Now on the back end of what will likely be a 10-year career on the Hillsborough County Commission, Mark Sharpe made an appearance at the Tiger Bay Club meeting held at the Straz Center in Tampa on Friday afternoon. The area's most iconoclastic Republican talked about job creation, domestic partner registries, and why he remains in the GOP.
I'll have more about his comments about domestic partners in an upcoming post, but it was his response to being asked by La Gaceta columnist Joe O'Neill why he remains a Republican that proved the most provocative.
It's Sharpe's moderate brand of Republicanism in this age of extremism that even prompts such a question. Certainly nobody would have accused the former Navy veteran of being a Democrat during his three bids for Congress in the Tampa area in the 1990s, especially in the wave election of 1994 that saw the Newt Gingrich Contract with America GOP win back the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. Sharpe narrowly lost his own race that year to longtime Tampa Democrat Sam Gibbons, who shortly afterward announced he would be retiring from office.
This article appears in Mar 14-20, 2013.