in the District 6 raceeteran Tampa City Councilman Charlie Miranda continues to outdistance his sole challenger, Kelly Benjamin.
Including early and absentee votes, Miranda has 63 percent of the vote. Benjamin has 37 percent.
Progressives need to stop backing losers like Benjamin, Doug Tudor and Ed Turanchik. Mainstream voters find them weird. Benjamin once ran campaign for a strip club owner. Tudor bizarrely attacked fellow Democrat (who he wasn't running against) Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. Turanchik has been a walking punchline with a record of not getting his insane ideas off-the-ground.
Newsflash to progressives: candidates like this will never win. The progressive base needs to push the Democratic establishment to the left. Republicans don't dare cross the tea party. Progressives need to instill that same level of fear in Democrats. Obama panders to the Chamber of Commerce because he believes progressives will fall in line in 2012. If Mitt Romney spoke to the SEIU the tea party movement would have his ass.
Progressives have a choice of backing goofy candidates with no choice of winning or fighting the Democratic establishment. The first option is guaranteed failure. The second option is the only choice progressives have.
Dear Nitwit,
ReplyDeleteI've been directed to your little myopic rant blog by the Ybor Stogie. First, as an "attention whore" I have to say, nothing disappoints me more than a blog post mentioning me that is rife with sloppy typos. If you're going to sling some mean spirited mud, at least have the decency to check your grammar.
Second, Joe Redner is a close friend and supporter. Your opinion on what happened during his campaign 5 years ago is based on ignorance (or worse yet, my "attention whoring" worked and you read my blog post). Regardless, I'd bet less than 1% of voters in my district knew or cared about any work I did on Joe's campaign. I've worked on many other campaigns. Apparently, that's the only one that entered your blog world. Why? Because I used my great attention whoring skills to make you read all about it!
Third, your "analysis" is complete garbage and offers no meaningful insight. The bulk of West Tampa will not vote against an institution like Charlie. That fact deserves more discussion than your lame "don't back progressive candidates" thing. I won every single precinct in Seminole Heights (guess they like weird people here) as well as Carver City and Lincoln Gardens (the African American dominated precincts), but turnout wasnt high enough to bridge that other 12%. That will change as our hip little neighborhood establishes itself.
Everyone's entitled to an opinion Hussey, but yours is flat out wrong (besides being laced with transparent personal vitriol). The election of an openly gay Kevin Beckner and a very liberal, sometimes harsh Mary Mulhern prove the point. Sipporting these people *did* push the local Democratic base to the left. Duh!
Also, White Chocolate in the run off blows your "weird factor" theory out of the water. You may not like Ed or me, but there are certainly a lot of people who do and those people will continue to support "progressive" candidates no matter how many more pompous blog posts you churn out. And I'm glad for that.
Newsflash: the City elections are non-partisan.
Cheers!
K B