Raul Martinez? Well, titan fits him just fine. I’m glad he’s finally in the race, though he will have to endure the slings and arrows of his tiny foe. Just stay calm, and come November, all will be well. Congressional District 21 will be part of a landslide sweep for the Democrats, and we can start to get out of Iraq, enact civilized health care and steer the economy into a green and fair mode. We’ll re-engage with the world community on an honorable basis and forge security alliances based on watchful peace and cooperation.
Let’s pause to bring in Districts 18 and 25, to complete the picture for Miami-Dade County. District 25 will see Joe Garcia, our Democratic Party chairman, running against and defeating Mario Diaz-Balart. In District 18 a new name has emerged, Annette Taddeo, Colombia-born and a successful businesswoman, to take on the ineffective Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.
Joe Garcia and Annette Taddeo have yet to announce their candidacies, so let’s pause here to have a short talk on the telephone with Annette Taddeo.
First, she’s not announcing. “I am keeping all my options open,” she said.
She loves the district, to which she was brought by Hurricane Andrew. Her parents’ Cutler Ridge home was wrecked by that storm in August 1992. At the time, she had finished college and was planning to start work as an editor in the Spanish language. Instead, she bought a motor home in Alabama, drove it to Miami and parked it in front of her parents’ wrecked home. “We all lived in it for the next six months and I worked to rebuild their house. It was the first home to be finished there.”
Already, I like my new congresswoman. She gets things done. She does not sound like a rubber-stamp representative – that is, NOT like the incumbent.
I’m tempted to ask Annette Taddeo if she’ll be like Ros-Lehtinen and constantly send me franked mail seeking my praise for her exertions on my behalf: She got me $490,000 for Miami Beach pedestrian and bicycle access ways. Yes, but she also voted for torture, for the war in Iraq, for Bush’s vetoes and against SCHIP – all wrong on all the stuff that’s important!
But no, that would be asking Annette Taddeo if she’s running for Congress, and that’s premature to answer.
It’s just as well now to steer away from the telephone transcript and say that I approve of the broad strategy that the Democratic gods are on the verge of using in our county. We’re up against three Cuban American rubber-stamp, hard-line politicians, and what are we about to deploy?
· For District 21: Raul Martinez is an accomplished local leader who was mayor of Hialeah for 24 years, thanks to many Republican voters who love him.
· For District 25: like Martinez, Joe Garcia is Cuban-American; he has a national reputation as a Hispanic political strategist.
· For District 18: Annette Taddeo is President and CEO of LanguageSpeak, Inc, a comprehensive provider of language services, a winner of awards and a civic leader. Check out her official bio (from which I nipped her portrait).
The Republicans are three rubber-stampers; our candidates are a local political genius, a national political genius and a brilliant businesswoman. This is Democratic Party diversity.
Just to depart from South Florida electoral politics for a minute: Today’s NY Times piece on the national mood says that the CBS News/New York Times poll shows we Democrats are so far ahead of the Republicans that it’s beyond funny. That is, if people are asked which party’s presidential candidate they’re likely to vote for in the November election, the results for 2000 and this year are as follows:
· In 2000, “respondents were evenly divided.” (Do you remember how that election turned out?)
· In 2008, “they favored the Democrats by 18 percentage points.”
For some months now I’ve brought up the idea of historic landslide a number of times, always coupled with the admonition that we’ll have to work and donate to make it possible. This 18-point lead is, of course, a national reading and it may not be so strong here in South Florida. Still, what if it’s only a 12-point lead? Does this sweep all our Republican members of the U.S. House out? How hard will we have to concentrate and work to make it happen?
I can only say how pleased I was to walk up to the center of Hialeah Tuesday morning and see a forest of TV-broadcast towers and trucks at City Hall – formally, the Raul L. Martinez Government Center. The lavish media coverage of Raul Martinez’ announcement and the hysterical Republican responses are in stunning contrast with the non-coverage that the media gave to the Democratic candidates in 2006. We’ve come a long way, baby.
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