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The race to replace U.S. Sen. Bob Graham has been little more than a sophomoric name-calling campaign.
U.S. soldiers are daily losing their lives in Iraq. The federal government deficit is at historic levels. Despite a rebounding economy, too many people are still without jobs. Health care prices are rising so fast that even people with decent jobs can no longer afford insurance. And, in Florida, the candidates for U.S. Senate are in lather over which one is a trial attorney and which one isn't.
Is this the best that voters can expect?
To date, the race to replace retiring senator and Florida political icon Bob Graham has possessed all the gravitas of a student council election. With two primaries, 12 candidates and no runoff, the Senate election is becoming a study in pizza politics. Just promise pepperoni and hope that's enough to beat the pinhead in homeroom who's offering sausage or the cheerleader who's pushing green peppers.
Republican Bill McCollum, a Longwood attorney and former U.S. House member who led impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton, is on his second try for U.S. Senate, having lost four years ago to Democrat Bill Nelson. This time, McCollum already has his knickers in a knot about fellow Republican Mel Martinez, a former Orange County commissioner and the U.S. Housing secretary under President George W. Bush. McCollum's perpetual complaint is that Martinez is a former president of the Academy of Florida Trial Lawyers and does not support a $250,000 limit on medical malpractice lawsuit awards. Martinez, for the record, says he supports $500,000.
By way of demonstrating his obsession, McCollum produced a commercial that compared Martinez to U.S. Sen. John Edwards, the North Carolina Democrat and potential vice presidential candidate. The off-camera announcer advises, as if in parody, to viewers: "Mel Martinez and John Edwards. Two liberal trial lawyers. Both wrong. So wrong, so often."
Martinez, who is so riled by the L-word that he signed a witless "Taxpayer Protection Pledge" and routinely describes himself in press releases as the "conservative Republican candidate for U.S. Senate," has launched a few missiles of his own. When Coral Gables businessman and first-time candidate Doug Gallagher aired commercials claiming that Congress had solved few major problems, Martinez demanded Gallagher apologize for smearing President Bush. Never mind that the president isn't a member of Congress or that candidate Bush offered many of the same criticisms of Congress when he campaigned for president in 2000.
The Republicans, though, aren't the only ones trivializing the Senate campaign. In the Democratic primary, U.S. Rep. Peter Deutsch and Miami-Dade Mayor Alex Penelas have spent so much time swearing over which one did more to help Al Gore lose the presidency that Gore himself decided to jump into the mudpit. This, in short, is the script: Penelas says he helped Gore win Miami-Dade by 30,000 votes, Deutsch calls Penelas a "pathological liar," and Gore calls Penelas the "single most treacherous and dishonest person I dealt with during the campaign anywhere in America."
Voters can be forgiven for their inability to draw the connection between such sophomoric name-calling and the lack of affordable prescription drugs in America. The pettiness in this campaign, and the crude plays for the extreme factions in each party, are no doubt owed in part to the crowded field and the need to attract only a plurality of voters for the nomination But that makes the behavior no more tolerable. Florida's next senator will need, among other things, to help navigate a peaceful exit from Iraq and craft federal budgets that are almost certain to hurt people who are in great need. Pardon voters if they find these campaign swearing matches to be pointless.