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Florida governor’s debate: Gillum, DeSantis get personal in verbal slugfest
Democrat Gillum offers a new explanation for”Hamilton” tickets provided by undercover FBI agent
♦By Rich Shumate, ChickenFriedPolitics.com editor
DAVIE, Florida (CFP) – On a day when bombs arrived at the doors of political leaders across America, the two candidates vying to be Florida’s next governor made little effort to cool the political temperature, engaging in a personal, verbal slugfest that included allegations of lying, corruption and was capped off by the spelling out of a racial slur on statewide television.
DeSantis, Gillum meet for second debate (Courtesy WPBF)
In their second and final debate at Broward College, Democrat Andrew Gillum was forced to explain how he wound up accepting a pricey Broadway ticket from an undercover FBI agent investigating corruption in a community redevelopment agency in Tallahassee, where he is the mayor.
Republican Ron DeSantis later got into an argument with the debate’s moderator when he tried to ask a question about appearances DeSantis made before a conservative group whose members have expressed anti-Muslim and racist views.
“How the hell am I supposed to know every single statement somebody makes?” DeSantis snapped, drawing boos from the crowd. “I am not going to bow down to the altar of political correctness. I’m not going to let the media smear me like they like to do with so many other people.”
At that, Gillum pounced.
“(DeSantis) has spoken at racist conferences. He has accepted a contribution and would not return it from someone who referred to the former president of the United States as a Muslim n-i-g-g-e-r,” Gillum said. “Now I’m not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist. I’m simply saying the racists believe he’s a racist.”
DeSantis responded in kind: “I’m not going to sit here and take this nonsense from a guy like Andrew Gillum, who always plays the victim … who’s aligning himself with groups who attack our men and women in law enforcement, attack our military.”
During a previous debate on Sunday, Gillum refused to answer DeSantis’s repeated questions about who paid for his ticket to the hit musical “Hamilton.”
He attended the play in New York in 2016 while traveling with an undercover FBI agent posing as a developer as part of an investigation into alleged kickbacks at Tallahassee’s community redevelopment agency.
Before the second debate, emails released as part of an ethics probe showed that Gillum had been told that the tickets had been arranged by the FBI agent – a revelation which DeSantis said showed that Gillum had lied during the first debate.
“He wouldn’t accept responsibility from getting a $1,000 ticket from an FBI agent at the last debate. We now know that he lied about that,” DeSantis said. “At some point, you’ve got to demonstrate leadership and accept responsibility for what you’ve done.”
While Gillum’s campaign had previously said that he thought his brother had paid for their tickets, he told the debate audience that he was aware that the agent and a lobbyist friend who was also on the trip had arranged for the tickets.
However, he said his brother repaid the men who arranged the “Hamilton” tickets with tickets to an upcoming Jay-Z/Beyoncé concert.
“I understood that to have solved whatever the issue was with regard to the expenses associated with it,” Gillum said. “I take responsibility for not having asked more questions.”
After insisting that he is not under FBI investigation, Gillum sought to downplay the “Hamilton” issue by saying it was a distraction from the real issues in the campaign.
“In the state of Florida, we got a lot of issues. In fact, we have 99 issues, and ‘Hamilton’ ain’t one of them,” he said.
DeSantis was also asked by the moderator, Todd McDermott of WPBF-TV in West Palm Beach, about how he could maintain that Gillum was unfit to be governor due to the FBI investigation in Tallahassee while remaining a strong supporter of President Donald Trump, who is the subject of investigations with the FBI, special counsel Robert Mueller and Congress.
DeSantis did not answer the question, choosing instead to defend his role in efforts by House Republicans to investigate FBI agents for alleged improprieties in the Russia probe.
As he did in the first debate, DeSantis continued to hammer Gillum on immigration, saying that his unwillingness to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement if he is elected governor would put Floridians at risk to indulge his “hate” of Trump.
“Say you’re convicted of child molestation. You’re here illegally. You’ve served your sentence, state prison. Are you going to hand them over to ICE or not?” he said. “He will not commit to doing that. That means that child molester convicted gets released back on the streets after serving the sentence. And guess what? That child molester will re-offend, and someone’s son or daughter in Florida will end up paying the price.”
At that point, the audience booed, and Gillum replied, “Shame on you.”
At another point in the debate, after DeSantis criticized Gillum for not doing more to bring down Tallahassee’s murder rate, Gillum retorted, “I would suggest the congressmen might want to reconsider whether he wants to be governor. The governor’s mansion is in Tallahassee. I’d hate for you to be hurt.”
The debate in Davie is the last scheduled face-to-face meeting for the candidates before the November 6 vote.
