Sen. Mel Martinez set in motion a goofy game in which no one really wins

Somewhere in my heart I feel sorry for U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez. He is a good man and was never a true right-wing, nut-case Republican. My guess is that’s why he is resigning his Senate seat more than a year before the end of his first term. Martinez won the seat in 2004 by a very narrow margin, defeating Betty Castor. He didn’t get 50 percent of the vote, but most Floridians hoped that either Martinez or Castor would represent all of Florida and not just some ideological sliver.

From the beginning it didn’t work out that way. In what turned out to be Martinez’s first national television appearance, the right-wing Christian nutcases poured into Florida to fight against pulling the plug on Terri Schiavo, the brain-dead but mechanically alive woman who became a cause célèbre for the right wing.

A Republican operative came up to Martinez, slipped a card into his pocket, and told him to read the prepared text to the media. Martinez, being the newest foot soldier in the Republican army, dutifully read a statement supporting and endorsing all the right-wing diatribes. Halfway through his comments, you could see his face change, and by the end he was running for cover. I think he had just realized that he’d become the newest Republican Party cabana boy.

It didn’t get any better. The Republican Party, unsure of where he stood, didn’t trust him. The Democrats didn’t really know him. So over the next five years, he suffered with very bad committee appointments and almost no national exposure.

Possibly the lowlight of that time was in 2007, when he was appointed the general chairman of the Republican Party for the 2007-08 election cycle. The party was in disarray and fundraising was tanking. It’s a pretty safe bet they gave him the position because they didn’t like him and he had no chance for success. He resigned the post after a year.

You might see a pattern here with the Republican Party. They take their minority members and give them jobs that can’t be done because they won’t lend any support. Can you say “Michael Steele,” the current chairman of the Republican Party?

So Martinez’s cabana boy job didn’t work out. I just wish he would have been more of a fighter within his own party and for Florida, but Washington eats people alive and I can hardly blame him for wanting to come back home.

Unfortunately for Florida, that leaves us in quite a mess for the short term. Our completely incompetent governor, Charlie Crist, has advised us that he will run for Martinez’s seat in the U.S. Senate. In the meantime, however, he is the one who gets to select someone who will replace Martinez until 2011. Crist’s first inclination was to appoint himself (perfectly legal under Florida law), but his handlers convinced him that it might be bad form.

So Crist has been running around the state interviewing every Republican who promises he or she won’t run for the office in 2010. Then he caught a lot of grief from the Cuban contingent because he was not seriously considering a Hispanic for the seat. Somehow that group sees Martinez’s seat as a “Hispanic seat.” And the Hispanic-seat issue became so important that current U.S. Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart put his name in the hat and then pulled it out soon after. There was never any explanation as to how the mechanics for this would work.

At one point Crist had ten people under consideration. I don’t understand why just ten. Obviously he has been kissing the butts of every senior Republican politician in the State of Florida, and every right-wing fringe character in the hopes they will support his run for the Senate.

So Crist’s job was to select an interim U.S. Senator who wouldn’t interfere with his own campaign for that very same position. In mid-August I put my money on George LeMieux, Crist’s former chief of staff and a diehard loyalist. My thinking was that LeMieux, an attorney, would follow orders and stay out of the spotlight, thus allowing Crist continue running around Florida, slapping all his Republican pals on the back, telling them he was happy to consider then for the Senate seat, and now please send money so Crist can actually win the seat himself.

On August 28, Crist announced his pick. None other than 40-year-old LeMieux, who’ll now have 17 months to enjoy life as a United States Senator.

So much for the Hispanic seat.

* * *

As I write this, it’s the end of August and neither the county nor the city have had budgets submitted by the respective mayors to their respective commissions. Now, legally they don’t have to be in until September (which is also the same month they have to be approved), but you’d think the county’s Mayor Carlos Alvarez and the city’s Mayor Manny Diaz would have put together some preliminary numbers for the commissions to review.

From Alvarez we have heard how bad things are and how the county is going to have lay off some 1700 workers. That’s very nice when you consider that his own staff has risen to 62 over the past four years, and his office budget has climbed to $9 million. Then factor in the news that he secretly gave his top aides substantial raises over the past months. No surprise he took some serious heat. So he promised that three members of his staff will be laid off, including his personal photographer. Gosh, Carlos, can you live without a personal photographer?

And it’s no better over at the city. Nobody can find Mayor Manny, and his mouthpiece, city manager Pete Hernandez, has been babbling on incoherently. What a team! They’re becoming quite a pair, so bad even mayoral candidate Joe Sanchez has been distancing himself from the mayor and his buddy.

Is it possible we just might elect some people who don’t overspend their budgets and don’t lie to us?

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