Archive for the ‘Naked Politics’ Category
This, in part, is how Republican Senate candidate Marco Rubio was introduced at a luncheon for the Latin Builders Association in Miami Friday:
"I think maybe, one day, maybe, he'll be the first Cuban-American president of the United States!" said Noelia Moreno, president of the LBA. (And she was not referring to a GOP presidential straw poll earlier this month that included Rubio.)
The former House speaker was among friends — about 350 of them — at a ballroom at the Big Five Club, where the crowd gave a warm reception to a candidate considered one of their own. In giving his usual stump speech, Rubio also took time to praise his friends, saying only his relatives and "a handful of people in this room" thought a year ago that he could win the Senate race.
"I am grateful and I thank God every day that I went through that," Rubio said of being way behind in the polls at first. That helped him focus on the question of why he is running for office, he said.
"Are you running to be somebody? Or are you running to do something?" he said, adding that if he were running to be somebody, he would have picked an easier contest. (Rubio has used this line before, but it still got laughs.)
Before and after the speech, Rubio took some questions from reporters, including several regarding his expenses using a Republican Party of Florida credit card — though he did not directly address a report about spending on kitchen flooring.
"We’ve been answering questions about this for six months," Rubio said. "I’ve said it over and over again. The answer’s the same as it’s always been. Any time there was anything on there that was personal in nature, I identified it immediately, we paid for it out of my personal funds."
And when a PBS reporter asked him about the presidency, Rubio smiled and brushed off the question, saying he looks forward to serving the public and then returning to Miami to be successful in another field.
The associate U.S. Attorney General has written a stern letter to BP claims czar Kenneth Feinberg saying the present pace of claims is "unacceptable" and directing his office to make whatever changes necessary to move things along.
The criticism of the Gulf Coast Claims Facility is notable because it comes from within the Obama administration, which hand-picked Feinberg for the job. And it follows displeasure from Florida officials, including Gov. Charlie Crist and CFO Alex Sink.
"Your recent public statements have acknowledged that the process is more complicated and time-intensive than you had anticipated," associate AG Thomas Perrelli wrote. "I would reiterate to you, however, that the efficiency of the GCCF's review and payment process is not just a matter of fulfilling your own performance goals. The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill has disrupted the lives of thousands upon thousands of individuals, often cutting off the income on which they depend. Many of these individuals and businesses simply do not have the resources to get by while they await processing by the GCCF."
– Alex Leary
Charlie Crist’s decision to include a citation from the Nationa Review in an attack ad on Marco Rubio and Kendrick Meek has the conservative pub pretty annoyed. Editor Rich Lowry said the quote attributed to the National Review was actually a case in which the National Review was quoting the St. Petersburg Times (technically, it was a Miami Herald-generated story in partnership with the Times-Herald Borg, but alas, poor Yorick).
it shouldn’t have surprised me when I saw your recent attack ad on Marco Rubio misleadingly attribute the headline “IRS Investigating Rubio Expenditures” to National Review. A minute of research would reveal that the piece referenced, posted on National Review Online on April 21, 2010, consisted of an attributed quotation from the St. Petersburg Times and a response from the Rubio campaign.
It should have been obvious that the attribution belonged to the Times. Instead, you used the reputation of National Review to attempt to undermine Rubio’s support among conservatives. Your tactic is even more tawdry considering nothing ever came of the Times story, and not even the faintest whiff of wrongdoing has attached itself to Rubio.
More here
When the polling got tough on Gov. Charlie Crist, Crist got going on U.S. frontrunner Marco Rubio in an an attack ad packed with some pants-on-fire falsehoods.
Now, the newly independent Crist has a new ad that’s targeting both Rubio, a Republican, and Democratic Rep. Kendrick Meek. The ad doesn’t look (at first blush) to be false. But it sure suggests that Crist is losing Democratic support in the race for Senate. Crist needs to hang on to nearly half of all Democrats and half of all independents if he wants to win. And chances are, more and more Democrats are going to continue to come home to Meek as the partisanship of the election season grinds on.
We’ll know more tomorrow when Mason-Dixon releases its poll results on the Senate race. Meantime, here’s the (bong?) smoke-filled ad bashing Rubio and Meek.
Alex Sink is up by 7 in the governor's race. No, wait, Rick Scott is up by 6. The former is the Mason-Dixon poll from yesterday. The latter is the Rasmussen poll from today. What gives?
Not only are the top lines nearly opposite — Rasmussen has Scott leading Sink 50-44, while Mason-Dixon has Sink up 47-40 — but the internal findings are just as divergent.
Take
Rasmussen's finding that Scott holds a monster 21-point edge among
no-party voters. In Mason-Dixon, Sink holds a 16-point edge among the
same voters. Consider the favorable/unfavorable margin. In Rasmussen,
Scott enjoys a 53-39 split, and Sink's almost even at 45-46. Mason-Dixon
has Scott underwater in this area, to the tune of 30-47, while Sink is
at 44-23.
Rasmussen has taken heat in the past from liberals for being biased toward Republicans. Polling guru Nate Silver explains
that Rasmussen has a different model than other polls, predicting a
much more conservative turnout on Election Day. Whatever the case, for
those of us who drink coffee and care about polls (though we're
certainly not polling experts), today's Rasmussen survey could be
described as a "coffee-spitter."
The big differences: How they modeled, Mason-Dixon polled over two
days (Sept. 20-22), while Rasmussen polled on one day (Sept. 22).
