After all, the MSM and political elites would know, wouldn't they, they're "experts"?
And besides, as they were always keen on reminding us, Florida is SO important.
Except when it's not.
But they were 100% wrong and Marco Rubio trounced Crist in the GOP primary.
And then, not willing to accept the mandate of the people, the elites of both parties and many columnists and editorial boards decided that Crist should be given yet another chance to win, not just one, so millions were given to him by the comfortable status quo-types who reminded us over-and-over that despite his loss to Rubio, Crist was still the best candidate.
Then in November, Rubio trounced Crist for yet a second time, and made hapless Democratic Party nominee Kendrick Meek a third-place finisher in a three-way race, and a very bad third place at that.
Yes, Florida, the same state where the only statewide-elected Democrat in the FL Cabinet,
a multi-millionaire, former banking executive and longtime Democratic insider who was married to a wealthy attorney and former Democratic gubernatorial nominee, lost the gubernatorial race to a wealthy businessman who had never run for elective office before.
Losing in some part because she never did the one thing that all good elected officials must do -explain who they are, what they've done, what they are in favor of and against and why.
That is a necessity.
But Alex Sink and her political advisers and the Democratic Party, esp. the most liberal wind of that shrinking party, took all that for granted, as did most of the state's news media.
But finally someone started noticing what I had seen from the beginning -that she really was running for office in the worst possible way.
By late August and early September, reports started appearing in newspapers -but not on Miami-area TV- that her campaign had been done such a poor job of laying the groundwork explaining who she was and her stand on issues, that, surprise, there were still many voters who did not know that Alex Sink was a woman.
When you are running for governor of the fourth largest state in the country and three months before the general election, a sizable number of likely voters don't know what sex you are, you are poised for a bruising losing effort.
And that was when Rick Scott's TV campaign started in earnest of defining the woman who had been so blase that she and her staff thought that could wait until after the summer.
And the same elites and reporters were reporting for months that in a re-match now...
Sink would win.
But we don't have do-overs a few months after the election, we just have the election.
Scott, a very flawed candidate, beat Sink, a very apathetic and blase candidate who didn't do the minimum required.
I ignore those stories for some of the same reasons that I voted against Sink, knowing that no matter how close the election might be or how much the news media, esp. the liberal news media in South Florida, wanted to play tail gunner for Sink and get Scott in a game of "gotcha," Sink was a seriously flawed person and candidate who was incapable of moving the football in Tallahassee and get the state out of its backwardness in so many areas.
Knowing that both branches of the state legislature are held by the GOP, and veto-proof if sink won, what could Sink possibly accomplish as governor given how self-evident her personality and management flaws were?
She'd continually have been made a fool of as the legislature over-rode any vetoes she might made, even when I might have agreed with her reasoning.
To say the least, Alex Sink was not much of a gubernatorial candidate, and it's my guess that she would have been a terrible governor for the fourth-largest state in the country, even when she was right on the issue, because her personality and manner would NOT have worn well with residents.
In that election for governor between too very flawed candidates, we drew the well-meaning "Joker" who at least knew who he was, and we all have to live with that verdict for another three years.
Now, eleven months until the 2012 election, the same state "insiders" and experts I've described are alternately pre-ordaining Bill Nelson's re-election and/or the rise of some queer boomlet called the Connie Mack revolution.
To my way of thinking, where ideas -thoughtful and nuanced- really are important, Connie Mack is political 'fools gold' compared to Marco Rubio, who is Fort Knox in comparison, since as someone who supported Rubio from the beginning -even when state reporters were writing his premature obituary- I always knew that he was everything that Sink, Meek, Crist, Nelson and Mack are NOT.
In that comparison, to me, candidate Connie Mack is the small change you find in the shallow end of the hotel swimming pool while on summer vacation in North Carolina to escape the heat, humidity and boring existence of summertime South Florida.
(Asheville, North Carolina 1972 to be exact. A trip I've never forgotten: Mount Mitchell, Smokey Mountains, Stone Mountain, GA...)
Great for kids, like your two younger sisters, who race each other diving into the pool to get the quarters you throw, which amuses some of the other hotel guests around the pool otherwise zoning-out, but not really much to brag about for adults, or even teenagers paying close attention.
In short, there is no "there" there with Connie Mack IV.
Or any possibility of any upside that he would ever become the sort of thoughtful, savvy and sometimes counter-intuitive person that surprises you frequently with his principled stands representing the crazy-quilt of six different states cobbled into one that that is today's Florida, and able to cast important or even dire votes that will matter to this nation's future.
To me he's the personable but somewhat dis-connected high school homecoming king whose father is the mayor and largest developer in the area, and he's still milking the gravy train, occasionally doing the right thing, but not often enough to inspire either trust or respect.
To me, Connie Mack IV is NOT the answer to any reasonable question.
Like I've so often said on this blog about the city I live in, Hallandale Beach, and how it so thoroughly mis-managed to the detriment of the residents who want it to be MUCH BETTER now than it is, Mack's "An interpretive house of cards that falls apart at the slightest touch of rationality and evidence."
