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Familiar Foe Files To Challenge For Brown-Waite's Seat

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By TONY MARRERO

Hernando Today Hernando Today

Published: May 3, 2008

BROOKSVILLE - The race for the 5th Congressional District seat just got a lot more interesting.

John Russell, a Dade City Democrat who has twice run for the job and who has had some volatile encounters with the Brooksville Republican who currently holds it, filed Friday to try again.

Russell, a 52-year-old licensed nurse practitioner, paid the $9,912 filing fee on the last day to enter the race with hopes that his third bid to unseat Ginny Brown-Waite will be the charm.

He had kept his intentions quiet, demurring in recent weeks when asked whether he planned to run again.

"I saw no winner stepping up as promised," Russell said by cell phone Friday as he drove back from filing in Tallahassee. "I saw a void."

H. David Werder, a 53-year-old disabled truck driver from Spring Hill, qualified by petition; Carol Castagnero, a 69-year-old former teacher from Lakeland, paid the fee.

"I'm feeling good about the setup," Russell said of his Democratic challengers.

Hernando County Democratic Party Chairman Jay Rowden had said recently that he had at least two strong would-be candidates considering a challenge to Brown-Waite, but they decided against it.

"They talked about it for months but nobody came to play," Rowden said.

Russell pointed out that Brown-Waite will have a challenger in the primary in Jim King of Land O' Lakes, which Russell said will force her to change her strategy.

He said he will campaign on the same issues he has in the past - Social Security, veterans' benefits, insurance reform and the environment, to name a few - which he said "have only become more relevant and more acute in 2008."

In 2004, Russell came in second in a four-person Democratic primary. But in 2006, he won the primary, beating Richard Penberthy, a Pasco County high school teacher who ran an organized and respectably funded campaign.

Russell garnered 40 percent of the vote in the general election to Brown-Waite's 60 percent.

But he's made headlines beyond the political results; headlines that may not bode well when it comes to financial support from the state Democratic Party, which hasn't offered any in the past.

Last year, he was among the most vocal critics of state party Chairwoman Karen Thurman after the Miami Herald reported that Thurman was receiving $3,500 a month from Al Cárdenas, former chairman of the Florida Republican Party, to help him lobby the new Democratic leadership in Congress on behalf of Miami-Dade County. That didn't violate any laws or party rules, but Russell sharply criticized Thurman at a party event in St. Petersburg.

That summer, he was thrown out of the Florida Democratic Party convention in Orlando after a fracas in which Russell maintains he was hit from behind. He called it an unprovoked attack that was retribution for his critique of Thurman.

Last October, Russell is accused of pushing Brown-Waite's husband, Harvey Waite, at a candidate forum in Crystal River, and Russell's supporters are accused of shoving Brown-Waite in an ensuing fracas. Russell has adamantly denied the claims.

He said Friday he plans to run "a clean campaign" and that "there's nothing Brown-Waite can pull out of the rabbit's hat that I haven't seen."

Brown-Waite has made it clear that she doesn't consider Russell a threat and did so again Friday when a reporter asked her spokesman Charlie Keller about her reaction to the news.

"She just laughed," Keller said.

Reporter Tony Marrero can be reached at (352) 544-5286 or lmarrero@hernandotoday.com.

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