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One squirms on hot seat, the other just shrugs
© St. Petersburg Times Katherine Harris, who resigned Thursday as Florida's secretary of state in typically bizarre fashion, should never have been in statewide office. I do not say that because of some lingering disagreement with her handling of the 2000 election. She acted within her statutory power during that dispute. Her failure was that she couldn't sit in the hot seat and defend herself effectively. That is absolutely part of the job description in politics. But there was rarely a state-level politician less equipped for it. The motto of her four years in office might as well be: Harris Could Not Be Reached For Comment. The end of her press conference Thursday was perfect: a flustered Harris, sheltered by aides hustling her out of the room, knocking over microphones and tape recorders to get her away from having to explain herself any further. Yes, a perfect exit, perfect, perfect by Florida's election standards. It turns out that Florida's secretary of state has not really been secretary of state since July 15, or has been "de facto," or something like that. Has anything she's done since then been legal? Is that even the official state seal under her desk, or wherever she keeps the thing? After a while you get sort of numb to the list of mishaps, some her fault, some not. Harris' office didn't know the right amount of money to charge candidates for filing fees. She, of course, was nowhere to be found during the crisis. When everybody had to rush their last-minute checks to Tallahassee, the airplane fell out of the sky. Now this. What will happen to Florida next? It wouldn't be a surprise if, on election day, those space aliens in the Mike's Hard Lemonade commercials parachute out of the sky and steal all the ballot boxes. Dog bites man, no news there. The other end of the spectrum when it comes to handling the hot seat is Dick Greco, mayor of Tampa, who held his own for about an hour Thursday afternoon in a news conference about his surprise trip to Cuba. I thought he did pretty good overall (a thousand English teachers right now are mouthing the word "well"), except that he still doesn't get why it's a big deal for the mayor of a major Florida city to pop up in Havana without cluing in the folks. His Honor's reason was that it was to protect all those other folks on the trip, the private citizens, who would have been affected by the "pandemonium" of an announcement beforehand. I do not buy that. I think he just wanted to go bad (bad-LEE! bad-LEE!), knew it would be a big pain in the neck to tell anybody in advance and decided to take his lumps when he got back. More than one wiseacre noted that, fresh from meeting with the loquacious Fidel in Havana, Greco came back and gave a marathon speech of his own. He talked about all the tough decisions he's had to make and said to the assembled reporters, "There are people in this room who don't know what the hell they're talking about." Dang, he found out. You know what it was? It was just like old times in Tampa, the mayor and the monsignor and the Chamber of Commerce guy deciding to take a little trip, except, you know, this time it was for a five-hour yak with Fidel (to whom, the mayor assured us, he told a thing or two). The only new, pesky thing is that anybody on the outside felt they were due an explanation. Too bad that the mayor's absence from the Hillsborough County Aviation Authority on Thursday morning, where reporters had flocked to ask him about Cuba, resulted in a 2-2 deadlock on choosing a contractor for a new baggage handling system. Everybody had to go to a second, emergency meeting later. Again, dang. -- You can reach Howard Troxler at (727) 893-8505 or at troxler@sptimes.com.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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Times columns today Howard Troxler Robert Trigaux Jan Glidewell From the Times Metro desk |
