Since she entered the CD13 race last fall, Democrat Alex Sink has emphasized her ability to transcend ideology as a selling point in her candidacy. And to put some meat behind that bromide, today the former banker trotted out three Pinellas County Republicans who are supporting her in the special congressional election against Republican David Jolly next month.
“When Alex first called me and told me she was running, the first thing I said to her was ‘Would you consider this as a Republican? It would make my life much easier,'” said Alan Bomstein, a registered Republican from Dunedin and the founder of Clearwater’s Creative Contractors Inc. He spoke during a press availability in Sink’s campaign office in Clearwater off Ulmerton Road.
Bomstein then listed some of Sink’s credentials that he said made her viable with center-right Republicans like himself. She’s a businesswoman, he said, a fiscal conservative who also has government experience and knows the Bay area well. He emphasized that last point to dismiss the idea that Sink is a carpetbagger who has parachuted into the race because she was the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s choice to run, as Jolly has alleged.
Republican Seminole Vice Mayor Thomas Barnhorn said that some of the core values of the GOP have “morphed” into Tea Party values considerably in recent years, and called on fellow Pinellas Republicans to support Sink to “put a little bit of a wrinkle in this gridlock to make it move forward.”
The third Republican attending the press conference to endorse Sink was Bill Francisco, a semi-retired Dunedin businessman and former high school classmate of Sink from North Carolina. He said after watching the first televised debate between the candidates (which also include libertarian candidate Lucas Overby), he came away not finding a lot of ideological distance between Jolly and Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican castigated as leading the GOP to shut down the government last October.
“He sounded like the Tea Party,” Francisco said of Jolly. “And I’m not the Tea Party.”
Those comments come after it was recently reported that Republicans have been voting in larger numbers than Democrats in voting by mail in the contest which began two weeks ago. There are still 20 more days left before Election Day on March 11.
When asked if there are any Republican-related measures that she can espouse, Sink mentioned immigration reform, which was supported by several Republicans in the Senate who helped pass such a bill last summer. One of those Senators was Marco Rubio. She also mentioned that there has been a bipartisan push for a measure to repeal the medical device tax.
And she said, as a deficit-hawk, it was time to pull the Simpson-Bowles report off the shelf. That’s the name of the bipartisan deficit commission study from a few years ago that listed recommendations on how to reduce the federal deficit. Though the recommendations were embraced by centrists, leaders on both the left and the right had some issues with it.
This article appears in Feb 13-19, 2014.
