Wheels starting to turn in US House Districts 18 and 25

I think there were two developments on Tuesday in the coming races for the US House of Representatives from Miami-Dade County, involving Joe Garcia and Annette Taddeo, the Democratic candidates who waged strong campaigns in 2008 but lost in FL-25 and FL-18, respectively.

I’m guessing that Joe Garcia took himself out of the House race in 2010 by accepting a nomination for a job in the Obama administration, and Annette Taddeo declared, once again, that she’s mad at the incumbent Republican, and she squashed talk that she’d run for chief financial officer of Florida.

Taddeo’s stump speech in her brave battle to unseat Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in 2008 always included the story of her decision to run. It was because Ros-Lehtinen had voted repeatedly against expanding children’s health insurance coverage. Taddeo would bring tears to her listeners’ eyes by recalling her many surgeries to repair a cleft lip, and she would say this experience convinced her to challenge Ros-Lehtinen, who’s been in the US House now for 20 years.

Now the issue is the environment, Taddeo said in a statement ruling out a run to succeed Alex Sink as Florida’s CFO. She didn’t declare outright for Congress, but it sure sounds like the next thing in her sights.

Here’s most of what she said:

I have taken time to seriously examine this [CFO] opportunity and to confer with family, friends and supporters. I’ve had an opportunity to do some soul searching about my future and I’ve come to some clear realizations. I am most passionate about my family, my business and public service. I’ve dedicated my entire life to family, while dedicating my professional life to building and growing my company, LanguageSpeak. Through my service on a variety of public boards and groups and then my run for Congress, I have been able to follow my passion for public service.

The Chief Financial Officer position is very appealing to me. I believe my background as the owner and active CEO of a small business gives me the skills I would need to serve the people of Florida in this position. As I examined the opportunity, I felt confident I could raise the money to be competitive and that I could do the job well and with vision.

But something was missing.

Just over a week ago, the House of Representatives passed landmark legislation to attack climate change and to address our dependence on foreign oil and the deadly greenhouse gasses that fossil fuels spew into our environment. I followed that debate with rapt attention and realize the legislation isn’t perfect. However, in spite of the science, in spite of the clear and present danger climate change presents to the future of Florida, my own member of Congress voted against the bill.

I realized at that moment what was missing as I considered the CFO race. I just wasn’t passionate about it at this time. I am passionate about climate change and health care and restoring our economy. I am passionate about economic development and job creation and making sure America is on the forefront of innovation for the future. I feel we are being let down, once again, by political leaders who can’t see beyond the next election.

Therefore, I have decided not to be a candidate for CFO or any other office at this time. I hope and believe that I will run for public office again in the near future. I have decided to keep my focus on my family, my business and to engage in public policy from the perspective of a wife, mother, business owner and activist for now. Thank You.

A month ago, at the Jefferson-Jackson Day event in Miami Beach, she said she wouldn’t run for Congress again without the full backing of the Democratic Party, as she had to do in 2008. Well we remember the thrashing and gnashing that went on as we in the grassroots begged and yelled for our incumbent Democrats in the US House, Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL-20) and Kendrick Meek (FL-17), to get behind the strong Democratic candidates challenging the three Republicans in our county’s US House delegation. It was like the poor Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the impossible mountain.

In the end, Taddeo lost 42 percent to 58 percent – the same margin that Democrat Raul Martinez lost to Lincoln Diaz-Balart in FL-21.

Joe Garcia did considerably better against Mario Diaz-Balart in FL-25, losing 47 percent to 53 percent.

Not long ago I heard Joe Garcia speak at a Democracy For America-Miami-Dade chapter meeting, and he clearly was leaving the door open to a new run for the US House. The demographics are getting more and more favorable for a Democrat in this district that includes Miami’s southwestern suburbs and through the Everglades to the eastern part of Collier County.

But now Garcia is taking an interesting chance in Washington, and I think this rules out a run for the US House. It’s already July of 2009, and within six months he’d had to have a campaign up for the November 2010 election. Somehow Joe Garcia doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d put the citizenry through the agony of confirmation hearings and then a few months later quit and run for some other position.