DeSantis, 40, served six years in the U.S. House representing a Jacksonville-area district. Gillum, 39, has been mayor of Tallahassee since 2014.
Recent public polling has put the race within the margin of error, which means neither man has a statistically significant lead. However, the most recent poll has shown some movement toward Gillum in the race.
Democrats have not won a governor’s race in Florida since 1994.
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Florida governor’s debate: Gillum, DeSantis joust over Trump, racism and corruption
Gillum calls Trump “weak,” accuses DeSantis of injecting race into the campaign
♦By Rich Shumate, ChickenFriedPolitics.com editor
TAMPA (CFP) — Meeting in their first face-to-face debate, Democrat Andrew Gillum and Republican Ron DeSantis disagreed as expected on hot-button issues such as immigration and taxes — but they threw their sharpest elbows over charges of racism and very divergent views of President Donald Trump.
In the October 21 debate in Tampa, televised nationally by CNN, Gillum, who is African American, accused DeSantis of trying to make his race an issue in the campaign, beginning with a comment on the day after he won the Republican nomination that Floridians shouldn’t “monkey up” their future prospects by electing Gillum.
Gillum and DeSantis meet for first debate in Tampa (Courtesy CNN)
“The congressman let us know exactly where he was going to take this race the day after he won the nomination. The ‘monkey up’ comment said it all. And he has only continued in the course of his campaign to draw all the attention he can to the color of my skin,” Gillum said.
“And the truth is, you know it, I’m black. I’ve been black all of my life. So far as I know, I will die black.”
If elected, Gillum would become Florida’s first African American governor.
But DeSantis insisted that his public record, including his service in the military and as a Navy prosecutor, demonstrated racial tolerance.
“Floridians can know that I’ll be a governor for all Floridians,” he said.
When it came to Trump, DeSantis — one of the president’s staunchest allies in Congress whose campaign benefited in the GOP primary from a Trump tweet — noted that Gillum has said publicly that he would support Trump’s impeachment, which would hinder his ability to get things done in Washington as governor.
“Andrew wants to lead the Trump impeachment from Tallahassee,” DeSantis said. “You need to be able to work with the administration to get the dollars we deserve … I think I will be better positioned to advance Florida’s priorities because I have a productive relationship with the administration.”
At that, Gillum doubled down on his biting criticism of Trump, who carried Florida in 2016.
“Donald Trump is weak, and he performs as all weak people do – they become bullies. And Mr. DeSantis is his acolyte. He’s trying out to be the Trump apprentice at every turn,” Gillum said.
“You shouldn’t have to kiss the ring of the president of the United States for the president to see to the good and the goodwill of the third-largest state in all of America.”
DeSantis, 40, served six years in the U.S. House representing a Jacksonville-area district. Gillum, 39, has been mayor of Tallahassee since 2014.
DeSantis took Gillum to task for his stewardship of Florida’s capital city, noting that it has an historically high murder rate. He also tried to associate the mayor with an ongoing FBI investigation into corruption that has ensnared a Gillum associate.
“Andrew’s a failed mayor. He’s presided over a crime-ridden city. He’s involved in corruption,” DeSantis said. “He’s not the guy to lead our state.”
But Gillum insisted that overall crime has actually dropped in Tallahassee and that neither he nor his administration are under investigation by the FBI.
DeSantis responded, “You went to a Broadway show with an undercover FBI agent,” a reference to a photograph that has emerged of a trip Gillum took to New York with an FBI agent who was investigating the corruption case.
When DeSantis repeatedly pressed Gillum on who had paid for tickets to the Broadway play “Hamilton,” the mayor did not answer. Instead, he tried to turn the tables by asking DeSantis to produce receipts for his travel as a congressman, which Gillum said about to become subject of an ethics investigation before DeSantis resigned in August.
“That’s a lie,” DeSantis said.
DeSantis also hit Gillum for wanting to raise taxes, pointing to his support for higher sales and property taxes as mayor. He also insisted that Gillum’s plans for expanding state spending would lead to a sharp increase in the state sales taxes or perhaps even imposition of an income tax.
“Andrew has a lifetime of supporting higher taxes,” DeSantis said. “If you believe with that record that he ain’t gonna raise your taxes, then I’ve got some ocean front property in Arizona that I’d like to sell you.”
Gillum quickly shot down any suggestion of an income tax, which would be politically explosive in the Sunshine State. He said his plan is to increase taxes on the wealthiest 3 percent of Florida businesses, who he charged had reaped a $5 billion windfall from the Republican tax cut plan that DeSantis supported in Congress.
“We’re going to take a billion of that and invest in public education in this state,” Gillum said.
