Supposedly 10% of all Sarasota residents are millionaires. If I was a Sarasota millionaire, I’d surely vote for Buchanan. He loves lowering taxes on rich people and hates laws and government services that make life easier and more secure for working people. He’s tight with President Bush and the rest of the crew that wants to talk tough about illegal immigration without penalizing companies that hire illegals. And he’s spending millions of dollars to run some seriously stomach-turning attack ads that lie about his opponent, Christine Jennings.

My first choice among all the primary candidates would have been Nancy Detert, but Buchanan out-monied her and won. Besides, in a poisoned Republican Party — one whose informal spokesman Rush Limbaugh picks on sick people — nastiness wins and niceness loses.

My second choice probably would have been Jan Schneider, even though I had doubts about her managerial competence, but Jennngs negatived her harshly and won the Democratic primary.

I went to a candidates’ forum in Lakewood Ranch before the primary and watched all of them, not only when they were speaking but afterwards. Nancy Detert was hugging people and people were hugging her. Schneider was shaking hands and engaging people in actual conversations. Jennings was gracious but reserved. And Vern Buchanan strode through the crowd like a prince among peasants.

No one bowed, but his body language told me he hoped they would.

Dubious Buchanan Campaign Statements

One of the few positive claims the Buchanan campaign makes about its candidate (in between repeatedly yelling “Jennings is evil! Satan loves Jennings!) is that he created hundreds of local jobs in his car dealerships.

Bullshit.

Sarasota Ford — one of Buchanan’s dealerships — was selling and repairing Fords while Buchanan was still running his flaky American Speedy Printing franchise business up in Michigan, and assuming Ford itself can survive, it’ll be in business long after Buchanan dies.

Buchanan also claims he helped lots of people start their own businesses, but if you read the article I linked to in the previous paragraph, you’ll see that a lot of those people felt Buchanan did them more harm than good.

Then there are Buchanan’s offshore tax-ducking reinsurance companies. And his questionable Ritz-Carlton finance deal, which also had a strong tax-ducking component to it.

Buchanan’s response to accusations of flim-flammery against him boils down to, “It’s all legal.”

Maybe one of our country’s problems is that Buchanan’s edgy business dealings are legal — and perhaps another one is that the millions he gets from his shenanigans, thanks to Bush and a Republican Congress, are taxed at a far lower rate than money earned from actual Work even without the extra layer of tax-dodging that people like Buchanan use to reduce their tax obligations even more than the Republicans in Congress originally intended.

Buchanan has never fixed cars or run a printing press for a living. He is nothing but a wheeler-dealer and a smooth talker. That’s fine as far as it goes, and a society can tolerate a few of these guys on its fringes, but as far as letting them into Congress — that is, actually let them make decisions on how our country is run — I don’t think so.

I am not going to vote for Jennings as much as I am going to vote against Buchanan.

So it goes. At least I’ll vote, which a majority of my fellow Bradenton residents will not.

(sigh)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 at 8:23 am and is filed under Bradenton/local, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.