“America is threatened by many crises, ranging from economic recession to international terrorism, but none of these threats are quite so immediate or so fundamentally hostile to our democratic form of government as the existential menace of Florida.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Sept. 30, 2011
Florida Republican politics is a Byzantine web of intrigue and treachery, a terrain of secret alliances and hidden rivalries involving not only elected officials, but also a vast imperial court of staffers, consultants, campaign operatives and money men who constantly aspire to advance their own narrow personal ambitions without any regard for the commonweal. The only reason honest people in Florida vote for Republicans is because the state’s Democrats are so much worse.
If the FBI were to target Florida politicians for a sting operation, they might conceivably arrest nearly every member of the state legislature, and all but a few of the county commissioners, city council members, mayors, and other minor office-holders who infest the state like so many cockroaches.
We should have left the damned mess to the Spanish, the Seminoles and the alligators, but it’s too late. We’re stuck with Florida now. The Spanish can’t afford to buy it back and the Seminoles are content to wreak their revenge on the White Man through lucrative casino operations like the one in Immokalee where a visiting journalist recently spent a few unfortunate hours at the blackjack table, but I digress . . .
The attempt to make Florida state Rep. Will Weatherford the fall guy for an alleged plot — supposedly orchestrated by allies of Mitt Romney — to redistrict Rep. Allen West out of Congress came flying into my face this afternoon, when I got a phone call from Javier Manjarres of The Shark Tank. It was Javier’s interview last week with Weatherford which got the whole uproar started, and Javier assured me this afternoon that he’s privy to all kinds of stuff about the conspiracy against West, stuff he can’t talk about because people would lose their jobs over it. The need to protect sources is certainly understandable, but it unfortunately puts Javier in a position of being unable to prove what he alleges, and I have neither the time nor resources to go chasing after the details myself.
The reason Javier called me is because he is at odds with my Florida friend Sarah Rumpf for her defense of Weatherford, and I had linked her blog in quoting a letter she published from Florida state Rep. Scott Plakon, who likewise defended Weatherford from what Plakon called “cheap shots” by Rush Limbaugh.
My phone conversation with Javier got interrupted by a disturbance at my house involving my son’s dog, and I was unable to reach Javier when I called back. Nevertheless, this conversation piqued my curiosity about exactly what the hell is going on in Florida, so I did some further investigation and stumbled onto some related intrigue that, to my knowledge, has not been reported in connection to this story.
Florida state Senate President Mike Haridopolos may be the unseen force behind the redistricting uproar, for which Weatherford is being unfairly demonized. And if there is a Romney connection to the whole thing, it may not surprise you to learn who Haridopolos endorsed for president.
With no extensive direct knowledge of Florida politics myself, I do know that Haridopolos was a candidate in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate (to challenge Democrat Bill Nelson) until his campaign self-destructed last summer. With $2.8 million reportedly left in his campaign coffers, however, there were obvious questions about Haridopolos’s future plans:
Speculation has swirled over a possible Hardipolos bid for U.S. House next year. With Florida gaining two congressional seats in 2012 — and one of those likely targeted for Central Florida — the Brevard County-based lawmaker could be geographically and financially well-positioned for a run.
The plot thickens, you see, and there’s also this angle: Haridopolos blamed those pesky Tea Party people for his failed Senate campaign (they called him out on various issues, including immigration), and one of the Tea Party people Haridopolos hates the most is — did you guess? — Allen West.
There is gossip to the effect that one heated conversation between West and Haridopolos ended with West suggesting that Haridopolos perform an anatomically impossible act. And the fingerprints of Haridopolos are said to be all over that Florida congressional re-districting map that seemed to be designed specifically to screw over West.
But the story is still more complicated than that. If Haridopolos had planned to carve himself out a congressional district, his plans were thwarted in part because of his friends with the Romney campaign. Both U.S. Rep. Connie Mack IV and his father, the former U.S. senator, campaigned with Romney in Florida, which had consequences that Haridopolos failed to anticipate:
The leading Republican candidate in the U.S. Senate race, Mack earned national media exposure stumping across the state for Mitt Romney. The former Massachusetts governor went so far as to anoint the 44-year-old Mack in campaign stops as “the next senator from Florida.”
That endorsement helped drive Mack’s opponent, Adam Hasner, out of the race this week and into a congressional race in South Florida. Another GOP challenger, Craig Miller, exited to run for a congressional seat, too, leaving only former Sen. George LeMieux as a serious challenger.
Hasner was the Tea Party favorite in the Senate race, and his decision to switch to a congressional campaign was part of a complex deal that my buddy Dan Riehl reported this week:
In a deal with several moving parts, Conservative favorite Rep. Allen West will move over and run in Rep. Tom Rooney’s old district, as Rooney moves on to run in a newly created district. Additionally, Adam Hasner will drop his Senate bid, leaving a somewhat clearer path for Rep. Connie Mack to run for the Senate nomination.
So guess who ends up the odd man out in this game of musical chairs? Haridopolos, with $2.8 million in the bank and no district to run in.
Now, I don’t know Haridopolos and I don’t know Weatherford, either of whom may be more honest than an Immokalee blackjack dealer, or maybe not. However, I do know Scott Plakon, who is by all accounts a Christian man of unquestioned integrity, and Plakon says Weatherford is innocent of any intent to screw over Allen West.
If anyone wishes to vouch for the bona fides of Haridopolos, let him stand forth and speak up. But Plakon, Hasner and West are all allied with the Tea Party, whereas Haridopolos reputedly depises the Tea Party, and so if there were someone looking to make trouble for West and his Tea Party friends . . .
Well, distracting everybody by putting the blame on Weatherford — a popular politician whose own ambitions might make him a future rival of Haridopolos in a statewide campaign — would be just the kind of sneaky thing you might expect in such a situation involving Florida Republicans.
Too bad Spain can’t afford to buy back that damned state.