Yes, confirmation hearings – that’s what the Miami Herald says on the Naked Politics blog.
Click on that and you'll see that the White House said of Garcia:

"Joe Garcia's dynamic public service career spans over 20 years and consists of a diverse body of work in the fields of energy, foreign policy and human rights. As a law student, Mr. Garcia directed the Exodus Project, a non-profit refugee resettlement program that reunited over 10,000 families at no cost to American tax-payers. In 1992, the late Governor Lawton Chiles appointed Joe Garcia to the Florida Public Service Commission (PSC), where he fought for lower utility bills for the people of Florida. In 1998, Mr. Garcia's fellow commissioners elected him as chairman of the PSC. As PSC Chairman, Joe Garcia worked across party lines to pass the largest energy rate cut in Florida's history, saving Florida's families more than $1 billion. In 2001, Mr. Garcia was named as the Executive Director of the Cuban American National Foundation, where he served as a tireless proponent of freedom and improved human rights conditions in Cuba and throughout the Americas. In 2004, Mr. Garcia was named Executive Vice President and Director of the Hispanic Project for NDN, a policy research institute in Washington D.C. Joe Garcia earned his Bachelor of Arts and Juris Doctorate degrees from the University of Miami."

Oh, yeah. The job is director of the Office of Minority Economic Impact at the Department of Energy.

Meek/Burns/Gelber US Senate politics at JJ meeting

Dan Gelber is stepping back. Kevin Burns is not. Kendrick Meek is confident of the Democratic nomination to run against whomever the Republicans put up for the US Senate seat being vacated by Mel Martinez.

UPDATE: Just learning at midnight Monday about a new entry in the US Senate race: Corrine Brown, U.S. Rep. from Jacksonville (FL-3) says she's considering a race for this seat.
ALSO: The Gelber campaign used my video of Gelber (see below) in a message to people in the Gelber Facebook group. Cool to be linked. It's also on the Broward New Times blog, where you also can see a snip on Corrine Brown.

That’s a bunch of names, and even more will enter the picture. Aside from the jockeying personalities and ambitions, the thing that stands out is a drive by many Florida Democrats to avoid divisive primaries in the 2010 elections – midterms in the presidential cycle but the year to elect the governor and the three other state cabinet officers. No incumbents seek re-election for the first time in over 130 years. Democrats are ambitious to grab all four so-called statewide offices – they only hold one now – and elect a Democrat to the US Senate.

This would be a tremendous state coup for Democrats on the heels of taking Florida’s 27 electoral votes for Barack Obama last November. But it goes against the typical history of midterm losses by the president’s party, and may not be possible anyhow unless the national economy brightens and makes voters more happy with Democrats. The Republicans, after all, also are trying to avoid tough primaries, though Marco Rubio, the deeply conservative former State House speaker, shows no sign of leaving the Senate field to Gov. Charlie Crist, the empty suit.

What do I know about the Republicans, anyway?

Here’s the way this played out among Democrats in public Saturday at the day of training and campaigning that was part of the Florida Democratic Party’s Jefferson-Jackson Day in the luxe venue of the newly renovated Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach.

Dan Gelber, 48, my state senator (District 35), said he had walked a few hundred yards to the meeting from his Miami Beach home. Finding coffee at the GLBT Caucus room, he told this blogger he was likely to step back from the US Senate race and was talking to people about running for state attorney general. He’s a former federal prosecutor, one highlight in a busy resume of politics and public service, but his ambition in this direction runs up against another rising Democrat, state Sen. Dave Aronberg (FL-27), 38, who’s perhaps even more in need of a bigger job than Gelber. Gelber is early in his first state Senate term, while Aronberg is in his second and last. Term limits, Ta DA!

Some say Florida Democrats don’t have a deep bench of candidates. Gelber and Aronberg are evidence for the other view: that talent is abundant. Unfortunately, attorney general is a natural office for each of them.

Now I’ve mixed the race for state attorney general in with the US Senate. Let’s go back to the senatorial possibilities.

The hapless Mel Martinez announced last year, after being cashiered as head of the Republican Party, that he wouldn’t run for re-election to US Senate. The Democratic scramble started back in December when Gelber said he was thinking of the Senate. A month later Meek, 42, in his fourth term in the US House (FL-17), made the first official step into the race, and Gelber officially announced for US Senate soon thereafter. In February Kevin Burns, mayor of North Miami, launched his bid. This made the Democratic race an entirely Miami-Dade County affair, though the three are a diverse set, Meek being African-American, Gelber Jewish, and Burns gay, in a 26-year relationship and having an adopted, charming daughter. Hey, we’re Democrats. So what if it’s Florida and some parts of the state are still in the Deep South. I can’t help but think … Anyway. Get over it.

All three showed up at the Netroots Coalition training session Saturday morning and spoke briefly, setting wheels in motion. Here are video links to clips of their talks. Text summaries soon thereafter.

