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Harris bet didn't look so dumb a year ago, but I'll still pay off

By HOWARD TROXLER
Published August 13, 2006

On June 12, 2005, some idiot published this sentence in this newspaper:

I've got even money that says if Katherine Harris is the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in 2006, she wins.

Oh, wait. That was me.

I offered readers a bet for charity, at $1 per postcard, that Harris would win - and that so would Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008, if she is the Democratic nominee for president.

My argument was that having a red-hot name and star power in politics can still get you elected, no matter how much the other party hates you.

Since last summer, of course, it is fair to say the Harris campaign has gone just a tad downhill.

No, hold on.

Did you ever see Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? It would fair to say the Harris campaign has reached approximately the same point at which Bette Davis drags poor, limp Joan Crawford down to the beach and twirls around in front of the bewildered crowd.

So these days, this bet looks like the dumbest one ever. It has cost me far, far more grief than I caught from the few folks who actually wrote in to accept it.

That's why I was grateful and relieved to see this paragraph in an article the other day by one of our Washington reporters, Anita Kumar:

Former staffers recalled the excitement they felt when they joined the Senate campaign of a woman whose role as Florida secretary of state during the bitter 2000 presidential recount turned her into a GOP celebrity.

At one time, political experts considered this year's U.S. Senate race in Florida a prime chance for Republicans to unseat the last statewide elected Democrat, Sen. Bill Nelson. Harris made an early claim to be the Republican nominee.

See? "Political experts" thought there was a chance! But how many would admit it today?

What a weird tale this has been. Harris went from being Florida's deer-in-headlights secretary of state during the 2000 election, to a member of Congress and a darling of the national Republican Party, to being begged by her own state party to quit the race.

She's run off generations of campaign staff and they don't even keep up the pretense it was amiable.

In the parlance of the moment, our would-be senator wears Prada.

It would serve everybody right if she got elected anyway. Stranger things have happened in politics, you know.

Wait. No, they haven't.

A wicked thought occurred to me recently - there still might be a chance to wriggle off the hook.

The terms of the bet clearly stated, "if she is the Republican nominee."

At the time, see, I was worried that the Republicans would buy her off with a nice ambassadorship to Bulgaria or something to keep her from running. It never occurred to me that she might lose her own party primary. Now it's at least a possibility.

But wriggling out of the bet on those grounds would be scuzzy. So, even at this late date, please consider the terms modified. Even if she loses in the Sept. 5 primary and is not the nominee, I'll still pay up.

The other hedges I made was that the bets had to come from Floridians using a real name and address, and they had to come on a postcard, with a maximum exposure of $500. One bet per customer. (This was because I figured the Bill Nelson campaign otherwise would set up a chain e-mail and bankrupt me.)

Apparently, most readers thought the bet either was too stupid to take or else figured I was too smart to bet against. Hillary was a lot more popular; she's closing in on $200 to date.

But Harris didn't even crack $50. Just so the Humane Society doesn't think I'm a cheapskate, I'm gonna double that to a minimum of $100.

By the way, the Hillary bet is still on.

The senator whom Republicans love to hate is moving steadily toward her goal. A lot of people give her credit for being a good senator. Some New York Republicans like her better than they thought they would.

So before Dec. 31, 2007, if you'd still like to bet against her, drop me a postcard at this address: Howard Troxler is Wrong, c/o St. Petersburg Times, P.O. Box 1121, St. Petersburg, FL 33731. Same rules apply.

[Last modified August 13, 2006, 01:29:54]