If it took a wrecked economy and a languishing war in Iraq for the United States to elect a black man as president, it took a former pro wrestler and a chicken-and-dumplings entrepreneur to force Hillsborough County to return to the Democratic party.
The recipients of the Obama tidal wave and the Bush recession backlash were Phyllis Busansky, who won the Supervisor of Elections Office by a slim margin, and Kevin Beckner, who hopes to be an antidote to a right-wing County Commission.
The losses by Republican incumbents Commissioner Brian Blair (of Killer B pro wrestling and anti-gay fame) and Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson (who with his brother, Freddy, ran the I-4 landmark Buddy Freddy's) are the outward sign of a crumbling power structure and ideological ennui inside the local GOP.
How bad is it?
• Barack Obama was only the second Democrat to carry Hillsborough in 28 years. Bill Clinton in 1996 was the only other victory, and Obama's 38,000-vote win in Tampa dwarfed Clinton's 7,000-ballot margin.
• The Republican Executive Committee is wracked by infighting, as Chairman David Storck came under fire for forwarding a racist e-mail about Obama voters in the waning days of the campaign. Factions inside the party, mostly pro-business Tampa Republicans, are pushing for him to step down, and successors are already jockeying for the spot.
• Blair ran on the mantra of less taxes and smaller government that had carried Republicans to victory since 1994 — and got waxed. Beckner beat him by more than 49,000 votes.
Chris Ingram is a former Republican staffer on Capitol Hill and a consultant with Strategic Solutions in Tampa. Three days after the election, he told me about a letter to the editor he wrote months ago, warning that "the Republican leadership in Hillsborough County needs to wake up and smell the coffee, and the candidates we are currently putting forward are going to get beaten." He specifically named Johnson and Blair.
"'They are extremely vulnerable,'" he recalled writing. "'They are out of touch. They are bad candidates, and they are bad public servants.' Well, what happened? They both lost."
It is rare to hear a political consultant talking with such candor about incumbent party officials, but it again illustrates the nature of the rift in the party. The division is part city vs. county, part social conservatives vs. fiscal conservatives and part dueling personalities.
"The county is bigger than just one section," said Sandy Murman, a former Republican state representative who has butted heads with east county conservatives. "I think Republicans are going to have a pretty tough time. I don't think the ideology works anymore, the less taxes and small government message. [Voters] want somebody who is going to actually do something for them. That's why they went to Obama. Our candidates just said I reduced your taxes. But nobody's property tax bill went down, so who do you trust?"
They didn't trust Blair. Now Beckner gets a shot at working with a nearly dysfunctional board that features a bloc of three conservatives, two centrist Republicans and one fellow Democrat.
To get a sense of just how different Beckner will be as a county commissioner than Blair — who had angered environmentalists, Muslims and people in the LGBT community — when I got him on the phone within 24 hours of the ballot count being completed, he was headed to a Muslim United Voices rally in Temple Terrace, where he had been invited to speak.
"A lot of people were just disenfranchised with him, and they were looking for new leadership," said Beckner. "The first thing that I am doing is sitting down with the individual commissioners and see what they want to get accomplished. It's going to be give-and-take for everybody."
Busansky faces an even tougher task of fixing the Hillsborough elections office, which has experienced the death of a thousand cuts, its election and voter registration procedures plagued by errors. The former county commissioner told the media on Thursday night after her victory was sealed that she likes fixing things and looks forward to the challenge.
It needs some fixing. When I visited the elections operations center in Brandon on Wednesday night after the election, the vote-counting was still going on. The veteran reporters there were just shaking their heads as the hours dragged on, watching through panes of glass as election workers carefully took absentee ballots out of large envelopes and fed them through a counting machine. Meanwhile, there was no sign of Johnson, the elected supervisor or his chief PR flak. Johnson had not been seen since the night before.
It is a bad thing not to have a vote tallied before midnight of Election Day. It is unusual — but not unheard of — for vote-counting to go on until the wee hours of the morning after. You start to get into a real historic moment when you drag the counting into the daylight of Wednesday. To have more than 80,000 votes uncounted by the end of Wednesday and pushed into Thursday was a total meltdown of the system.
At 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, one of Johnson's assistants handed out a progress statement: "The Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Office is pleased by the overall success of this very large and historic election."
Here's to success.
(Full disclosure: In my career in political consulting in the 1990s, I worked for Phyllis Busansky when she was the state director of the welfare-to-work program under Gov. Jeb Bush. I avoided talking with her during her campaign against Buddy Johnson. I also once represented Sandy Murman's campaign.)
This article appears in Nov 12-18, 2008.
