The Political Whore

I spent some PoHo ink in this week’s CL issue writing about the Congressional District 9 race, in which three Democrats are running for the right to face Republican first-termer Gus Bilirakis in November. I’m intrigued by the Democratic Party’s recent victories in Mississippi, Illinois and Louisiana in turning formerly Red stronghold seats into Blue. Some Tampa Bay Democrats think Congressional 9 can be in play because of Bilirakis’ low “power” rankings, as a freshman. I wrote:

Florida has a remarkably un-powerful congressional delegation. Because it is so packed with Republicans, and the Democrats are now in control of Congress, Florida’s influence in Washington lies — according to Congress.org’s power rankings — somewhere below that of Alabama and West Virginia. For now, however, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has targeted just two Red-to-Blue districts in Florida for financial support: Christine Jennings’ rematch with Vern Buchanan in Sarasota and an effort to unseat Republican Tom Feeney in Orlando.

For now, that list doesn’t include District 9, where three Democrats are vying for the nomination. It is a wildly gerrymandered district that stretches from Plant City across northern Hillsborough, through Palm Harbor, Clearwater, Safety Harbor and East Lake in Pinellas (while excluding Dunedin), north through Tarpon Springs and into part of Pasco County along the Gulf coast. In addition to Dicks and Mitchell, Anita de Palma, a former Florida state director for the League of United Latin American Citizens from Clearwater, is also running in the Democratic primary. (Another Democratic candidate, Michael van Hoek, dropped out and endorsed Dicks.)

You can read the whole story here.

Bonus Cuts: As I have limited space in CL, I will start start putting all the news that’s fit to print but doesn’t fit the print here instead.

I didn’t get to get into one issue that some politicos point to as a vulnerability for Dicks: a 1996 article in the Tampa Tribune that detailed how a few people who took an investment seminar from him in the 1990s claimed they had been ripped off and lost money:

PLANT CITY - Joann Chandler was approaching retirement age in 1989 when she attended a financial seminar led by John Dicks in Tampa. She had sold her house and come into a modest inheritance and wanted to prepare for the future.

The seminar was sponsored by Delta First Financial, an investment firm tied closely to multimillionaire financial adviser Charles J. Givens’ Altamonte Springs-based educational organization. Givens’ company was known nationwide in the 1980s and early 1990s for its infomercials, seminars, books and, later, scandals.

Dicks, who is running for state Senate in eastern Hillsborough County, was “very convincing,” Chandler, now 64, recalls.

“I said to myself, “I’ve never trusted anybody; you’ve got to trust these guys.’ ” So she gave Dicks $ 70,000 to invest in a series of limited partnerships.

The partnerships failed. Chandler sued Givens and Delta to get the money back, but she could not comment about any settlement. She also filed a complaint against Dicks, who she says convinced her she could not lose.

“I blame him,” she says. “He’s made my life hell.”

Chandler and four others filed complaints about Dicks and some eventually filed lawsuits. The cases were settled in arbitration, according to the account, which is no longer available online except through paid archiving services.

Some Dicks supporters say they’ve been mailed anonymous packages containing the stories and allegations.

“I have seen parts of the court file,” Mitchell told me in an interview. “Some of the bloggers have raised that issue. To the effect, he is going to have a very tough time because the Republicans have that issue and [they can raise questions about whether voters] are going to put someone in Congress who has swindled seniors. That is something that Democratic voters need to take into account.”

Dicks has steadfastly denied “swindling” anyone, saying that only six investors out of hundreds became disgruntled during his time giving investment advice. He told the Trib in 1996 that “of those who lost money, there were never any guarantees made. That’s just one of the inherent factors of any investment. People can lose money, and I did, just like they did. And I didn’t have anybody to sue.”

Dicks told me when I asked him about the matter that all the cases were settled amicably. “While a lot of people were successful, there were six who lost money,” he told me last week. “I learned from that. It has actually helped me be a better public servant.”

In an interesting possible preview of things to come, Dicks was attacked by the National Republican Senatorial Campaignover the seminar controversy during his unsuccessful 1996 Florida Senate run. (Full disclosure: I represented his opponent, Tom Lee, during Lee’s Republican primary in that election. I was unaware of the national political attacks against him in the general election.) Dicks, a lawyer, sued for libel and settled the case. “They definitely paid out some money,” he said last week. “Mine all went to charity.”

Another aspect of the race that didn’t fit in print was a quick overview of where Dicks stands on some of the issues. Dicks:

• Wouldn’t support opening new oil drilling leases off Florida’s Gulf coast — at least yet. He calls them “our ultimate strategic reserve” but touts new technologies to extract oil in other parts of the nation first. He feels likewise about drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge but would support that before allowing more Florida Gulf coast drilling. “I want to protect the environment,” he said of the ANWR, “but that is a remote and desolate place.” (His opponent Mitchell, a former Federal Trade Commission attorney who worked on litigation against Big Oil, questions Dicks position and said he opposes more drilling in the Gulf and ANWR as producing too little oil to be worth the environmental risk.)
• Parses his answers to fall on both sides of divisive social issues. On gay marriage and pending constitutional amendments: “I concur with Jeb Bush that it’s not necessary [to amend the constitution], and I’m against gay marriage.” On abortion: “I’m very definitely against abortion, but I’m respectful of Roe v. Wade. It’s settled law.”

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