Mary Alvarez served on the Tampa City Council with both Rose Ferlita and Bob Buckhorn. It's fair to say that she enjoyed her experience with Ms. Ferlita a bit more. She's supporting her former colleague in the race for Tampa's mayor, and recorded a robocall that was sent to registered voters throughout Tampa on Monday, where she hits on several of the attacks that Ferlita has been promulgating against Buckhorn over the past week.
Alvarez begins the call by saying she served with Buckhorn and "he's not ready to be Tampa's mayor." She follows that up by saying that "Bob has distorted his role in saving MacDill, which makes him less than credible, and his negative attacks on Rose are attacks on all women."
Let's dissect these two charges.
The allegation that Buckhorn has taken an unfair amount of praise for being amongst a group that helped save MacDill AFB from being removed by a federal commission is a point that Ferlita first made in her major commercial attacking Buckhorn that began airing last Thursday. That was pumped up on Monday when a supporter was able to get a question to 970 WFLA radio host Jack Harris about this incident, right down to citing the year that a story was reported on this in the St. Petersburg Times.
But what about his alleged negative attacks on Rose? which Ferlita now says is an attack on "all women." (Or Alvarez said it. They're both saying it).
This article appears in Mar 10-16, 2011.