By Chris Ingram
The Tampa Tribune, January 25, 2014
On Wednesday, I sat down for lunch with David Jolly. Despite his jeans and untucked button-down shirt, he looks like a congressman. He has a low-key and modest demeanor, but his personal style doesn’t make him a slouch. Although no freshman member of Congress from Pinellas County (or Hillsborough, for that matter) could fill Bill Young’s shoes, Jolly is the most qualified and prepared to hit the ground running.
For her part, Alex Sink, the hand-selected candidate of Democratic Party leaders in Washington, looks good on paper (other than she’s not from the district), but as a campaigner, she’s more awkward than Miley Cyrus teaching an etiquette class. The party bosses must have forgotten Sink’s lackluster personality is why Rick Scott is governor. What they didn’t forget was a good Web URL. Just 14 hours after Young’s passing was announced, the URL being used by the Sink campaign was secured.
Although Sink’s folksy new television ad starring herself and her father is great at trying to break her detached image as a clone of the Democratic Party bosses, putting lipstick on a mule doesn’t hide the mule.
The gentlewoman from Hillsborough County’s carpetbagging aside, the issues in this campaign likely favor Jolly, not Sink. Voters are fed up with the heavy hand of government, specifically Obamacare. A Quinnipiac survey of voters nationwide, released last week showed 55 percent oppose the quagmire legislation that has defined the president. A poll of District 13 voters showed even greater disapproval.
As Slate political reporter Alex Isenstadt noted, “Sink’s message — that Obama ‘failed us’ but the law should be fixed, not repealed — is the universal Democratic credo.”
If voters think the same Washington Democrats who gave us Obamacare and who anointed Sink can be trusted to fix it after all the assorted lies, incompetence and empty rhetoric that followed its passage, they shouldn’t be surprised when Congresswoman Sink does nothing.
For the record, Jolly supports repealing the failed Obamacare legislation.
That Sink is wrong on the issues explains why she’s going to run a character assassination-driven campaign. Specifically, she’ll do this by (Click here to read the full column in today’s Tampa Tribune).
Chris Ingram is the president and founder of 411 Communications a corporate and political communications firm, and publisher of Irreverent View. Ingram is a frequent pundit on Fox News and CNN, and has written opinion columns for the Washington Times, UPI, and National Review online. He is the Republican political analyst for Bay News 9, the only 24 hour all news channel in Florida’s largest media market. The opinions expressed here are those of author and do not represent the views of Bay News 9. E-mail him at: [email protected].
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