Things can't get much worse for trial lawyers in Florida

TALLAHASSEE — Florida is known for annoying come-ons by personal injury lawyers that ask: "Have you been injured in an accident?"

Well, the way trial lawyers are licking their political wounds these days, they might want to call for help.

Things can't get much worse for the trial bar and its statewide lobbying arm, the Florida Justice Association.

First, the lawyers dumped a mountain of money into a special election for a North Florida Senate seat, a high-risk operation that failed miserably when John Thrasher defeated three Republican rivals. And then this week the group owned up to engineering an ugly campaign flier in that election that fanned the flames of racial division.

Had the trial lawyers crushed Thrasher, it would have sent a roar across the statewide political landscape: Don't mess with the big, bad trial bar.

But Thrasher had even more money and won with the help of former Gov. Jeb Bush and allies in the lobbying world, like the Florida Chamber of Commerce and the Florida Retail Federation.

In this case, the trial lawyers violated the first rule of hardball politics: If you shoot the bear, you better kill him.

Thrasher will replace the late Sen. Jim King, a more moderate Republican whose door was always open to trial lawyers' concerns. Thrasher, who lobbied for the Florida Medical Association before he served in the House, won't be nearly as accommodating, and he's a rock-solid vote against whatever the trial bar is peddling in the Senate.

"I think his election is a turning point for the Senate," said Marian Johnson, who runs the Florida Chamber's Political Institute.

Thrasher's win was bad for trial lawyers, but the group's admission of responsibility for the racially tinged flier was worse. The piece linked President Barack Obama to the Black Panthers and warned "armed thugs may try and scare you away from the voting booth."

The mailer was so scurrilous it looked like a parody of an attack ad. But it wasn't. It was real.

After ignoring my phone calls for a full week after Thrasher's election, Scott Carruthers, the trial bar group's executive director, summoned me to his office Wednesday.

Only when I got there did a contrite, clearly embarrassed Carruthers drop the bombshell: His group had enlisted Republican hired gun Bill Helmich, who conceived the ad and sent it to 88,000 Jacksonville-area households.

Incredibly, one of the state's most influential Democrat-aligned groups used race-baiting to develop a pool of persuadable absentee voters, as part of a larger effort to ensure that anybody but Thrasher won the election.

"Morally and politically it was indefensible, what was done," Carruthers said, even though the trial-bar group itself created some distance by channeling the money for the flier through a like-minded group in Jacksonville called Conservative Citizens for Justice. Its president, Jacksonville trial lawyer Tom Edwards, resigned when he learned how the flier came about, and said his group's money paid for the flier without his knowledge.

Edwards said the mailer "violated the basic values of justice and fair play, which I worked for throughout my professional career."

Some black legislators are outraged that a group that has long stood for the rights of minorities would engineer such a despicable political trick. "Shocking," said Rep. Joe Gibbons, D-Hallandale Beach, a former chairman of the legislative black caucus. "It's 100 percent race-baiting."

The business forces that have long battled trial lawyers couldn't be happier right now, and it's going to be a long road uphill for the trial bar to restore its political credibility.

About the only good to come of this episode is a renewed commitment by legislators to make the work of these bottom-feeding, shadowy political groups more transparent.

Steve Bousquet can be reached at bousquet@sptimes.com or (850) 224-7263.