Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

Casting herself as Batman to whatever sinful villian happens to scare people the most is kind of how Ronda Storms has made it as far as she has already. When I heard she would be facing off a newcomer Stephen Gorham I figured she’s a shoe-in. I even considered moving back to Riverview to vote against her but ultimately decided it would be a waste of time.

Fast forward a few weeks and here we are at election day. I see that the race has gotten about as weird as any of Storms’ endeavors, but surprisingly, it may be tighter than I thought. We are assured that Gorham is “closer than ever” to the much better funded Storms. Of course that is the notoriously left-leaning St Pete Times telling us that Gorham is gaining, but the article gives no clue as to how close that actually is. I checked to see what the Tampa Tribune had to say about it but guess what? Other than when they endorsed Gorham, the Trib doesn’t seem to have anything about the race. Nothing at all. I wonder if the folks at the Trib even know there is a race down there?

Anyway, back to my point. I keep seeing this ad of Ronda’s accusing Gorham of being bankrolled by Gaming and Casino interests and how he will turn all the underage girls of south Hillsborough county into streetwalking hookers. I noticed that unlike most other negative ads I am subjected to this one had no small print to tell me where I could find the information they had gleaned these facts from. Since Ronda seemed to indicate the kid had gotten enough money from gambling interests to finance several hours of the war in Iraq I wanted to know where to go to see it. Luckily I remembered the Florida Division of Elections website maintains fairly detailed records that does just that.

Campaign finance records for both candidates don’t show anything really out of the ordinary. Gorham has two items that are obviously gaming related. Both for $500 they make up less than 1% of the money he has raised.  Gorham’s money mostly comes from trade unions (the Police and Fire sided with Ronda which is funny since Ronda has made it obvious to Sheriff Gee a couple of times that she felt she knew better how to allocate his deputies than he did) and private parties.

Storms has no obvious ties to the gaming industry but has thousands of dollars in money from insurance agents, doctors, lawyers, farmers, and what appears to be a check for $190.68 from Republican State Representative Ed Homan. I am not sure who makes a campaign contribution for that odd an amount but I assume it has some significance, maybe it was the least gay number he could think of when he wrote the check. She also got $3011.90, or three times the amount Gorham pocketed from gaming interests, from Brighthouse Networks.

You really can’t trust any advertising paid for by one person to get any sort of clear understanding of their opponent. You may think this is common sense but there are a lot of folks that will vote in this election firmly believing that Jim Davis has never done a lick of work in his life because they saw that on TV.

Also, please think about the sway our hometown papers exercise over these local races. The Times is happy to promote Gorham at every opportunity, while the Tribune seems to forget him as soon as they endorsed him.

This race isn’t big enough to garner national attention so we rely on our two local papers to cover these races evenly and fairly. In this case, newsworthy for Storms if nothing else, I think we have been cheated. One paper became little more than a cheerleader on short fiber newsprint and the other, well they just don’t find it worth the effort.

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