The Political Whore

Quietly, behind the scenes in yesterday’s elections, there was a coup among Pinellas Democrats. The victim was party chairwoman, Toni Molinaro, who was generally credited with increasing the local party’s coffers and keeping infighting to a minimum.

Molinaro was defeated in an election in her south St. Petersburg neighborhood for precinct committeewoman by Blanche L. Ganey (described in news accounts as a church administrator and Obama supporter), by a vote of 88-40. In order to remain as chairwoman at the party’s December reorganizational meeting, Molinaro had to be an elected precinct committeewoman.

At least partially behind the back-door ouster of Molinaro was the man she replaced in 2006, former St. Pete mayoral candidate Ed Helm.

“I’m looking for new leadership,” Helm told me this afternoon.

The Pinellas Democratic Executive Committee for years has been among the most contentious and controversial in of the DEC’s in the state, with wild swings from faction. Helm’s five-month term was among the wildest, with accusations that his wife’s PAC violated elections laws and his own actions in endorsing some Democrats over others drawing the attention and censure of the state party, which withheld money from the Pinellas organization.

When she beat him out for the job, Molinaro told the St. Petersburg Times, “He alienates people, and he alienates good people.”

Looks like payback is a bitch.

Helm and his band of stalwart progressives used a little known state law that sees local political parties disbanded and reorganized every presidential election year. Only those people who signed notarized oaths during a weeklong window in June of this year could run for precinct positions that would give them a vote during the December reorganizational meeting. Not that Helm can take all the credit; the Barack Obama campaign has also been working hard to fill those precinct committeemen and committeewomen slots as part of its election strategy. The campaign had sent out at least two e-mails to local supporter alerting them to the signup procedure.

Nothing in the Obama effort, however, seemed to target Molinaro.

Helm said his dissatisfaction with Molinaro is because she didn’t recruit a full slate of Democratic challengers for the offices that were on this year’s ballot and because of a drop in precinct leaders in the party, from 350 during his term to less than 200 today. “We still aren’t doing what a good party does; recruiting good candidates and running those candidates,” Helm said.

I have not been able to reach Molinaro for comment. I’ll post it here when I do.

Democrats who work behind the scenes bemoaned the ouster.

“I’ve never seen anybody work so hard and get so much done and accomplish so much,” consultant Mitch Kates said. “If that is truly what happened, then it shows how their personal agendas are ahead of the party. That’s somebody’s personal agenda, and it’s sad.”

That leaves the Pinellas Democrats again on the verge of factionalism, just as their greatest chance for a Democratic president in eight years comes barreling toward them.

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