The candidates also disagreed sharply on immigration, with DeSantis charging that Gillum and Democrats supported open borders, abolishing Immigration and Customers Enforcement and turning Florida into a sanctuary state, which DeSantis said would be “a wet kiss to the drug cartels.”
“Andrew during the primary said he wanted to abolish ICE, said he would not cooperate with the Trump administration vis-à-vis illegal immigration,” DeSantis said. “That means you’re going to have more crime in Florida.”
Gillum denied that he was for open borders and said he supported enforcement of immigration laws. But he took issue with the Trump adminsitration’s hard-line stance on immigration enforcement.
“What I’ve simply said is that what we’re not going to become here in the state of Florida is a state where basically become a show-us-your-papers state based on the color of somebody’s skin, the language that they speak, what neighborhood they live in,” he said. “That’s not the American way. That’s not who we are as Floridians.”
Gillum also criticized the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, saying “we should not be terrorizing people who are here in this country who are babies that are nursing with their parents, with their mothers.”
Despite campaigning for the same office for nearly a year, Gillum and DeSantis had not actually met until just before the debate.
They are scheduled to meet for a second and final debate on October 24 in Davie.
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Texas U.S. Senate debate: Cruz, O’Rourke clash on immigration, energy policy, taxes and Trump
Final face-off comes with President Donald Trump poised to head to Texas to campaign for Cruz
♦By Rich Shumate, ChickenFriedPolitics.com editor
Watch full debate on Twitter
SAN ANTONIO (CFP) — Meeting to face-to-face for the second and likely last time, Republican U.S. Senator Ted Cruz and his Democratic challenger, U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, sparred over immigration and border security, energy, health care, abortion, tax cuts and, no surprise, President Donald Trump, who is about to bring his rally roadshow to Texas on Cruz’s behalf.
O’Rourke and Cruz meet in Oct. 16 debate (Courtesy KENS)
Throughout the October 16 debate in San Antonio, Cruz painted O’Rourke as an extremist beholden to “left-wing national activists” who supports “socialized medicine” and whose views are out of step with most conservative Texans.
O’Rourke, in turn, accused Cruz of being “all talk and no action” and more interested in his national political ambitions and the welfare of corporate interests than representing the people of his state in the Senate.
The sharpest exchanges came when Cruz charged that O’Rourke supported a plan to impose a $10-a-barrel tax on oil, which he said would negatively impact the state’s oil and gas industry, and the congressman insisted that the senator was mischaracterizing his record.
“This is what you can expect over the course of this debate. Senator Cruz is not going to be honest with you,” O’Rourke said. “He’s going to make up positions and votes that I’ve never held or have never taken. He’s dishonest. It’s why the president called him ‘Lyin’ Ted,’ and it’s why the nickname stuck, because it’s true.”
Cruz fired back, saying “it’s clear Congressman O’Rourke’s pollsters have told him to come out on the attack.”
“If he wants to insult me and call me a liar, that’s fine. But John Adams famously said that facts are stubborn things,” said Cruz, who added that he would ”post proof of O’Rourke’s oil tax vote on his website. The explanation on Cruz’s website states that O’Rourke refused to support a resolution opposing President Barack Obama’s proposal for increasing the tax on oil.
Cruz also said O’Rourke, if elected, would push for Trump’s impeachment, which would lead to “two years of a partisan circus shutting down the federal government in a witch hunt on the president.”
O’Rourke retorted that it was “really interesting to hear you talk about a partisan circus after your last six years in the United States Senate.”
Cruz also touted his work on the tax cut bill recently passed by Congress, saying it had brought marked improvement to the Lone Star State’s economy.
“Texas is booming. We’ve got the lowest unemployment we’ve had in 49 years,” he said. “We’re seeing record growth.”
But O’Rourke, who opposed the tax cut plan, said it would add $2 trillion to the deficit. He said he supported a partial raise in the corporate tax rate, which could be used to improve universal access to health care through expanded access Medicare and Medicaid.
Cruz dismissed O’Rourke’s health care plan as “socialized medicine” and said income tax rates would have to be tripled to pay for it. He also noted his consistent support for repeal of Obamacare, although he pushed back when O’Rourke charged that he wanted to take away coverage for patients with pre-existing conditions mandated in the current health care law.
On abortion, Cruz said O’Rourke was on “extreme pro-abortion side” by not supporting restrictions on late-term abortions and supporting taxpayer funding of abortions through Medicaid. He also said the congressman would push for confirmation of “left-wing judicial activists who impose their own policy positions from the bench” on issues such as abortion and gun control.
O’Rourke did not back away from his support for legal abortion, telling the debate audience that would only vote to confirm Supreme Court justices who will support a woman’s right “to make her own decisions about her own body.”
