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Back-To-Future Scenario Gains Momentum

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By TOM JACKSON

The Tampa Tribune

Published: September 3, 2008

Now that it is down to just two, all pretense has ended. In word, deed and traveling companion, the race for Pasco sheriff finally can be seen for what it has been all along. It's Bob White versus Lee Cannon all over again; 2000 smack-down redux.

Well, why not? Sheriff's races in Pasco County are notorious for reanimating the undead, and it's not just because Election Day arrives before the last Halloween pumpkin has succumbed to white flies.

Take Jim Gillum. Please. This relic from the 1990s has been killed off more times than Frankenstein's monster. But like Karloff rising from the smoldering windmill, come election season or retirement announcement, he'd emerge to do the zombie lurch, unfazed by panicked townsfolk locking shutters and barring doors at his stumbling approach.

So here comes Kim Bogart, a high-ranking member of the Cannon administration (and Gillum's as well) whose supporters suggest Pasco cannot afford another four years of the last eight. (Where have we heard that before?)

For which the White campaign offers a prickly reply: Everyone who's eager for a return to the hubristic, finger-pointing, scatter-blaming bad old days of Lee Cannon - look in the mirror.

Reversals Of Fortune

The post-primary blessings offered by the vanquished served only to fuel this political bonfire. Having decried the incumbent's administrative skills while seeking the Democratic nomination, Jeff Deremer - as they say in the U.S. Senate - extended and revised his previous criticisms.

White, Deremer says now, "knows how to be a sheriff. I have the utmost respect for him." Never mind that Deremer's epiphany feeds the impression that he was half of the crash-dummy team that posters to the leoaffairs.com message board claimed he and Robert Sullivan, White's GOP rival, were.

The sloppiness of Deremer's abrupt reversal reveals him to be, at 38, either hopelessly impressionable or deviously calculating. Is it possible to be both?

No less blatant is Sullivan's decision to cross party lines and throw in with Bogart. How cunning. How delicious. How utterly Anbar province: The enemy of my enemy is my friend, says the Arabian proverb.

White, who seems supremely formidable in his re-election bid, might quote Oscar Wilde: "A man cannot be too careful in his choice of enemies." If he prevails, which seems likely given the support of a popular governor, a bulletproof state senator and majority party grass-roots operatives, Bogart and Sullivan will have trouble explaining that "I opposed Bob White" line on their resumes.

Great Scott, Marty!

Nonetheless, such risk-taking is the life's blood of political campaigns, and is to be admired. Bogart, whose ascendancy suffered from his alliance with Cannon, may be propelled by the resentment that attends the victims of collateral damage. Big deal. It's not like revenge-seeking is a novel, or even a disqualifying, reason to tilt at windmills.

The weeks ahead should give us a better sense of whether a first Bogart term would be Cannon III, but here's something to chew on: Among Bogart's contributors - besides, notably, Cannon himself - are contributing architects to the former administration Darlene Greene and Harold Sample. The game, as they say, is afoot.

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

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