The American Spectator

It might not happen today, but it’s clear that Rep. Katherine Harris is going to have to abandon her Senate campaign soon. There is just too much controversy surrounding her. Over the weekend, she canceled her appearance at the GOP leadership conference in Memphis, promising a major announcement soon.

We reported two weeks ago that her Senate campaign was again hemorrhaging senior staff, and the whiff of a rotting corpse floating in the Florida Keys was unavoidable around that campaign organization.

Now, Josh Marshall and his intrepid crew of “reporters” are on the make. Anyone who lives in California or a Washington, DC suburb knows that a 200% increase in a real estate sale is not a big deal nowadays. Homes in the Washington suburbs of Maryland and Virginia that were bought just five years ago for $300,000 were being sold a few months ago for almost a million. Clearly Marshall’s crew either lives in Manhattan dwellings or is too busy hanging out in Adams Morgan with the MoveOn.org crowd to understand, well, capitalism.

But Harris’s problem isn’t with her real estate deal, it is more broadly her lack of judgment in entering a race no one wanted her to enter, and doing so knowing that she was damaged goods due to sloppy fundraising practices and poor staffing oversight on Capitol Hill. Hence, her ensnarement in the Duke Cunningham investigation.

We’ve heard that Republicans — Gov. Jeb Bush in particular — are looking for someone who can step in quickly to face off again Sen. Bill Nelson. By all accounts, this is not a race that is a foregone loss. The right man could beat Nelson. But whether they can recruit him is another matter.