Redstate

By Charles Fenwick Posted in Democrats — Comments (7) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

While it wasn't certain until November that Bob Graham was going to retire from his Senate seat in Florida, a trio of Democrats already had campaigns in progress to replace him. Those three candidates, Betty Castor, Peter Deutsch, and Alex Penelas, continue to fight for the Democratic nomination today. With four weeks until the primary, it is time for all to know something about each of these contenders.

Betty Castor is the favored candidate of the pundits. Twice a state senator, she was elected as Education Comissioner of Florida twice before becoming President of the University of South Florida in 1993. She announced her candidacy in June 2003 and has received support from key parts of the Democratic constituency.

The pro-abortion fundraising group Emily's List has given her strong backing and she's received endorsements from the National Education Association, Janet Reno, and former EPA head Carol Browner. A former member of Howard Dean's campaign is her assistant campaign manger and his influence shows on her website, which has been a powerful fundraising tool for her. According to articles from the Democratic Convention, she had no problem raising money while she was there. This has given her a front-runner status for the campaign that has allowed her to define the issues she wants to focus on.

Castor's issues are a mixture of traditional Democratic issues and issues not associated with Democrats that the John Kerry campaign is running with as well. The traditional issues are health care and education and she's pretty much stuck to the party line on those issues. The non-traditional issue is the military. Her first issue oriented television ad was on that subject and touted her
Military Families' Bill of Rights proposal, which borrows some elemnts from Kerry's plan, such as a call for 40,000 additional soldiers.

Castor's front-runner status has allowed her to run a "positive" campaign, but of course, it has made her the target of attacks from her challengers. The most sustained of these has been criticsm of her handling of Professor Sami Al-Arian during her tenure at USF. He was suspected of and later indicted for providing support to the terrorist group Islamic Jihad. A 527 group calling itself the American Democracy Project created a website entitled Castor Truth solely on this issue. She's also been criticized by Peter Deutsch for her support from Emily's List and he has filed a complaint with the FEC that claims that the group and her campaign have been illegally coordinating their activities.

Peter Deutsch has been a member of the House of Representatives since 1992. He's received endorsements from several Representatives, including two of the three African-American representatives from Florida (Corrine Brown and Alcee Hastings).

It is that friendship with Hastings and Brown that has been one key themes of his campaign. As shown in the beginning of Fahrenheit 9/11, the trio attempted to halt the certification of the Electoral College vote. Their attempt failed as no member of the Senate joined them. Deutsch recently introduced a bill that would allow a single Representative to protest the certification. This was noticed by Michael Moore, who had a press conference with the Representives at the Democratic Convention. While he did not explictly endorse Deutsch, Moore called him "the man of courage who's on the ballot and is going to stand up for all the people of Florida".

Like Castor, he has also taken up the traditional Democratic issues such as health care and has a reasonably detailed Universal Health Care Plan.

The current mayor of Miami, Alex Penelas, rounds out the field. He got unwanted national press in May when Al Gore called him "the single most treacherous and dishonest person I dealt with" during the 2000 presidential campaign. Because of this, the Cuban-American's campaign hasn't gotten much support and he needed something special to attract attention from the devoted Democrats

That something special came in the form of a bomb dropped during a candidate's forum in Tallahassee where he called for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq. He has repeated the call since, and is the only candidate to take such a hard-line stance (Castor and Deutsch have Kerryesque positions on the issue). Despite this, he hasn't been able to garner much additional support.

As indicated throughout this post, Betty Castor leads in the polls with about 38% of the vote. Deutsch trails (but has closed a bit recently) at 27%, and Penelas (whose loss has been Deutsch's gain, it seems,) is at 16%. As of mid-July, about 25% of voters were undecided. Note that there is no run-off in the election this year, so only a plurality is needed on August 31 to get the nomination.