, this in a way is good. Crass as it may be, discussion of her physique means people are taking notice of her human dimensions. And no candidate this year is more in need of humanization than the often dour Reno. When not evidencing what a biographer called her "ramrod rectitude," she seemed nearly androidish in the face of fallout from the Waco catastrophe, the Clinton fund-raising morass, and the Elian Gonzalez affair.

"Reintroducing Janet to Floridians," as her campaign manager says, is why Reno embarked on her "Red Truck Tour" of Florida. Manning the wheel of a used 1999 Ford Ranger, Reno lit out on February 26 from the Alabama border for a 15-day jaunt across the state. Hoping to unseat Gov. Jeb Bush this fall if she can withstand a primary challenge from Tampa lawyer Bill McBride--a neophyte whom Democratic kingmakers are supporting since they believe he matches up better against Bush--Reno has something to prove.

The 63-year-old has been perceived as physically frail since she was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 1995. It didn't help matters when she fainted during a speech at the University of Rochester on February 1. Forty-five minutes into her talk, Reno timbered backwards, uttered "Damn" on the way down, and provided a disastrous CNN visual: the candidate sprawled on her back, her size-13 gunboats peeping out from behind the rostrum.

As undesirable stagecraft goes, the episode ranked alongside Ed Muskie's crying jag. Reno's cousin played it off as a "30-second nap," and Reno's doctors let everyone know she'd collapsed because she was overheated and undernourished, not because of Parkinson's. Since it was her third public collapse since 1997, Reno joked that every once in a while she goes "zoop." But Reno has been subjected to polite sniping even in friendly quarters. At a Democratic candidates' forum, state representative Lois Frankel (one of two additional non-factors in the Democratic primary) said, "Wherever we go, Janet gets the most attention, whether she's standing up or lying down."



DERIVATIVE though it may be (Sen. Fred Thompson drove a red truck across Tennessee in his 1994 campaign), The Red Truck Tour is Reno's shot to prove she is robust enough to be governor. I catch up with her in Orlando, and immediately kick myself when my colleagues in Reno's trailing white press van tell me what I've missed: Janet carefully treading in her flats across Ft. Walton's white-sand beaches while trying not to go down on her keister as did a cameraman, Janet schmoozing her base at a gay resort (site of the Suncoast Eagle leather bar), Janet playing drums (badly) before an anemic crowd at a Bo Diddley concert in Gainesville.
Val:Y