Marco Rubio senate bid washes up on Gulf Coast beaches
By Gimleteye
From Eye on Miami
The Miami Herald seems to pick up the theme I recently wrote about: Marco Rubio’s bid to be the next U.S. Senator from Florida is washing up on Gulf Coast beaches. The difference is that the Herald puts its own reverse spin on the same story: “The oil spill in the Gulf stains whatever it touches — except Gov. Charlie Crist’s political fortunes,” they claim.
For this and other reasons, I read anti-Crist bias in the Miami Herald. [And] I don’t imagine these things. For many years I have read the Herald bias [in favor of] Big Sugar in its news reports. Sugar’s litigation through the 1980’s and 1990’s fueled many downtown law firms and partners’ vacations and their kids’ college educations and braces. Sugar, for example, hired Joanna Wragg as its public relations consultant. Joanna Wragg had been the associate editor of the newspaper. (How many stories have you read in the Herald about the reversal of the court-mandated clean-up of the Everglades by Big Sugar and its consequences by a federal judge of the 2003 Jeb Bush initiative, widely reported in the Herald at the time, of his new law amending the Everglades Forever Act?)
The pro-Rubio slant I attribute to the Greenberg Traurig * wing of the Herald, whose lobbyists and affiliated clients obtained special access to the Herald during the building boom and afterwards. Which in the end resulted in the enormous mistakes committed — supporting massive overdevelopment — that will be hard to acknowledge until the players have all faded from the scene, and institutional memory supplanted with new speculators.
Along this line, there is a detectible sense of sour grapes in the way the Gulf oil catastrophe has damaged the “drill here, drill now” fortunes of Rubio. Herald brass have always shown a strong deference to former governor Jeb Bush, along the lines of the conservative right. In their opinion, Jeb was good for Florida business when he was governor and he, not W., should have been president. They are now wondering if Charlie Crist will become Marco Rubio’s Lawton Chiles. (Chiles spoiled Bush’s first bid for governor in 1994.)
The broad-brush strokes of Herald-world view sees Crist as shallow, vain, and changeable as the weather. Bush/Rubio is sober, business-like, and committed to conservative principles. I don’t believe either characterization is true, but in any case, I would take Charlie Crist as a U.S. senator over a Bush proxy any day of the week. The conservative principles that Jeb represented were at the center of a grand experiment for the nation where Florida was the guinea pig — along the lines of the Karl Rove/Grover Norquist formula — that failed spectacularly.
This bill of particulars — the housing boom, followed by the bubble and implosion — were manufactured by production homebuilders, lobbyists, and land speculators who needed (and funded) anti-regulatory zealots in high political office. The speculators were constituted from the lobbying corps of the builders’ and trade associations. They supported Bush.
Their miscalculations of risk now have manifested as gears in the machine powering the greatest shift of wealth in U.S. economic history. You don’t reward the team that drove the economy off the rails by awarding it a U.S. Senate seat…
Charlie Crist may be many things, but he does not bear the stamp of responsibility for these grievous errors of judgment – which, during their time, were scarcely reported by the Miami Herald.
* Greenberg Traurig is one of Miami’s largest and most influential law firms.
Gimleteye is the name used by Alan Farago in his Eye on Miami blog. For the past 20 years Farago has written, worked and volunteered to advance civic engagement and issues related to the environment and politics.