Key words from Gelber:

• “Every time we get involved with divisive primaries, we lose.”
• In recent election cycles, “there’s really only been one (Democratic) candidate who’s won, Alex Sink. Guess what – she didn’t have a primary. … I’m in this US Senate race. But I will likely be taking sort of a step back in this race….”
• “I do think this cycle is going to be (about) how disciplined we are going to be as Democrats. Whether we can put together a group that delivers change, really changes the face of our state.”

Kevin Burns was the only enthusiastic proponent of primaries. “I love primaries,” he told the Netroots crowd, while cautioning that a primary should be “responsible.” He contrasted a good primary with the Republicans’ usual tactic of special interests anointing someone to be the nominee.

That doesn’t make Burns a front-runner, however. Meek seems to have that position. But it’s a long time before the primary in August next year.

Gelber and others talked about a 2010 slate – the US Senate, plus the state leadership offices of governor, attorney general, chief financial officer and commissioner of agriculture and consumer affairs. (The lieutenant governor is elected as a team with the governor.)

In the evening, at the banquet before over 1,000 people, Gelber made it more official, saying in his podium speech, “I’m going to step back from my US Senate bid and consider other seats in the (state) cabinet.”

This won the best ovation of the evening. There was prolonged applause and many rose to their feet. Neither Alex Sink, the gubernatorial nominee, nor keynoter Tim Kaine, governor of Virginia and head of the DNC, got prolonged applause. After Kendrick Meek spoke and didn’t acknowledge that Gelber had, in effect, withdrawn (What does “step back” mean, anyway?), Bob Graham, the wise old Florida Democrat, with vast experience as governor and prominent US senator, seemed to depart from his text to thank Gelber, and praised his “courageous, unifying and patriotic statement.”

Now came Alex Sink to the podium after Graham’s introduction. Unchallenged for the Democratic nomination for governor, she gave a speech rich in platitudes until she got to her growing up on a farm. The chatty audience finally hushed and seemed enthralled by her description of how she learned self-reliance and a “love of numbers” from helping her father with the farm accounts. She wrote the checks, and it seemed that soon she was head of the Bank of America in Florida, and now on the threshold of the governor’s office.

She’s facing Bill McCollum, whose distinguishing feature is having run for office a ton of times without seeming to become especially smart or effective. Now he’s the state attorney general, term-limited, so he’s up or out of office.

On Sunday morning Gelber sent an email to supporters announcing again that he’s “stepping back” from the US Senate race, and that he’d been talking with Bob Graham, Alex Sink and US Sen. Bill Nelson about a “slate of candidates” for 2010.

The text of his email:

As you may know I have decided to step back from my U.S. Senate bid. I wanted to let you know the reasons.

When Governor Crist announced he would be a candidate for US Senate, he created a domino effect that opened up every seat on the cabinet. At a time when our state is facing its greatest challenges, ironically, we have our greatest uncertainty and dislocation. But I believe this is also an opportunity – the chance to set a new course that avoids the mistakes of the past and tracks a better future for our families.

It makes little sense -- when we do face the prospect of real change in Florida -- for me to participate in a potentially divisive primary for U.S. Senate that will only serve to diminish our chances against a very formidable and well-known Republican nominee.

I also believe that we have a historic opportunity here in Florida to reshape the political landscape and more importantly, bring fundamental change to Tallahassee. I have had a number of conversations with Senators Graham and Nelson, and CFO Alex Sink, about how we can best unify our party and move forward with a slate of candidates that can communicate our vision for a better Florida, and I look forward to continuing these discussions. I would like to hear your thoughts as you have been a good supporter and friend, and I value your opinion. You can reach me at dan@dangelber.com.

Tim Kaine, in his keynote speech, promised to pay a lot of attention to Florida campaigns and said his DNC will “invest” in our 2010 Senate race. Kaine waxed philosophical in describing how hard it was to know when one’s political “moment” was in bloom and when it was past. “We’ll be measured by what we do in this moment ... You don’t know how long a moment will last … We’ve got to do as much as we can.”

A few more words on that slate for the state offices. Who might be in the other state cabinet slots? One delightful surprise was to learn that Annette Taddeo is considering a run to succeed Alex Sink as chief financial officer. Taddeo ran a strong campaign for US House District 18 (my district) but lost to the entrenched Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in 2008. Taddeo is a successful businesswoman in her own right and would be a credible occupant of the CFO portfolio.

