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A Candidate Spurns Civility, Lays Self Bare

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By TOM JACKSON

The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 30, 2008

Well, it was a dumb idea in the first place. The "civil campaign" pledge. What a hoot.

I mean, really. Only an idealistic dreamer like Kurt Browning could have come up with one like that. But here's the thing: Elections are too important to be constrained by silly vows of chivalry. This ain't the debate club.

Stripped of nastiness, election season becomes little more than a beauty contest, minus the swimsuits-in-heels competition. Thank goodness, then, for John Nicolette, no looker himself, to splash turpentine on Browning's boardwalk parade to identify Miss Congeniality.

You remember Browning, the good-guy public official who missed by a hair becoming an Eagle Scout and has been making up for it ever since. He could have been Pasco's elections supervisor for life, except that the new governor named him to oversee the statewide overhaul of Florida's elections procedure, which included the dismantling of Browning's crowning achievement, the "idiot proof" - his term - touch-screen voting system.

So, touch-screen voting died while Browning's well-meaning, if idiotic, quest to make county elections safe for general audiences survived. Then along came Nicolette, a longtime firefighter who knows something about arson, to torch Browning's Barneyfication of the campaign season. He means to unseat two-term incumbent Ted Schrader in the District 1 race, and that means twisting the argument to suit his ambition.

He's Gonna Blow!

Nicolette, in his spare time a grinding, teeth-bared deal-broker on behalf of his business interests and, on a volunteer basis, for the state fair authority, is not a dish for the faint-hearted. He is brass knuckles without the camouflage of leather gloves, a loaded 18-wheeler on a downhill grade, the no-stinking-badges bandit accosting Humphrey Bogart deep in the Sierra Madres.

It's understandable that a guy who races into burning buildings for a living and arm-wrestles midway promoters for grins would come to consider himself a force of nature. Thus has he assumed (more or less) responsibility for a volcanic eruption of campaign mailers whose accuracy was secondary to the size and lethality of the blast.

Festooned with unfocused photos of Schrader evoking Lon Chaney's silent-era "Phantom of the Opera," the missives - authored by campaign veteran Anthony Pedicini of Tampa-based Public Concepts - assail Nicolette's rival as a tax-hiking, budget-busting liberal and a road-choking, round-heeled favorite of developers, a rubber stamp who, by the way, surfed the Internet during certain long-ago board meetings.

Fusing Innuendo, Explosiveness

Space grows short, but let us inject this about the bulk of charges: Hoo. And: Boy. The claims asserted by Pedicini and approved by Nicolette (unverified by the candidate before they were mailed, he acknowledges) parse and paraphrase much broader newspaper stories to arrive, generally, at hysterical conclusions ascertainable only if those stories were squinted over by Mr. Magoo from an altitude of 20,000 feet.

Well, like organized sport, campaigns do not build character so much as they demonstrate it. By casting off the silly, artificial bonds of civility to spew hot and wild at Ted Schrader, John Nicolette has revealed much that will be useful for Republican voters making up their minds what to do come primary election day, Aug. 26.

Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.

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