Mason-Dixon uses live operators to poll. Rasmussen uses Interactive
Voice Response (i.e., "robo" polls). The biggest difference between the
two pollsters could be how they screened their likely voters.
As we saw during the just-ended primary, many polls (including
Mason-Dixon) showed McCollum with a good lead with less than a week to
go before the election, but he lost. We can't say how Rasmussen called
the election because his polling outfit refused to post/poll the Florida
Republican primary race — something Scott supporters said was evidence
of a pro-McCollum bias (something Rasmussen Reports denies). Of course,
now the Scott people can't get enough of how great Rasmussen is.
– Lee Logan and Marc Caputo
Though a risk-averse banker-type, Florida CFO Alex Sink is engaging in an intriguing political judo act with her latest ad that attacks Republican Rick Scott for attacking her over the state pension fund. True, the Scott/Republican Party ad is misleading in that it implies Sink was solely responsible for State Board of Administration investments, though she shares the duties with Gov. Charlie Crist and Attorney General Bill McCollum. And it appears the ad doesn’t give the most up-to-date losses of the investments, etc. More here
But it’s not like the SBA has done a bang-up job. The board skirted legal advice and gambled on risky investments. Why draw attention to the SBA? Because, Sink says, there’s another part of the story: The stock market went down, so nearly everyone lost money. And Florida’s investments are highly rated by the industry.
But Sink could be playing with dynamite that either blows up on Scott or on her (or maybe it doesn’t matter). Aside from the trap of talking about bad investments, Sink runs the risk of being in constant response-and-explain mode v. Scott, whose campaign is gleefully pointing out she hasn’t responded to their ad over taxes. One at a time, guys.
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Democratic U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings has his own race in November in a Broward-Palm Beach district but his campaign will lend to a hand to a neighboring Congressman starting this weekend.
Campaign workers for Hastings, who is black, will distribute U.S. Rep. Ron Klein's campaign materials at black churches in Palm Beach County starting this weekend and continue for the next several weekends, said Art Kennedy, Hastings' chief of staff on leave from that job to work on Hastings' campaign. Kennedy said that Hastings' campaign workers will also go door to door in some Palm Beach County neighborhoods for Klein.
Klein faces Allen West, a black Republican whose $4 million warchest and youtube video have brought him nationwide attention.
Only about 5 percent of the voters in Klein's Broward-Palm Beach district are black — so having Hastings stump for the white Congressman is a sign that this could be a close race.
"Every vote is going to count,'' Kennedy said.
Looks like Florida voters will get more opportunity to size up the main U.S. Senate candidates than we initially thought. Charlie Crist has agreed to participate in two more televised debates with Republican Marco Rubio and Democrat Kendrick Meek.
The first one is Oct. 6: ABC News, WFTV-ABC 9 Orlando & WFTS-ABC 28 Tampa and moderated by George Stephanopoulos and two local media panelists.
The next one is the Leadership Florida and Florida Press Association debate Oct. 19 at Nova Southeastern. Questioners include William March of the The Tampa Tribune, Myriam Marquez of the The Miami Herald, and Michael Williams, Political Reporter for WFOR-TV, CBS-Ch. 4 in Miami. WFOR anchorman, Antonio Mora, will moderate.
Crist and the other already had agreed to the CNN/USF/St. Pete Times debate set for Oct. 24 in Tampa, as well as a Univision debate held last week. Meanwhile, the Crist campaign says it is "seriously considering" an Oct. 15 Fox Affiliates debate and Oct. 26 NBC News debate with David Gregory.
– ADAM C. SMITH
Vice President Joe Biden touches down in Hollywood today to raise money for U.S. Senate candidate Kendrick Meek and other Florida Democrats. At a time when some Democrats are wary of appearing too close to the administration — like gubernatorial candidate Alex Sink, who won't be there and kept her distance from President Obama when he recently visited — Meek is less cautious.
"I think it's a compliment,'' Meek said yesterday. "I think it's an honor that the vice president would come raise money for my campaign. We're not going to get double-armed distance from the president."
Remember that Meek is in a three-way race against Republican Marco Rubio and Gov. Charlie Crist, so he doesn't need Obama-unfriendly Republican voters to win. In contrast, Sink is in a two-way race against Republican Rick Scott and is dependent on crossover support. Her campaign says she has "events and speaking engagements" in Orlando and Lakeland today.
Biden is slated to address about 500 Democrats at the Westin Diplomat Resort & Spa at 3 p.m. The take, expected to be roughly half a million dollars, goes to the Florida Democratic Party.
Before hanging with the Democratic slate — except Sink — Biden is slated to raise money in Miami for the Delaware Democrat who wants to replace him in the Senate, Chris Coons. Why does Coons have to come all the way to Miami to raise money for his campaign against tea party favorite Christine O'Donnell? Because, as Willie Sutton said of robbing banks, "That's where the money is."
The House has cleared legislation to crack down on Medicare fraud with "major provisions" authored by Reps. Ron Klein and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.
Klein's office says the pair's provision targets criminals by doubling fines and jail time, and also contains ways to stop Medicare fraud before it starts. South Florida is an epicenter of Medicare fraud — Klein's office estimates billions of dollars of fraud is commited in South Florida alone.
The legislation, Klein said, "marks a serious step forward in a huge and important battle to end the rampant fraud ravaging Medicare in South Florida.”
The legislation grants the Office of the Inspector General the authority to bar executives whose companies have been convicted of Medicare fraud from participating in the program in the future. It also cracks down on parent companies that commit fraud but hide behind shell companies.