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“Light-hearted and funny” is how Sarasota County Republican Party Chairman Eric Robinson describes an ad he produced targeting Democratic county commission candidate Jono Miller in a superb article by Rick Barry over on the Pelican Press website. The ad Robinson refers to? It featured “a ridiculously stumbling, bearded man wearing a pink tutu, with the label ‘Jono Miller’ on a black bar above the image.” Sure sounds “light-hearted and funny,” right?

Unfortunately, scouring YouTube to post the “Miller” video here produced no results. That doesn’t mean there’s not plenty of Sarasota slime out there. This ad — which features a fat actor gobbling ice cream as a stand-in for Democrat and incumbent state representative Keith Fitzgerald — wallows in the gutter as well:

In his piece, Barry pegs the local GOP’s ‘08 electoral success to its flurry of negative advertising in the final days of the campaign, estimating that up to $100,000 was dumped into each race in the home stretch. Local Democrats promise they won’t be outspent next time around.

And Fitzgerald’s position will only be stronger in two years: Florida Democratic legislators recently named him policy chairman, which makes him the third highest-ranking Democrat in the Florida House. Not bad for a guy supposedly “giving taxpayers fits.” (Got to admit: I like me some puns.)

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