How long has Pinellas Congressman Bill Young been serving in Washington?
According to the less than hagiographic introduction he received at the Suncoast Tiger Bay meeting on Friday afternoon at the St. Pete-Clearwater Marriott, the soon-to-be-82-year-old Representative has been around longer than "Hamburger Helper, the Partridge Family, Egg McMuffins and the Heimlich Maneuver."
He took the age jokes with good humor — but not so much his host's reference to the fact that Young did not debate his most recent vanquished Democratic opponent, attorney Jessica Ehrlich. So when Tiger Bay member Jerri Evans asked why he'd failed to debate either Ehrlich or his 2010 opponent, Charlie Justice, Young was more than ready to respond.
"Why would I debate when the opposition candidate — that's all that candidate talked about, was personal attacks on me?" he said. Ehrlich targeted Young for his support of House Budget Chairman (and later GOP VP nominee) Paul Ryan's budget, which initially called for changing Medicare into a voucher program, later redefined as "Premium Support."
Looking out at Tampa Bay Times editor Paul Tash, sitting dead center in the room, Young added that the paper's fact-checking site PolitiFact had called the charge that Republicans had voted to end Medicare "the lie of the year" at the end of 2011.
This article appears in Dec 6-12, 2012.