It's all Al-Arian, all the time, in Florida's U.S. Senate race.
Taxes, prescription drugs, the war, budget deficits - all have been drowned out by the increasingly tedious noise and half-truths surrounding Sami Al-Arian, a tenured professor accused of running a jihad from the University of South Florida while Betty Castor was the school's president.
Enough already.
With 21/2 weeks until Election Day, Castor and Mel Martinez are both using the Al-Arian case to smear each other with the taint of terrorism. Polls suggest the race is very close, and the outcome could rest in the hands of Al-Arian, whose face and name may be better known than the candidates' by the time this race is over.
Castor raised the issue first in the general election, a decision that at first appeared to benefit Martinez, who has hitched his political fortunes to President Bush and his handling of terrorism.
"As long as we're talking about our issue, we win," said a gleeful Jennifer Coxe, Martinez's spokeswoman, this week.
But as Martinez ran an ad accusing Castor of going soft on Al-Arian, casting aside the complex legal issues involved, Castor went a giant step further, with an ad showing Al-Arian and Bush side by side, looking like best buds.
The photo from the 2000 Strawberry Festival in Plant City is one of countless snapshots taken on the trail. But no matter. Al-Arian by now is a very scary figure, even though he has not been convicted of any crime.
Castor, not content to let the photo speak for itself, stretched the truth beyond limits, calling Martinez "chairman" of Bush's 2000 campaign and saying he "allowed" Al-Arian to "campaign" with Bush. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Castor's ad notes that Al-Arian got into the White House complex in 2001, after Bush was president, where he rubbed elbows with senior adviser Karl Rove. No picture has yet surfaced of that moment.
As the race reaches a critical stage, both candidates await the arrival of NBC's Tim Russert, who will moderate the first of two live, statewide TV debates Monday (7-8 p.m., WFLA-Ch. 8, and NBC stations elsewhere).
Since the race toward the general election began Sept. 1, neither candidate has run a very impressive campaign. Castor is so preoccupied with fundraising, to the exclusion of events with voters, that even her supporters are puzzled. Martinez has again had to clean up after his staffers' excesses, as he did when they called the agents in the Elian Gonzalez case "armed thugs."
Clearly, Martinez is taking the worst beating in the court of public opinion.
The Miami Herald's Carl Hiaasen called Martinez "a nasty, right-wing drooler" who's following a Republican campaign playbook: "Monger as much fear of terrorism as possible." The South Florida Sun-Sentinel's Stephen Goldstein rips Martinez for ignoring the fact that Castor had no legal grounds to fire Al-Arian.
"Having fled Castro's dictatorship, you'd think he would have learned to respect people's constitutional rights," Goldstein wrote.
Even Castor's son Frank sounded this week as if he wished his mother would switch topics. The son, a prosecutor in Palm Beach County, circulated a pro-Castor e-mail that lists a litany of issues where Martinez may be vulnerable, from his former membership in a restrictive country club in Orlando to his opposition to expanded stem cell research.
(Martinez quit the club before he ran for office in Orlando in 1997, saying it was too slow to diversify).
"I've told them, they ought to push stem cell research harder," Frank Castor said of his talks with the campaign. "That's a good issue. A lot of Republicans support it."
If a candidate's son is hungry for a more issue-oriented campaign, isn't that telling us something?
Steve Bousquet is the deputy capital bureau chief of the Times.
