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Ruth: In the arena, right or wrong

 
Published Sept. 10, 2014

They traipse in one after another looking like conquering heroes or sheep being led to the slaughter. I have a soft spot for them all — even the ones who are wrong on just about everything.

This is election season, which means candidates, or ripe fodder depending on a columnist's snarky point of view, make their way to a meeting with the Tampa Bay Times editorial board seeking the newspaper's recommendation.

Whatever the candidates' shortcomings, you have to admire their willingness to put themselves before the public. Any campaign, if taken seriously, is a grueling, demanding, exhausting enterprise requiring the politician to shake countless hands, knock on endless doors, attend stultifying, often sparsely attended community forums to answer sometimes stupid questions and ask strangers for money all while wearing the "I really care about you" smile.

In the end, 50 percent of these candidates are rejected by the voters and told to go away and stop bothering people. It's hard, cruel work. You try it sometime.

In many cases, especially when it comes to incumbents, the probability of being tossed out of office is fairly unlikely. And yet most of these folks still draw an opponent, people I have always found endlessly fascinating, even the ones without a discernible pulse.

Perhaps they feel lightning will strike even though they have only raised $2.35 in campaign contributions and by sheer force of their lack of knowledge of the issues, or the personality of a domino tile, somehow the body politic will notice their name on the ballot and vault them into office. That's the thing about the democratic process — hope springs delusional.

It takes no small amount of intestinal fortitude to galumph about the hustings for months on end, knowing full well one's Election Day prospects are dimmer than Miley Cyrus being named to a best-dressed list.

And yet the doomed but enthusiastic candidates press on without much money or help. How can you not respect that?

Still, the wanna-be statesmen are entitled to a fair hearing with the editorial board, which lasts roughly 40 minutes or so, or until we run out of questions or the candidate runs out of answers.

All the candidates are asked to fill out a form to provide some personal information and their positions on issues. Some go well beyond the call of duty.

Democrat Will Rankin, who is running against Republican Jeff Atwater to become Florida's chief financial officer, arrived with a bulging three-ring binder that included his family's coat of arms and the clan's motto. If we based our recommendations solely on the basis of the sheer tonnage of personal data — not to mention a snazzy coat of arms — Rankin's anvil of a resume would probably qualify him to hold every Cabinet office in Tallahassee.

The moment made me wistful that I have no family coat of arms. Crossed Dewar's White Label bottles, perhaps?

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Alas, Rankin wouldn't allow us to keep the dossier. When I handed it back to him, I think I sprained a muscle. This might have been the first time in editorial board history that someone had to go on injured reserve caused by a bloated biography with a gland problem.

Then there are the sublime moments. Democrat Lorena Grizzle, a Democrat running against Republican Rep. Larry Ahern of Seminole, recalled the moment she first registered to vote in 1972 as a Democrat, much to the concern of the Pinellas supervisor of elections.

Grizzle's mother was the late Mary Grizzle, a prominent Pinellas County Republican who also served in the Florida Senate. The daughter's political apostasy was quickly reported by the Pinellas County supervisor of elections to the family matriarch before Lorena Grizzle arrived home — only to be ordered to go back and switch her party affiliation. Immediately. She only became a Democrat again two years ago.

What is the moral of this story? It takes a village to raise a Republican?

On occasion a candidate commits candor, as when one visitor to the board described the Florida House as a vile "snake pit of the universe." Ordinarily, with truth being a defense, such an observation would not have raised much of an eyebrow. In this case it was an incumbent member of the Florida House, Democrat Dwight Dudley of St. Petersburg, who still wants to return to a den of vipers. Why?

"It's frustrating," Dudley explained. "But it (his House seat) has value. It's a bully pulpit."

Therein lies the difference between a candidate and the rest of us. A high tolerance for masochism.