The Political Whore

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 this week as 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 and the general situation in which Florida Democrats find themselves:

• 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?”
• Republican Gov. Charlie Crist: I’ll consider anything that doesn’t stick the taxpayers with the bill.

With those reviews already in hand, Thurman turned to the public at large via the Internet, soliciting its opinion on voting again my mail hoping to back up the results of Senate Minority Leader Steve Geller’s poll that showed 59 percent of Florida Dems want a re-vote. Her deadline for submitting opinions is Friday at quitting time. But I’m betting that the Thurman Mail-In Proposal of 2008 will be history some time over the next week, if not sooner. There’s all kinds of problems cited by friends and foes: 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 so far; the problem of the party verifying signatures that they don’t have (only the supervisors of elections and the state elections division do, although Democrats believe they can get access to them); the pending Victor DiMaio lawsuit in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta seeing to reinstate the Florida delegates; and the possibility of a lawsuit by either presidential campaign depending on how a vote-by-mail would be structured or challenging the results afterward.

Kenneth Quinnell, prominent 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 in large numbers, but he acknowledges “nobody’s really dying for it, either, it seems.”

No matter what kind of compromise 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 the matter. 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.”

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