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It's 1 Potato, 2 Potato For Spuddy, Er, Buddy

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Daniel Ruth

druth@tampatrib.com

Published: November 8, 2008

Heckuva job, Buddy. And hello, you must be going.

Here's the thing about Tuesday night's long march into the electoral equivalent of a cluster-you-know-what wrapped in a flummox enshrouded by a bumfuddle.

Not one of us was surprised that walking FEMA trailer, Hillsborough "Supervisor" of Elections Buddy Johnson, once again managed to turn what should be the simple act of counting votes into a comic melodrama rivaling "Duck Soup" meets "Nightmare on Kennedy Boulevard."

While the rest of the state managed to get through an Election Day involving massive voter turnouts with relatively few hitches, here in Hillsborough County, Johnson, the Maynard G. Krebs of the optical scan, continued to regard a ballot as if he was Sasquatch contemplating a quantum physics textbook.

In another life, Johnson ran a restaurant, so even this dumber-than-a-sack-of-toothpicks ought to appreciate the notion that if a customer had to wait 48 hours to get an order of grits one wouldn't stay in business very long.

And neither did the supervisor of elections, who has lost sight of the fact the job description requires one to "supervise" the elections process, rather than stand idly by with all the management skills of Lucille Ball on a candy wrapper assembly line. This is a complex concept?

Dangling And Hanging

As of Thursday, there remained more than 70,000 ballots yet to be counted by Johnson's office, the result of early voting and malfunctions of some of the "supervisor's" optical scan machines.

Talk about putting the suffer in "universal suffrage."

You knew things weren't going well when Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe came off as the Brigadoon of democratic transparency compared to Johnson's "one potato, two potato" approach to figuring out who won and who lost Tuesday evening.

As it became apparent election night was about to turn into the bridge to nowhere, Johnson decided to become more elusive than Jack the Ripper, relying on various apparatchiks, flacks and minions to insist everything was simply hunky-dory, even though it was going on 4 a.m. and the uncounted ballots were being aged like a French cabernet.

Paging Rube Goldberg

And when he did leave his Elba of Denial, Johnson, who at this point was making Baghdad Bob look like Walter Cronkite, insisted any problems that may have remotely occurred were not his fault at all, but rather those meanies at Premier, the voting machine company that had dragooned him at gunpoint to buy its $6 million Rube Goldbergesque gizmos.

Finally Johnson read the unprintable handwriting on the wall as his opponent, Phyllis Busansky, pulled ahead once they got around to counting the votes and emerged from his bunker to concede before he risked being removed from office by Gov. Charlie Crist for being more incompetent than Beetle Bailey.

"I'm not surprised it wasn't greater," Johnson said of the magnitude of his loss.

Ironic, isn't it, that after years of ineptitude qualifying him for the Don Rumsfeld Bumptious Yahoo Award, Buddy Johnson at last got something right.

Keyword: Book of Ruth, to read and comment on Daniel Ruth's blog.

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