In his time of need last spring when he made the dramatic switch to running as an independent in the race for U.S. Senate, Charlie Crist was looking for some friends, and Dick Greco came through for him.
At Crist's news conference in St. Petersburg announcing that he was leaving the Republican Party, one of the folks who introduced him to the relatively sparse crowd at Straub Park was former Tampa Mayor Dick Greco, who bemoaned criticism of "career politicians" and the Republican-Democratic divide.
Now as he hopes to survive tonight's mayoral election and get into the run-off in three weeks, Charlie Crist is paying back Greco. The former Governor could be heard in households throughout Tampa last night after he recorded a robo-call for the once and possibly future mayor.
In the call, Crist says Greco has "the experience and is ready for the hard work that it will take to get Tampa's economy moving again." Crist says that Greco "knows how to control spending" (something that his critics would disagree with), and then gets down to their shared political DNA – that they are two kindred spirits who live outside the usual ideological continuum.
"Like me, my friend Dick Greco isn't extreme on either side of the political spectrum. He's simply reasonable. Now is the time for commonsense leadership."
Nobody's been using the robo-call more extensively in the last week than the Greco campaign, though all of the candidates are using them, since they're a relatively cheap way of getting their message out to as many voters as possible.
Meanwhile, Ed Turanchik aired a last minute commercial last night, where the former County Commissioner blames the mountain of debt that he's accused Greco of leaving the city in 2003, as now something that is equally shared by Greco, Rose Ferlita, and Bob Buckhorn. Watch the ad:
Meanwhile, Richard Danielson with the St. Pete Times has a little more information on the anonymous 527 group whose mailer sent everyone – well, Greco and Pam Iorio at least, into a tizzy. You know, the one that says that Iorio had to clean up Greco's "mess" at City Hall?
The group is the Liberty Leadership Fund. Danielson reports that:
The fund was established Feb. 21, according to state Division of Elections records. Its treasurer, identified only as "R. Absher," possibly of Pinellas County, but with a Washington, D.C., telephone number, authorized several employees of Tidewater Consulting to submit electronic reports on behalf of the fund.
Tidewater is a political lobbying and campaign management firm with offices in Tallahassee and Jacksonville and strong ties to elected Republican officials throughout Florida. Its president, Richard Coates, is one of those authorized to submit reports on the committee's behalf. Neither he nor Absher returned calls for comment Monday.
Tampa's elections are non-partisan. Ferlita, the only Republican in the mayor's race, said she had nothing to do with the anti-Greco flier and was committed to keeping party politics out of city government.
Polls are open right now until 7 p.m. Then the parties begin, and there will be a lot of "winners" tonight in the fact that with seven city council races and one mayoral contest, most of these races are not expected to end the night with a victor (i.e. a candidate getting more than 50% of the vote), with the exception of the District 6 race between Charlie Miranda and Kelly Benjamin, in which there absolutely will be a declared winner. So we could have as many as twelve different candidates out of the more than thirty running who will leave for another day – three weeks from now.
This article appears in Feb 24 – Mar 2, 2011.