SINK PREVIEWS THEMES FOR GOV’S RACE AT MIAMI BEACH FUNDRAISER
Posted by klaing on June 1, 2009
By KEITH LAING
THE NEWS SERVICE OF FLORIDA
THE CAPITAL, TALLAHASSEE, June 1, 2009……….Addressing her party over the weekend in Miami Beach for the first time as a full-fledged contender for the Governor’s Mansion, Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink emerged as Democratic gubernatorial candidate Sink.
Speaking to more than 1,000 activists Saturday evening at the Democratic Party’s Jefferson-Jackson fundraising dinner, which amounted to a Florida Democratic Convention, Sink took center stage with gusto and the opening themes she hopes will catapult her to victory became readily apparent.
Namely, she would be a “new and different kind of governor,” a wink and a nod to her bid to become Florida’s first female governor. And she would be a “working mom” with kids who are products of the public school system, a not-so-oblique gender reference. Sink also touted being raised in rural North Carolina, saying that her farm upbringing taught her values such as fiscal responsibility.
She also will take a page from last year’s Obama campaign – change. “The status quo has got to go,” Sink said, presaging what likely will be a prominent theme in a race that follows 12 years of Republicans living in the Governor’s Mansion.
It was a speech with a clear appeal to women, who made up 53 percent of the electorate in the 2008 election. And it was not lost on observers that large portions of the address were more likely to resonate with moderates in the I-4 corridor and conservatives in the Panhandle than liberal Democrats from urban South Florida, who nonetheless filled the room with attentive silence not given to any of the other dozen speakers at the fundraiser.
Former state Senate Democratic Leader Steve Geller told the News Service Monday that while Sink – who is not noted for her oratory – was not always perfect in her delivery, she was spot on in her messaging.
“The kind of speech she gave – in areas of the state Democrats have been lacking in – would be terrific,” said Geller, who attended Saturday’s fundraiser. “There was a lot of talk about farming and hard work, which might not resonate as much with highly urbanized Broward, Dade and Palm Beach County, but would go over terrifically in North Florida.”
But Geller, who served in the Senate from 2000 until being term-limited in 2008, added that Sink’s speech Saturday would have been effective anywhere on the campaign trail, not just in a room full of 1,100 of her biggest fans.
“It was a speech she could have given anywhere in the state, to any group,” he said. “She could have given it to the Democratic Party, as she did, or to the Chamber of Commerce, and it think it would have been warmly received. She had a presence.”
Being introduced by the Democrat’s elder statesman, former U.S. Senator and Gov. Bob Graham, proceeded by a five-minute biographical video and greeted by audience members waving placards, Sink did not look like one of the party’s candidates for governor – she looked like the Democratic candidate for governor.
“I saw a lot of people in the room who were from urbanized areas that were not as able to connect to (Sink’s) message, but I don’t remember the last time we had a candidate who could connect like that with areas we don’t traditionally do well in,” Geller said.
However, Geller said the Democrats’ palpable excitement about Sink Saturday could prove problematic later in the governor’s race.
“I’m a little worried about overconfidence,” Geller said. “Not on Alex’s part – she’s smart enough to know you’ve got to campaign like you’re two points down, not five points up – but in the party. There was a sense that she’s got it in the bag, so let’s focus on other races.”
It was a concern addressed by Sink herself in her 20 minute speech, telling the crowd that they should not “go resting on our laurels” from having helped Obama win the presidency. But Geller admitted that’s a good problem for a political party to have in an election that is beginning in earnest 17 months before voters go to the polls.
“I’ve been going to these things for 30 years, and some meetings, the activists go but they don’t think they can win,” Geller said. He added that the Democrats’ excitement could “lead to overconfidence, but optimism can lead to hard work.”
“It’s so much easier to get out volunteers and raise money when people are excited and everybody there was excited,” Geller said.
Former Republican Party of Florida executive director David Johnson agreed Sink used her first appearance in full-campaign mode to try to appeal to more than the party’s base, who already think she’s their best chance to occupy the Governor’s Mansion since 1998.
“The farming background could help in North Florida and the working mom thing could be very appealing to women in similar situations,” said Johnson, who worked for Sink’s 2006 CFO opponent Tom Lee but has not yet joined a 2010 campaign. “They want people who don’t have an opinion of her to come away with a warm feeling and think ’she understands me.’”
It’s a strategy Johnson said Sink successfully used in her first foray into Florida politics during that 2006 race. But he quickly added that Republicans have to poke holes in Sink’s story before it takes hold on the larger gubernatorial scale.
“Her situation was a little bit different because she was president of Bank of America,” Johnson said of Sink’s working mom description. “Her commutes probably involved a jet to Charlotte more than 10 miles in Tampa traffic.”
Still, Johnson said it was smart of Sink to focus on her biography this early in the race, because she is likely much less well-known than Republican frontrunner Attorney General Bill McCollum, who has run for statewide office three times.
“She starts with more room to grow because attorney general is largely a higher profile position than CFO,” Johnson said. “They’re both going to be raising lots of money and spending a lot of time defining themselves. It’s a question of how many people know me and how many people don’t. I want to get the percent that don’t know me on my terms, not on the opposition party’s.”
But Johnson also said that Sink’s personal story might not be as effective over the course of a much-higher profile governor’s race as it was during the first election ever held for CFO. Even if it is appealing to swaths of the electorate, he said, the Republican opposition will have the money to respond and those responses will draw more media attention.
“In a lower budget, lower profile race based on name identification, it was more ‘nobody knows either one of us, so let’s try to get our story out’,” Johnson said. “But the governor’s race will be very different. They’re both going to have 100 percent name ID.”
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06/01/2009
