Call it The Palin Effect.
Where there was torpor there is excitement. Where there was apathy there is energy. Where John McCain had struggled to energize the base of the Republican Party, there is now an almost religious fervor about his campaign, thanks to his vice presidential selection, the 44-year-old governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin.
“We were at a loss until we had this discovery, and now, I think we’re going to be all right,” said Ron Scheffler, the co-chairman of the Christian Coalition of Pinellas County.
“Social conservative Republicans were waiting with bated breath for something that would galvanize that part of the Republican base,” said Terry Kemple, the head of the Community Issues Council in eastern Hillsborough County. “Gov. Palin’s selection did that.”
And that’s bad news for Tampa Bay progressives, who (until last week) were looking at a 2008 in which the momentum and excitement was all theirs, powered by the allure of Obama
“Democrats are going to have to work that much harder,” said Michael Steinberg, a Tampa lawyer who is chairman of the Hillsborough Democratic Party.
“Enthusiasm drives turnout,” observed Jim Johnson, a Tampa Bay Republican who comments on politics on his State of Sunshine blog.
And turnout wins elections.
In Tampa Bay, the Palin Effect will be felt most by three evangelicals on the ballot: newcomer Rachel Burgin, running for a House seat in eastern Hillsborough; Nancy Bostock, a Pinellas School Board member looking for a promotion to County Commission; and controversial Hillsborough Commissioner Brian Blair.
Burgin’s and Bostock’s contests were already seen as heavily leaning Republican. But in the Blair race, where the incumbent faces a solid challenge from progressive Democrat Kevin Beckner, the Palin Effect could make all the difference in the world.
Blair, a pro wrestler-turned-commissioner, seems to have gone out of his way to antagonize progressives in his first term, especially those in the LGBT community. He voted to ban any county recognition of gay pride events and out of the blue launched a broadside against the anti-bullying “Day of Silence” in public schools, which was established to push gay awareness and rights.
Blair also enraged smart growth advocates and environmentalists by leading the charge to get rid of wetlands protection rules and regulators in county government.
So he seemed a natural target for Democrats, and the party’s nominee, Beckner, brings a law enforcement and financial planning background to the table. Beckner performed well throughout the county in his three-person primary, using grassroots and netroots help to win nearly half the votes on Aug. 26.
Blair, whose personal journey of faith was chronicled in a chapter of the book, Wrestling With God, has made no apologies for his stances and aggressiveness. He enjoys the reputation as someone who bucks the status quo, but he didn’t seem to enjoy unanimous support from suburban Republican voters, some of whom don’t share his zeal for social issues or his pro-growth ties to developers.
Blair needs the Palin Effect, and Democrats here know it. Party Chairman Steinberg likened Palin to the icon of Tampa Bay social conservativism: “She’s sort of like [state Sen.] Ronda Storms; you either love her or you hate her.”
The comparison is apt. Storms ran as an outsider, too, against developers and other special interests who had a hold on county government. But where Storms is shrill and combative, earning her the stronger enmity and derision of progressives, Palin is measured and disarming, making her a useful figure for candidates like Blair who need to have more than just social conservatives turn out to vote.
As for the Beckner campaign, no one’s hitting the emergency button because of Palin. Democrats have a little advantage of their own, Beckner believes. “All I know is there is a lot of buzz out there about the Obama Effect.”
Before Sarah Palin hit the national scene, social conservatism as a political force in Tampa Bay and Florida was on the wane. Evangelical voters notoriously stayed home in the 2006 elections, giving control of the House and Senate in Washington, D.C., to Democrats and costing the GOP two handfuls of seats in the Florida Legislature.
How ironic, then, that the man who re-energized evangelicals is a man they have so often rejected, and who so often rejected them: the centrist maverick John McCain. Equally ironic is the fact that the man who coined the Straight Talk Express is now selling Palin as a hockey mom outside of the same old politics, an image that’s pure bunkum.
Palin ran a politically savvy race in her first time out of the chute, in her campaign for the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, in 1996. As the New York Times reported last week, before Palin came along, elections in the town of nearly 7,000 people were nonpartisan and focused on mundane municipal infrastructure issues. That changed when Palin challenged three-term Mayor John C. Stein: “Anti-abortion fliers circulated. Ms. Palin played up her church work and her membership in the National Rifle Association. The state Republican Party, never involved before because city elections are nonpartisan, ran advertisements on Ms. Palin’s behalf. … ‘Sarah comes in with all this ideological stuff, and I was like, Whoa,’ said Mr. Stein, who lost the election. ‘But that got her elected: abortion, gun rights, term limits and the religious born-again thing. I’m not a churchgoing guy, and that was another issue: ‘We will have our first Christian mayor.’”
Still, despite Palin’s level of wedge-issue expertise, the Tampa Bay faithful don’t see a carefully crafted politician; they see a hockey mom.
