TAMPA — A little brush got cleared from the Florida U.S. Senate
race this week when Florida State Senate President Mike Haridopolos
(R-Merritt Island) dropped out.
Haridopolos had been successful in raising campaign cash,
$3.5 million over the last two reporting periods. This isn’t that
tricky considering how many folks like to keep state senate
presidents happy. But for all the money, he had baggage and his
campaign was unraveling. Staff was abandoning ship.
Haridopolos said he dropped out of the race to pay more
attention to his job as president of the Florida Senate. Made it
sound like he was doing Floridians a favor. But his baggage
included, though was not limited to, a “book” the Florida Community
College where Haridopolos worked paid him $152,000 to write, and a
stealth political consultant Haridopolos had idling on the public
payroll until she was needed. These would have been difficult to
square with his professed fiscal conservatism. Recent concern for
his state job notwithstanding, Haridopolos almost certainly
concluded, as did many other political observers, that he couldn’t
win the primary.
It’s difficult to say which remaining Senate candidate
benefits most from this departure. Perhaps it just adds a little
clarity to what will be one of the most watched U.S. Senate races
in the country next year. Conservatives have a chance to push the
ideological balance in the U.S. Senate to the right if the survivor
of the Florida Republican Senate primary can defeat two-term
incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson. Nelson is one of those Senate
“moderates” that the left-stream media loves, i.e., one who votes
for every bit of left-wing geekery that comes down the
pike.
Nelson has whooped up and/or voted for just about every
bad idea to come out of the Obama administration or the Reid-Pelosi
Congress (which has kept him a very busy “moderate”), including cap
and trade, the “stimulus” slush fund, ObamaCare, and every
conceivable form of regulation and incontinent spending. He’s been
no help in the current debt crisis.
Nelson even voted against a measure that would have
prevented the Environmental Protection Agency from enacting its own
carbon cap and trade program. Florida’s conservative rookie
senator, Marco Rubio, voted for the bill that would have prevented
the administration from doing administratively what the Congress
turned down. Candidates running for the Republican Senate
nomination say they would have too.
Nelson has not been obliged to pay the price for
supporting policies Floridians tell pollsters they don’t like. He
has run twice against weak candidates, and the left-stream media
here have not made his liberal voting record public knowledge. He’s
flown under the radar.
Nelson has the Florida media on his side and more than $6
million in campaign cash on hand. But all will not be smooth
sailing. A recent poll conducted for Sunshine State News found that
while Nelson’s favorable/unfavorable rating is above water at
32-27, a mind-boggling 41 percent of respondents either expressed
no opinion of Nelson or said they were “not aware” of
him.
If this poll sample represents Florida voters, it means
that almost half of them don’t know what to make of a man who has
been a U.S. Congressman from Central Florida, Florida Insurance
Commissioner or a U.S. Senator from Florida since 1972. It’s a rare
politician who can make almost no impression on his constituents in
almost 40 years in office.
Can Nelson, in 2012, once again make a virtue of
mediocrity and hide his liberalism from voters in a state where
people self-identify as conservatives by two to one? Foiling this
would be the job of the Republicans seeking to replace Nelson, all
running on conservative platforms. They are:
Former U.S. Senator George LeMieux, who served the final
16 months of the term of former Senator Mel Martinez who resigned
in the summer of 2009. LeMieux was appointed to that post by former
Florida Governor Charlie Crist, whom LeMieux had worked for as
campaign manager and chief of staff. When appointed, LeMieux
pledged not to run for the office himself in 2010. He was thought
of as a seat-warmer for Crist, who sought the office himself in
2010 but was routed by Rubio.
In the Senate, LeMieux compiled a conservative record. And
when Crist abandoned the Republican Party to run against Rubio as
in independent, LeMieux made a clean and complete break with Crist
and supported Rubio. But his critics claim he was the architect of
the many liberal policies that Crist adopted on the way from being
a conservative Republican to being a liberal
independent.
He’ll have to fight this Crist contamination to establish
himself as a true conservative. Early indications are he is doing
pretty well. He led the pack in collecting campaign contributions
with $950,000 in the most recent quarter. For good or ill, LeMieux
is seen by most as the establishment candidate.
Former state representative Adam Hasner of Boca Raton was
appointed by Rubio to be Florida House Majority Leader when Rubio
was Speaker. He’s considered the movement conservative in the race.
He’s campaigning on themes of limited government and reduced
spending, a tough foreign policy, and economic expansion. In so
doing he’s garnered the endorsements of national conservative
organizations and personalities, much in the way Rubio did in 2009
and 2010. Hasner fetched in $560,000 in campaign cash in the latest
quarter.
Retired Army Colonel Mike McCalister has only been in the
race since late June and has mostly appeared before Tea Party
groups. McCalister, who is running as a conservative and an
outsider, finished third of three in the 2010 Republican primary
for governor. He’s yet to report on his campaign
contributions.
The latest entry into the race, so recent as to have been
last week, is 61-year-old Orlando area restaurateur, Craig Miller,
who puts his private sector success up against the government
careers of his opponents. Miller, an Air Force veteran who served
at Cam Rahn Bay AFB at the height of the Vietnam war, who says he
too will put economic revitalization at the center of his efforts
if he’s elected, claims he has actually created tens of thousands
of jobs at such restaurant chains as Red Lobster and Ruth’s Chris
Steak House.
Can one of these conservatives bump off the liberal in
2012? Way too much time and chance between now and November of 2012
to say. But Nelson is by any measure a weak candidate. And Florida
still is, 2008’s presidential hiccup notwithstanding, more red than
blue. By January of 2013, Rubio could be Florida’s senior
senator.
