You really have to wonder about the Florida Democratic Party with Karen Thurman at the helm.
As I watched her being flailed by her own politicians last week when she floated a vote-by-mail scheme, I actually started to feel sorry for the former congresswoman. Finding a way to have the Florida Democratic National Convention seated despite the fact that (gasp!) Florida broke the rules seems an impossible task.
Here was the media and politico reaction to the best plan Thurman could come up with:
• The Miami Herald: It's an "absurd idea…a last-ditch, Hail Mary pass that has failure written all over it."
• Democratic Congressman Robert Wexler of Boca Raton: "a recipe for disaster."
• Democratic Congressman and Hillary supporter Kendrick Meek: a "disaster, in my opinion. And I'm pretty sure the campaign shares that opinion."
• Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe: "The people designing the likely mail-in plans here are Clinton supporters. So I think everyone has to be very cautious about that."
• Time magazine: "What is it like being a perpetual punch line?"
With those reviews already in hand, Thurman turned to the public at large via the Internet. The deadline for submitting opinions comes after mine to write this column. But I'm betting that by the time you read this in our print edition, the Thurman Mail-In Proposal of 2008 will be history. There's all kinds of problems: the lack of a reliable mechanism to hold such a vote; the cost to the party; the lack of approval by the state Democratic Executive Committee; the problem of the party verifying signatures that they don't have; the pending Victor DiMaio lawsuit in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta seeking to reinstate the Florida delegates; and the possibility of a lawsuit by either presidential campaign.
Kenneth Quinnell, progressive blogger and president of the party's Netroots Caucus, said the fight remains mostly an insider tale without long-term damage. If a re-vote happens, he said, Democrats will take part. But he acknowledges "nobody's really dying for it, either, it seems."
No matter what kind of solution the state and national parties reach before the convention, Florida Democratic voters need to realize they have twice been disenfranchised in presidential matters in less than eight years.
I guess what strikes me most is the apathy I hear about the whole voting mess, as if we are so beaten down in Florida, so used to being the butt of cable news and late-night jokes, that we've lost the will to argue. This was a much bigger story for the national press than it was for us here at home.
We just shrug our shoulders like Jake Gittes' private-eye colleagues in the last scene of Chinatown and say, with resignation, "Forget it, voters. It's Floridatown."
The Green Swath of Death redux? As the regional transportation authority TBARTA begins rolling out options and maps in public meetings all over greater Tampa Bay, it has already stirred up a hornet's nest of opposition because of one little line on one of those maps.
The line, labeled as a possible transportation corridor connecting Manatee County to Pasco County through far-eastern Hillsborough, looked suspiciously like one that was on county planning maps last year and that activists fought against until it was pulled off the plans. That line was green, prompting one activist to dub it "the Green Swath of Death." The color of the new line: green.
Sierra Club member Mariella Smith went to the meeting and wrote on the Sticks of Fire blog: "Could this be a resurrection of the Brandon Bypass?"
No way, said Bob Clifford of the Florida Department of Transportation, who is on the TBARTA staff. First, TBARTA is going to be in the transit, not road-building, business. Second, all the lines on the maps are potential corridors only in the first phase of examination, he said. In the second phase, those possible transit corridors will be tested to see if they would generate enough transit users to justify building them. The green line that worries activists, as well as a purple line through eastern Hillsborough connecting Plant City and North Port in Charlotte County, he said, likely won't.
This article appears in Mar 19-25, 2008.