She, too, appeared at the Netroots session and spoke after Gelber, Aronberg and Burns had left.

“This was not my idea,” she said of the CFO draft, but went on, “I am considering it. I am talking to people ... it’s a very difficult decision. I just went through a very grueling campaign.”

She said she’d never run again without party backing, as she did in the ’08 congressional campaign. This was something I saw from medium close-up, and while it was tough on her, it made me and many others admire her grit as much as her intelligence, talent and charm.

So, check it out, the website to draft Annette Taddeo for CFO.

And here’s a link to the Miami Herald’s story, which didn’t have any reporting from the Netroots meeting.

A link to an earlier post here on this topic.

You can check results in your home precinct at this link, though you’ll need WinZip to unlock the statistics after you download them from the Miami-Dade Election Department. I chose to download the Excel version (marked as Details XLS) after finding the text version to be incomprehensible.

My home Precinct (lucky) 13 in the far northern and eastern blocks of Miami Beach: 2,168 registered voters, of whom 1,448 voted, a turnout rate of 67 percent, which is just what the county as a whole showed.

How about the Obama-McCain breakdown: 893 for Obama, 548 for McCain.

Absentee? McCain got 148, Obama 140 (including me).

Early? Obama 495, McCain 268

Election Day? Obama 258, McCain 132.

Those who voted absentee or early were 1,051, or 73.4 percent of the voting population.

My figures for Election Day are off by a few. I discovered late in the game that one of the columns for Election Day was for the very small number of people who voted by the Ivotronic touch-screen method rather than the optical scan fill-in-bubbles method. And I hadn’t included them in my total, as my Excel skills are pretty low.

MORE: The results for Congressional District 18 for Precinct 13 may show how (though not why) Annette Taddeo lost to Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, which I regret very much.

Totals: Taddeo 734, Ros-Lehtinen 617. It's a nice margin for the Democratic challenger but not nearly enough to offset the incumbent's totals in more-Republican precincts. Taddeo's total of 734 is well under Obama's 893.

Still, a tip o' the hat to Taddeo's visit to the voting site on Sunday, the last day of early voting, when she greeted hundreds of people waiting in line. They will remember her charm and intelligence for the next time.

Kudos to the iron people waiting forever to vote!

Annette Taddeo (in blue), Democratic challenger for U.S. House District 18, meets people in a long line waiting to vote at North Shore Branch Library in Miami Beach Sunday afternoon.


There was this headline on the Miami Herald's website, main page, saying "Early voting has closed." It was about 8 p.m. when I saw it. Then I called my friend Erika Brigham in the South Beach storefront of the Miami Beach Democratic Club. She asked around and was told that people were still voting at Miami Beach City Hall. Wow, that was three hours after the line closed.

The Herald was a little premature in the tense it chose for the verb in that Internet headline. Maybe the lines had closed, but voting was still at full throttle.

I hopped in my car and drove to the North Shore Branch Library, the other place where people can early-vote in Miami Beach, and the last people were soon to finish voting at about 8:45 p.m. Wow, these were people I saw getting on line just at 5 p.m. after I had spent most of the four-hour day there.

Then I called Michael Calderin, candidate for Florida House of Representatives in District 119, and he was still on line waiting to vote at the West Kendall Library on Hammocks Road and 102nd Avenue. He expected he might finish about 9:30 p.m. but couldn't be sure, as the line was snaking through rows of bookshelves. Wow, that would be 4 1/2 hours on line.

Will they be finished by midnight? It could be close. The longest wait time on Miamidade.gov was five hours at the Stephen P. Clark Government Center in downtown Miami. That was posted just before 5 p.m., so they most likely will be finishing around 10 p.m. Wow.

The early turnout is stunning. The crowds on Miami Beach were overwhelmingly pro-Obama, though some crazies came out from their caves with bizarre signs and shouts, so it's clear that Democrats won't get all the votes.

Michael Calderin said he'd seen tremendous lines at at least three early-vote sites on Sunday, and he thought almost half of the expected votes in his Florida House district had already been cast.

So I'm just saying, maybe Election Day won't be too crowded, if such a large number have voted already.

FL-18: Wasserman Shultz in public endorsement of Annette Taddeo for US House; Closing difficult chapter?

l-r: Annette Taddeo, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Raul Martinez, Kendrick Meek, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Garcia.

This was a long time coming, and so quite choreographed. A rising star among Democratic congresswomen, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, of Florida District 20, stood on a stage in Little Havana Thursday and publicly endorsed the candidacy of the Democratic challenger to one of Wasserman Shultz’ friends in the House.

