There have been recriminations galore in the days since Alex Sink fell just 1.16% short of beating Rick Scott in Tuesday's Florida gubernatorial election.
On Saturday we were treated to Sink's own criticism of the White House (getting in line with the hundreds of other Democrats across the country who lost last week who blamed in part their losses to Barack Obama) in Politico, where the soon to be ex-Chief Financial Officer of Florida whined:
"They got a huge wake-up call two days ago, but unfortunately they took a lot of Democrats down with them,” said Sink of the White House.
She added: “They just need to be better listeners and be better at reaching out to people who are on the ground to hear about the realities of their policies as well as politics.”
And later, Sink says:
"I think they were tone-deaf,” she said. “They weren't interested in hearing my opinion on what was happening on the ground with the oil spill. And they never acknowledged that they had problems with the acceptance of health care reform.”
First of all, is anyone arguing that the reason the Democrats went down last Tuesday was because of the federal government's response to the BP oil spill? Surely, Sink speaks from experience of her frustration (along with Bill McCollum, George LeMieux, Bill Nelson and countless others) of how the federal bureaucracy was at its worse this spring and summer as the oil continued to gush, but how that had anything to do with anything on the ground in September and October is a pure reach.
But being called "an Obama liberal" did hurt Sink unquestionably and was obviously effective, even though it had little to do with reality. Adam Smith in Saturday's St. Pete Times in his postmortem writes that one thing Sink should have done was "more overtly distance herself from President Barack Obama." He writes that yes, it would have hurt her with the base (all Democrats had to work this year to try to insure the base came out in numbers, and ultimately it didn't), but that it would have turned independents for her.
This article appears in Nov 4-10, 2010.