Sink Or Swim

Just when I thought we'd seen the last of one-time Florida political rising star Alex Sink - who lived up to her name after she turned out to be the only Democrat who couldn't defeat the horrible Rick Scott in a gubernatorial election - and I even made that point rather acidly in a recent post - she's jumped back in to the political ring.  The former future governor of Florida, who wisely chose not to contest Scott in 2014, has jumped into the campaign to win the special election to succeed Republican U.S. Representative C.W. "Bill" Young of Florida's Thirteenth  Congressional District.  A rival candidate for the Democratic nomination has bowed out, allowing Sink to seek the nomination unopposed in the January 2014 primary.  The general election is on March 11.

So Florida native Chuck Todd may be right about Sink being a rising star after all.  Before her star can rise, though, her address has to change.  She lives in the eastern part of Hillsborough County (which includes Tampa) which is not in the Thirteenth Congressional District and so has to move to Pinellas County, which includes St. Petersburg and Clearwater, to be a resident of said district.  Republicans, who vow to make this race competitive, will undoubtedly call her a carpetbagger, but moving from one county to an adjacent county in the same metropolitan area hardly qualifies her as one.

The district can go either way politically, so Sink has to remember to be a tougher campaigner than she was against Scott.  Hopefully, she's learned her lesson.  She already learned her lesson not to run for governor again, as  this article explains. 

ERRATUM: In my post "Good Ol' Charlie Crist," I wrote that Jeb Bush was relieved that he didn't have to run against Alex Sink when she lost her bid to become the Democratic nominee for governor of Florida in 2002.  In fact, she didn't run for governor then; her husband, the late Bill McBride, was the Democratic nominee that year. Jeb Bush made some kind of comment that he was glad he wouldn't have to run against Sink, but that must have been in the context of her being a possibly tougher candidate to beat than her husband had she actually run.  But she didn't (and won't run for that office again).  I regret the error, which I corrected in my original post.