This is an observation and supposition I’m making without having interviewed her or knowing all the influences that brought her to this new point. I hope it means that she’s decided that Annette Taddeo, a successful businesswoman making her first foray into elective politics, is going to defeat the 19-year veteran, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, in District 18.

District 18 is where I live. I campaign some for Taddeo, whose half-Colombian, half-American background is perfect for this district that spans from Key West in the Florida Keys to Miami Beach and a good bulge of Little Havana and downtown Miami on the mainland. The district is majority Hispanic but not quite as Cuban as before, so Ros-Lehtinen, who’s Cuban American, is fighting hard with a mass of TV ads that fail to mention her links to neo-con misleaders and play up her “service” to the district.

As I try to persuade some brilliantly intelligent people to vote for Taddeo, they often reveal themselves as having been conned by Ros-Lehtinen’s supposed “service.” They ignore or are unaware of her repeated votes for the Iraq war, for torture, against the expansion of children’s health insurance. Hardly anyone seems aware of her hardline position on Iran, and they profess to admire her ability to get the Miami River dredged. (Big deal – some say it’s the shortest river in the USA, at 4 miles. Though it certainly needed dredging. Took forever. Anyway…) Once in a while they can change their minds after hearing her voting record. More have been swayed by her saccharine manner, and if they go to her office in Washington, they get such a nice cup of coffee.

It’s disgusting what dupes we are. How so many of us agree to be bribed by federal dollars. How we vote against our interests. I know, this behavior has been analyzed to hell and gone, and Americans are well established as having a tendency to let their vote be swayed by vague feelings of patriotism or by which candidate presents as a good social pal. Not that we’d ever get close to the snob. But we’ll take our emotional leaning as somehow related to attaining the American Dream, and we throw away our chance to vote for someone who has a solid and intelligent view of our situation. Well, I’m thinking of good old wooden Al Gore there, but he’s not a very good example, since he really won.

Let’s get back to what’s publicly known about Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her many months of reluctance to get on the side of Annette Taddeo and her two fellow strong Democratic challengers, Joe Garcia against Mario Diaz-Balart in District 25 (the outer suburbs and the Everglades) and Raul Martinez against Lincoln Diaz-Balart in District 21 (inner suburbs of Miami).

This came into the public eye in March, started by the Miami Herald’s featuring it on the front page. This blog picked that up pretty quickly (first post on March 9) and the story ran repeatedly on Daily Kos and elsewhere in the blogosphere. Wasserman Schultz was regularly creamed for not using her position of influence in the DCCC – Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee – to help the Democrats challenging in her neighboring districts.

At one point I was quietly happy about it, because it got Taddeo, Garcia and Martinez much more publicity locally and nationally than the little-known challengers had two years earlier. I know that too well, as I was nominal campaign manager for Dave Patlak, who didn’t quite get 40 percent against Ros-Lehtinen in the 2006 midterm election. We made her spend over $1 million – so there was some satisfaction for that.

What was Wasserman Schultz’ justification this year? Best guess was some collegial loyalty among fellow members of the U.S. House. They were all in the business of promoting federal bucks for South Florida and had to act together. There may have been some socializing. She told a skeptical audience once that it was a difficult balance. Not convincing. Many of us walked out because she came down on the wrong side of that teeter-totter. A report from March 21 at this link.

This affair caused me to think a lot about our political predicament. And it’s not just South Florida. This is all over our beloved country: the invulnerable incumbent. Their districts are so gerrymandered that they worry little about re-election. Wasserman Schultz and her Democratic colleague, Kendrick Meek of District 17, do not even get Republican opponents. Their districts are 70-percent safe Democratic.

They don’t benefit from the American tonic of competition. (Remedy: there’s a petition circulating to amend the Florida state constitution to ban political considerations in laying new district boundaries. This must be a priority after this election.)

If the two Democrats are invulnerable, the three Republican incumbents have less of a built-in advantage nowadays, though they started out with more solidly Republican districts. Demographic changes have put them in danger, and their three challengers, with strong campaign staffs and decent financing, are evidence that all three Republicans are seen as vulnerable, like their fellows most everywhere in the last months of George W. Bush.

Yet it still took forever for Wasserman Schultz to be more open in backing first Martinez, then Garcia and finally Taddeo. She wasted a lot of time being unnecessarily tenacious in backing Hillary Clinton. Then she spoke in favor of Taddeo at a meeting of Florida delegates at the Denver convention, where she somehow also cadged a slot to second Barack Obama’s nomination. Now it’s the last lap before election day, early voting is already under way, and finally Wasserman Schultz is in public at home in Florida before the TV cameras. And not alone.