“The greatest thing about it is that she’s a mom, and she understands what American families go through on a daily basis,” Burgin said. “She hasn’t been a lifelong politician. She’s just been maintaining her family.”
Local GOP strategist and consultant April Schiff of Strategic Solutions of Florida is not a social conservative but also marvels at the power of that image of Palin as Everymom. “She is a real working mom,” Schiff said. “Her family has issues just like everybody has. [Voters] relate better to that than these career politicians. They see her more as one of them, and that’s a connection.
“It’s pretty amazing,” said Schiff “With her speech … she has energized people like I have never seen before.”
Nancy Bostock is someone who knows about being a regular mom and having family issues to deal with while serving in public office. She’s more than a bit Palinesque. Bostock, who has served for 10 years on the Pinellas School Board, made headlines last year when, in sheer frustration at a state bureaucracy, she essentially gave her adopted son back to the foster-care system. He had become violent and needed more care than the state would give him as an adoptee; as a foster child, he would get the medical help he needed.
Palin’s candidacy resonated with Bostock.
“Everybody that I’ve come into contact with is excited about her nomination,” she said, “not just that a woman can be a major leader in our nation, but a mom. For a long time, a lot of professionals couldn’t put that out front. When I ran in 1998, I had a lot of people tell me, ‘don’t put that out front.’
“[But] women can be a dynamic leader and a mom all at the same time,” Bostock added, “and you don’t have to be a mom of a fake picture-perfect family.”
Like Palin, Bostock, 39, is an evangelical Christian, and on occasion, her religious beliefs have found their way directly into her votes. The School Board chairwoman has voted against anti-discrimination protections for gay school employees. She’s the kind of politician who doesn’t want to “promote the homosexual lifestyle.” Her stance on creationism in schools came out this way in the St. Petersburg Times: “The entire theory of evolution is not scientific fact. Intelligent design balances it out.”
But unlike Commissioner Blair across the bay, Bostock has not been a target for progressive attacks and has not gone out of her way to antagonize progressive constituencies.
Take her stance on the recently passed human rights ordinance in Pinellas County that extended anti-discrimination protections to lesbians, gays and bisexuals (if not transgendered people). Bostock says she would have voted against it “because I believe we all have the same rights, and it’s because we’re human and not because we’re of a certain race or a sexual orientation.” But she adds that she considers it a closed case and isn’t on a crusade to overturn it, just as she let it go at the School Board.
“I don’t lose any sleep over it,” she said.
In a county dominated by Republican politicians, Bostock seems to have the edge over Rene Flowers, a Democrat who served two terms on the St. Petersburg City Council but has been on only one party primary ballot countywide vs. Bostock’s three countywide victories since she was first elected at 29. Bostock said she doesn’t expect her campaign to turn on her social conservatism and has no idea if she’ll be attacked for it.
“What’s important is looking at what we have in common,” she said. “What can we build together, rather than what do we tear down.”
Rachel Burgin is a lot like Sarah Palin, too. Three weeks ago, darned few people in Tampa Bay had any idea who either of them was. They’re both attractive young women. They’re both very ambitious. They both are guided in their public lives by their involvement with evangelical Christianity.
But a week before Palin leaped into national headlines, Burgin made news of her own in Tampa Bay. She was named to replace her boss, powerful incumbent House member Trey Traviesa, on the November ballot when Traviesa dropped out of the race after the qualifying period had ended, saying he wanted to spend more time with family and his job. The switcheroo outraged some in the party, who expected that a more seasoned politician would be chosen to carry the GOP banner and who questioned whether the whole thing was a setup to hand the seat off to his legislative aide, Burgin.
“If people only knew how much that I did not know that my boss wasn’t running,” she said in an interview with CL. “I found out only three hours before everyone else knew.”
As for those who question her credentials vs. some of the other veteran politicians who asked to be considered for the ballot appointment, Burgin is confident, even slightly cocky.
“I would say to the people who make those comments, they don’t live in my district,” she said. “The people who live in my district know me. They know that I’ve been working very hard for them.”
Burgin’s just 26 years old, but she already has the kind of deep ties to Hillsborough County’s social conservative network that could make her a powerhouse in the GOP. Her brother, Josh Burgin, was an aide to Commissioner Blair; she is a member of Fellowship Baptist Church; and she attends Moody Bible Institute, having transferred from Bob Jones University. Burgin also just finished a three-month internship working in the Bush White House’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.
Her top priority? Education and providing “more choices” for parents outside of the public school system. Translation: more support for private religious schools and resurrection of Gov. Jeb Bush’s voucher programs.
And she’ll likely get the chance to do it. The local Democratic Party didn’t recruit a strong candidate, thinking that Traviesa had a lock on the office. When Traviesa quit, some in the party called for the little-known Democrat who filed to run, Lou LaRicchia of Valrico, to step aside and allow party officials to appoint a heavyweight.
He refused.
This article appears in Sep 10-16, 2008.
