FL Dems: Do They Even Want to Win?

Orlando Sentinel: 

"The Republican Governors Association has put together a 15-second ad blasting Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Alex Sink as a job-killer, harking back to her days as Florida’s top executive for Bank of America when the company was shedding thousands of jobs here..."

Wondering since the very start, which brain trust of Democratic insiders figured a millionaire banking executive would be a nifty candidate to run….amidst the smoldering wreckage of a global banking crisis.

I wouldn't vote for McCollum if you paid me, but that's because I know what's what, that this woman was a garden variety, 'profits-uber-alles' technocrat, while McFlanders was a water-carrier and lobbyist for the same banking interests, and one who had his shoulder fully to the wheel of the Gingrichite 'Contract On America,' including its characteristically disastrous repeal of Glass-Steagall. That said, I find nothing in the ad to disagree with. It disgusts me in exactly the way it's intended to. 

An excellent-but-bleak recent article in the Atlantic magazine describes the economic period we’re in as “a slow-motion social catastrophe”...why a corporate fucking banker would seem like a salable biography for pitching to the vivisected ‘animal spirits’ of an economically brutalized working class is a mystery. Really. A mystery worthy of anything the Old Testament has on offer.

What it actually is, is the pinnacle of stupidity. It’s the kind of thinking that could well make the Martha Coakley campaign look cagey and connected by comparison. 

You’d think the ‘horrible-biography’ consideration would be, I dunno, maybe 100x more salient than the candidate’s gender. but of course, the problem could only be that the Dems face a contradiction not shared by the RPOF: the Dems have two "bases," each antagonistic toward the other. 

• On the one hand, the base voters--largely working-class have-nots who want a fair shake. 
• On the other hand, the base donors--moneyed interests who want a leg up and a concrete, profitable return on their political investments, fairness be damned. 

The reason FL Dems are useless as a party, is that they’re not a party of fighters. They're the (slightly) less-accommodating wing of the Business Party, to paraphrase Gore Vidal. 

You couldn't ask for a better illustration of this schizoid infirmity than 'Alex Sink, Gubernatorial Candidate,' but consider also the party-approved candidate Alan Grayson had to smack down (with self-financed dollars) for the 2008 primary nomination in my own district, FL-08: Charlie Stuart.

Anybody notice what value the Stuart clan has added to the local political discourse, or the community generally–’community’ as distinct, mind you, from the ‘business community’–in the years since Alan took away ol’ Charlie’s second chance to be shamefully horsewhipped* by Ric Keller? 

If it’s there, I haven’t seen it.

*In a district that at the time enjoyed a 50+% registered-voter Dem party advantage, Stuart lost to Keller in 2006--a big anti-GOP cycle--by 7 percentage points. Then, two years later, relative-unknown Grayson creamed Stuart, by a little over 20 percentage points, in the Democratic primary. Good riddance.

via blogs.orlandosentinel.com