It hasn't been the smoothest of times over at the St. Pete Times Editorial page over the past week.
Last week the paper let down the community when it stunningly endorsed Jim Norman in the Senate district 12 race, instead of suggesting no endorsement (the embattled Hillsborough County Commissioner has had only two write-in candidates opposing him on November 2).
Of course, that silliness was exacerbated late on Friday when a judge ruled that Norman should be disqualified from the race because of that "gift" of $500,000 that the late Ralph Hughes gave to Norman's wife, a gift that the judge ruled should have been listed on Norman's disclosure forms when running for that Senate seat.
Now state Senate Democratic candidate Nina Hayden wants a correction for an error that page wrote last week, in endorsing her GOP opponent, Jack Latvala, in the race to replace Charlie Justice in Tallahassee.
In endorsing Latvala, the page gave short shrift to Hayden's candidacy, allocating all of one paragraph to it, as they wrote:
Nina Hayden, 36, is an assistant Pinellas-Pasco public defender who has served for two years on the Pinellas School Board. We recommended her for the School Board, where she is still growing into the job. The Democrat should have completed her term before seeking another office. She is a strong voice on criminal justice and education issues, but her knowledge of other topics is superficial.
One problem with that: although Hayden has been criticized by many for running "too early," her term is up this year, since she ran and won in 2008 to succeed the end of Nancy Bostock's last two years of her term, when Bostock moved to the Pinellas County Commission in 2008.
On her blog Hayden writes:
I am requesting immediately that this be corrected in print and the correction be placed on your website in the same article in which this misleading fact was stated. I am also requesting in print a written apology from the St Pete Times editorial board for such a serious mistake that clearly could have been avoided with a little bit of research.
Nina Hayden
Okay, this is in no way equivalent to the Norman endorsement, but especially when you're going to dismiss a candidate so cavalierly, one ought to have the facts straight (writing from personal experience, of course).
This article appears in Oct 14-20, 2010.