(UPDATE: 10:22 p.m. Saturday – Kevin Beckner responds down below). Republican operatives in Hillsborough County have told CL that Kevin Beckner is going to be subjected to a blizzard of attacks going into his re-election bid next year, and District 6 GOP candidate Margaret Iucalano's new fundraising pitch to fellow conservatives might appear to qualify as such an attack.
Iucalano is one of three Republican candidates who have filed to run against for the Republican nomination next year, with the winner facing the Democratic incumbent in November 2012.
A four page fundraising mailer sent out earlier this week invokes a familiar conservative bogeyman (or woman) to Beckner in the first sentence of her missive – Nancy Pelosi. Iuculano claims that the commissioner wants to replace "our capitalist, democratic republic with a European-style socialist welfare state," adding for good measure that under Barack Obama, "they've already had some degree of success in meeting that goal."
In 2010 Republicans throughout the country were successfully in linking Obama and Pelosi to Democrats running for federal, state (such as Alex Sink) and local offices (Susan Latvala vs. Bob Hackman in Pinellas County, for example) with stunning success at the polls.
But Iuculano links another traditional conservative favorite term to Beckner – that he employs an "ultra-liberal San Francisco-style agenda."
"San Francisco" is not only a city in California, but also has been used since the 1980's by conservatives as a synonym for liberal, and also gay, which Beckner is.
This article appears in Sep 29 – Oct 5, 2011.