'Tis the Season To Be Jolly

After professional loser Alex Sink narrowly lost her bid for the U.S. House of Representatives seat in Florida's Thirteenth Congressional District to Republican/lobbyist David Jolly in a special election in March, Democrats in the Tampa-based district - get this - actually hoped she would give the seat another shot in the regular election this November.  That's right, they were actually encouraging her to try again for a seat she failed to win, which is not normal behavior for the Democratic Party.  Instead, Miss Milquetoast ruled herself out as a Jolly opponent in the regular congressional election in April.

So whom did the Democrats get to oppose Jolly?  Umm, no one.  One candidate, Ed Jany, considered it and decided not to at the last minute, while Manuel Sykes, a minister, hoped to run for the seat but dropped out when he couldn't get Democratic support.  Having decided that the Democratic Party takes voters of his own background for granted but don't take them seriously as candidates for office, Sykes became a Republican.  Sykes is black.

Jolly's only opponents are a Libertarian Party candidate, Lucas Overby, and a write-in candidate named Michael Levinson.  Neither one of them is given any chance of winning, but they probably have a better chance of winning than any Democrat could have had; despite the fact that Florida's Thirteenth Congressional District is more or less evenly divided between registered Democrats and registered Republicans, the Democrats in that area are even more disorganized than the national party, and they easily recall Casey Stengel's comment about the 1962 Mets:  "Can't anybody here play this game?" 

No.  Certainly not anyone in the national Democratic Party.  They're too busy running House candidates in solidly Republican districts to bother with the Tampa area.  A fellow named Jim Perske is running in Minnesota's Sixth  Congressional District against Republican Tom Emmer to replace the retiring Michele Bachmann, even though attempts to elect a Democrat to represent that district have backfired miserably - and, true to form, Democrats who had tried and failed once before were not invited to try again.  In my own congressional district, New Jersey's Eleventh, Republican Rodney Frelinghuysen is expected to win easily over opponent Mark Dunec, a Democrat no one has ever heard of before and no one will ever hear of again.  The Democrats can't make a bipartisan House district in Florida competitive, yet they're sending sacrificial lambs to challenge Republicans in reliably Republican districts.  Let me state right now that I am not a registered Democrat.  If I may quote Marx - Groucho -  I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.