Before I name her companions, here’s the quote:

“We need to make sure that we have leaders in the Congress who will stand up and be your voice. To make sure that the middle class ... that they have members of Congress who are in Washington fighting for them. And these three candidates, Raul Martinez, Joe Garcia and Annette Taddeo, are the people that we need to elect so that we can make sure that they do that…

“This is the most important election of our lives. We are at a turning point in the United States of America. The wealthy have had their leaders in Washington. The wealthy have been taken care of for a long time. It is time to elect these three candidates to Congress so that we can have a voice for people who have not had one for a very long time.”

You can see from her words that all three Democratic challengers were in the room with her, Annette Taddeo, Raul Martinez and Joe Garcia, along with Rep. Kendrick Meek. The star in the room was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who for months has been trooping to South Florida doing fund-raisers for Garcia and Martinez. This was her first for Taddeo, I believe, and she also did fundraisers for Garcia and Martinez during a busy day.

Taddeo stood beside Wasserman Schultz and served as interpreter for the largely Cuban audience in the Little Havana Center for Activities and Nutrition, a senior center. Joe Garcia handled interpretation duty for Nancy Pelosi, who gave ringing endorsements of all three Democratic challengers, touting Taddeo’s strong business background, Garcia’s work in community organizing and Martinez for his long public service as mayor of Hialeah.

It’s time to say Thank You, Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz. I fervently hope you’re right in guessing that Annette Taddeo is going to win.

One last question, though. Those ads that the DCCC is running on TV here … the ones that criticize the Diaz-Balart brothers for their rotten votes in Congress. Why don’t they also mention Ileana Ros-Lehtinen? After all, she voted the same way as the rubber-stamp brothers. The ads run in the very same TV market that serves potential voters for Annette Taddeo. You’re a big wheel in the DCCC. Why, O why, don’t the ads also mention the third rubber-stamper, and maybe give your fellow Democrat a little boost? Why?

FL-18: Annette Taddeo campaigns with big sign

Annette Taddeo with a supporter and TV reporter in front of giant sign on wheels.



My favorite congressional candidate, Annette Taddeo, campaigned Sunday evening with a lively party at Kaffe Krystal in Kendall. At the end, clipboards were passed around and quite a few people signed up to be Taddeo Troopers -- volunteers for the final push to election day.

Regular readers will know that I live in FL-18, which Taddeo is fighting to wrest from the rubber-stamp Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. If you, too, live in FL-18, look for this sign being towed around your neighborhood.

UPDATE: The Obama campaign chimed in for Annette today, sending an email to some of us in District 18 urging that we help her campaign.


The email said:
You can change politics in this country at every level -- up and down the ballot.

Our records show that you live in Florida's 18th district.

There's a candidate in Florida who's working to bring the change this country needs, and that candidate is Annette Taddeo. Get involved and help bring change now.

Annette Taddeo for Congress:
Visit the website

Don't wait until Election Day to support Taddeo. Get involved today to make sure Florida has a strong representative to take our country in a new direction.

Thanks,

Obama for America

P.S. -- To get involved with Obama for America in your community, visit your state page:

http://.barackobama.com

This teamwork is great!

FL-18: Another reason to reject the incumbent and vote for Annette Taddeo

Michael Froomkin has posted on his superb blog, Discourse.net, a denunciation of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and the Florida Republican Party for the slimy mailer going out to Congressional District 18. It accuses us Democrats of surrendering to terrorists -- what else do they have in their bag of dirty Republican tricks?!?

There's an image of the mailer at the link above to Discourse.net, and I'll encourage traffic thataway by not showing the rotten thing on this blog.

Though I also live in FL-18, this mailer hasn't hit me yet. But my dining table is starting to groan under the weight of the lies rolling in from Ros-Lehtinen's campaign. This weekend came one extolling her for "helping middle class home owners, improve our health care system, invest in alternative and efficient energy sources and facilitate an affordable college education for our youth." All the stuff she doesn't do.

And there's a photo of her with her family and the slogan, "Together we will make the necessary changes."

Y'all catch the "changes" that she's asserting? Beware, there's no mention of retiring her rubber stamp.

By contrast, mailers from Annette Taddeo are factual and persuasive. I can only hope that people have their minds open as they decide how to vote.