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Candidate's tactics get her grilled over lunch
By EDIE GROSS and ALICIA CALDWELL © St. Petersburg Times, published August 16, 2000 ST. PETERSBURG -- Perhaps Pat Baker summed it up best. "It's nice to be here for your meal," the candidate for Pinellas County supervisor of elections told a crowd at Tuesday's Suncoast Tiger Bay luncheon. "I didn't know I'd be the main course." About 80 people at the political forum had a chance to quiz Baker and her opponent, Deborah Clark, on their qualifications for the job. But most of the inquisition was directed at Baker, who fielded questions about her campaign tactics. Baker, a Republican, has come under fire recently after admitting that she openly recruited write-in candidates for the elections supervisor's race in an effort to close the primary between her and Clark to non-Republican voters. She denies specifically recruiting her friend, Clyde Walters Sr., to run as a write-in candidate. But Walters' presence in the race shuts out 340,000 Democrats, voters registered with other parties and those with no party affiliation from the Sept. 5 primary. "I'm very concerned about the judgment you exercised with regards to getting a write-in candidate that effectively eliminated several hundred thousand voters in Pinellas County," said Tiger Bay member Janet Long. "If this is a way of circumventing the system before you're even elected, what will you do when you get in there?" Floridians overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment in 1998 that allowed all voters to participate in a primary where all the candidates come from the same party. But the primary is closed if a write-in candidate registers. Baker, who wore a tall, white pastry chef's hat during the luncheon, said lawmakers should consider closing that loophole. "If the Legislature didn't want this exception . . . it shouldn't have been approved," she said. Baker chastised Democrats for not fielding their own candidate in the race: "Get stronger and stop whining." Clark, a 22-year employee of the elections office, was appointed interim supervisor of elections in May after longtime supervisor Dorothy Ruggles died of breast cancer. She criticized Baker's efforts to close the election to non-Republicans. "Ordinarily, you don't really have a chance to see behind a candidate's campaign rhetoric until after they're elected," Clark said. "I think in this case, you have a chance to see her character." This is not the first time Baker's campaign tactics have been questioned. In her 1990 bid for a state Senate seat, Baker sent out a postcard with a photo of President George Bush standing next to her, wearing a "Pat Baker for Senate" sticker she had put on his lapel. The Pinellas Republican Campaign Committee's ethics committee censured Baker after learning that Bush had not endorsed her although he posed for the photo. Baker later issued a statement saying she did not mean to imply that the president had endorsed her. But when asked during Tuesday's forum about the postcard, Baker insisted that Bush supported her campaign, uttering the phrase, "Go get 'em" when he saw the postcard. She lost that Senate race to Don Sullivan in a primary runoff. Baker charged that Clark has hurt morale in the elections office. She said she saw Clark wag her finger in an employee's face, spin the employee around and shove her out an office door in May. Clark denied the allegations. Baker, meanwhile, has been accused by her former daughter-in-law of threatening violence. Kathryn Fronduto, who divorced Baker's son, Michael, in 1993, accused Baker three years ago of threatening to hit her in a dispute over visitation with Fronduto's two oldest children. Baker balled up her fist and said she was going to hit Fronduto, who was pregnant at the time, according to accounts Fronduto and a witness gave St. Petersburg police. Ultimately, prosecutors declined to pursue charges, saying they lacked sufficient evidence that harm was imminent. Baker said Tuesday that her experiences owning a business make her the best candidate for the job. But the printing company she owned with her husband from 1980 to 1991 shut down because of mounting debts. Baker said the business began to fail in 1986 when she and her husband were injured in a car accident.
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