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Tampa wasn't ready for fireworks

By SUE CARLTON
Published March 28, 2007

What a strange election day.

Outside the church-turned-polling-place Tuesday, I kept thinking I had each voter figured out. And I kept being wrong.

The dad in the SUV who walked in holding his little girl's hand? A Joe Redner man.

The guy who tooled up chomping a fat cigar? A Gwen Miller supporter.

In the end, tradition won the day. Or maybe it was inertia. Or the anti vote. Anyway, Tampa put Miller back on the City Council she has quietly been a part of for a dozen years, a place where she has made no splash.

No harm, no foul. No fireworks.

As opposed to electing Tampa's strip club king, who would have all but guaranteed them.

How interesting it would have been to have elected the city's best-known challenger of authority. Imagine it: the guy in the ponytail who has made a career out of poking people in the snoot, figuratively speaking, the millionaire who refused campaign donations, up there officially representing the people.

Redner would have been more than just good theater or a national news story about some wacky election down in Florida.

He knew his stuff - no surprise to those who have heard him on the First Amendment over the years. He could talk transportation and growth and the fate of the Hillsborough River.

But Tampa could not hold its nose and see past his past, beyond the dark clubs with the women wearing high heels and little else, twirling on poles and occupying laps. The voters could not look beyond, as one Miller mailout put it, "Joe Redner's X-rated values."

An interesting illustration of this town's relationship with Redner might be in two of its former mayors.

Dick Greco, whose administration clashed famously with Redner over a rule that keeps dancers 6 feet from patrons, aggressively supported the incumbent, his face next to hers on newspaper ads.

Former Mayor Sandy Freedman, who would not say whom she voted for Tuesday, called Redner a bright man who would have done his homework as an elected official.

His past did not scare her, she said.

"I have been amazed at how many people I talked to the last couple of weeks - prominent people - who surprised me by telling me they were voting for Joe," she said.

"I know a lot of families in which the husbands' and wives' votes were cancelling each other out," she said. Sometimes it was the woman voting for Redner.

This is the closest he has come in his half-dozen campaigns, all the way up to a runoff against an incumbent who should have been formidable.

I think I liked him best during a televised forum when he looked in the camera and told people they should be ashamed of the abysmally low turnout in the primary. He told us to go vote - for him, for Miller, just vote.

Folks were less amused by his offer of free admission to his Mons Venus club with an "I voted" sticker. They called it tacky, sleazy and worse. (His offer for a free week at his trendy Hyde Park gym was much less interesting.)

This was Joe being Joe. He never pretended to be anything else. In the end, Tampa rejected him because of what he is, and in spite of what he could have been.

[Last modified March 28, 2007, 00:20:23]