Back to what I do
Growing up in Tallahassee with a father who was an AFL-CIO lobbyist and election organizer, I sort of absorbed Florida politics by osmosis. Tallahassee is a company town and the company is government. In the 90s and up through the 2000 election, I had a damn near perfect record in picking primary winners and general election winners. My powers peaked in 2000. I was telling anyone who would listen that Florida was not “leaning Bush” as most prognosticators had it. It was a toss up and, I felt, trending toward Gore. I made some desperate and, at times, mean-spirited attempts to sway friends and associates from voting for Nader.
I moved away from Tallahassee in the fall of 2000. I spent just under a year in Boston, came back to Tallahassee for a bit less than a year, then moved to the Orlando area. It’s much harder to stay up on politics here. We don’t have an all day news & talk NPR station. Our local network affiliates just give highlight coverage to state politics until you’re within a few weeks of an election. I need to get back in the habit of reading papers from around the state.
In 2002, the Democrats really screwed up the governor’s race. I still don’t believe there’s a chance in hell that Janet Reno would have beat JEB! had she been the nominee. Bill McBride turned out to be a terrible candidate. Among friendly audiences, he seemed sharp, well versed, and able to put a good “broad appeal”* spin on some very progressive ideas. At the debates, he looked like some dumb good ol’ boy who who had less grasp of the details than our president. I cringed all the way through it.
I utterly failed to give enough political weight to the surprisingly effective relief efforts after Florida’s fall 2004 hurricanes. I was kind of blindsided by how solidly Bush tied the state up.** I am not going to let that happen again. Over the next year, I’m going to get my finger back on the pulse of politics in this state. Expect to see a fair amount of entries on that topic.
* I don’t think McBride put a “centrist” spin on things, though that is probably how most pundits would characterize it. In opinion polls, progressive ideas generally poll well with the american public on specific, individual issues. I believe that they can be well communicated and appeal to the majority of the population without being diluted into centrism.
**I firmly believe that there was widespread voting fraud in areas where electronic voting was used without creating a paper trail. I think that’s true outside of Florida. I’ve read enough credible, not conspiracy theory, stuff to be convinced. I think Bush probably won Florida without the fraud this time, though.