The candidates also differed on Trump’s proposed physical border wall on the U.S-Mexico border, with Cruz in support and O’Rourke in opposition.
“No wall is going to solve legitimate security concerns,” O’Rourke said, calling for increased spending on customs infrastructure to improve the flow of goods and people across the border.
Cruz responded that O’Rourke “not only opposes a wall … he wants to tear down the ones we have.”
The candidates’ second encounter in San Antonio is the last scheduled debate between them before the November 6 election.
Cruz, 47, was elected to the Senate in 2012 on his first try for political office. In 2016, he made an unsuccessful run for the Republican presidential nomination, carrying 12 primaries and caucuses and finishing second in the delegate count behind Trump.
O’Rouke, 45, has represented metro El Paso in the House since 2013, after serving on the El Paso City Council. Although he is Irish and his given first name is Robert, he was nicknamed “Beto” — a Spanish nickname for Robert — from childhood.
His campaign has excited the Democratic base, drawing large crowds and media attention in a state that hasn’t seen a competitive Senate race in 30 years.
O’Rourke has also raised a staggering $51 million for the race, including $38 million in the last quarter, which set an all-time quarterly record for fundraising by a Senate candidate. Cruz has so far raised $35 million for the entire race.
Still, the odds against a Democrat in Texas are daunting. A Democrat has not won a Senate race since 1988; Republicans have won the last nine Senate races by an average margin of 19 percent.
The last five public polls in the race have shown Cruz with a lead, but none of those leads have been outside the poll’s margin of error, which indicates that the race is still too close to definitively say either man has a lead.
Despite an often contentious relationship between Cruz and Trump during the 2016 presidential race, the White House has announced that the president will travel to Houston on October 22 for a campaign rally with the senator.
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President Donald Trump stumps for U.S. Rep. Andy Barr in Kentucky
President calls Barr’s opponent in 6th U.S. House District an “extreme liberal” chosen by “Democrat mob”
♦By Rich Shumate, ChickenFriedPolitics.com editor
RICHMOND, Kentucky (CFP) — President Donald Trump traveled to central Kentucky to excite his followers with a Make America Great Again rally in the commonwealth’s 6th U.S. House District, where Republican U.S. Rep. Andy Barr is in a political dogfight with his Democratic challenger, political newcomer Amy McGrath.
At an October 13 rally at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Trump said re-electing Barr “could make the difference between unbelievable continued success and frankly failure where we fight for two more years with these people, with these obstructionists.”
He also blasted McGrath as an “extreme liberal” who was “chosen by Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters — that’s a real beauty — and the radical Democrat mob.”
“Amy supports a socialist takeover of your health care,” he said. “She supports open borders. She needs the tax hikes to cover the through-the-roof garbage that you want no part of.”
For his part, Barr lauded the president, calling him “a man of action.”
“Other people resist, but this president gets results,” he said. “Mr. President, I’m with you to fight for the American people.”
In addition to Barr, the Richmond rally drew all three of Kentucky’s top elected Republicans, U.S. Senators Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul and Governor Matt Bevin, who faces what is likely to be a touch battle for re-election in 2019.
In response to Trump’s characterizations of her, McGrath released a one-sentence statement to the media: “Mr. President, you clearly don’t know me. Yet.”
According to McGrath’s website, she supports reforms of the existing Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, rather than its repeal, which Barr has voted for. She also supports the so-called “public option,” a government-run health insurance agency to provide an option for people who cannot get access through the ACA.
McGrath opposes Trump’s plan to build a physical wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, which Barr also supports, and has also criticized the administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents.
A day before Trump came to Richmond, former Vice President Joe Biden came to the district to campaign with McGrath.
McGrath, 43, who grew up in the Cincinnati suburbs of Northern Kentucky, is a retired Marine fighter pilot making her first bid for the political office against Barr in the 6th District, which includes Lexington, Frankfort, Richmond and adjacent portions of the Kentucky Bluegrass.
Barr, 45, has represented the 6th District since 2012. Prior to being elected to Congress, he was an attorney in Lexington.
McGrath has raised more than $3 million for the campaign, more than any other Democratic challenger in the South in 2018.
The race is rated as a toss-up by political analysts, although public polling has been sparse.
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Blackburn, Bredesen clash over immigration, guns and Kavanaugh in U.S. Senate debate
Tennessee candidates meet for the final time before November vote.
♦By Rich Shumate, ChickenFriedPolitics.com editor
Click photo to watch full debate (Courtesy: Nexstar Broadcasting)
KNOXVILLE (CFP) — With polls showing a tight U.S. Senate race in Tennessee, Republican U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn and former Democratic Governor Phil Bredesen tangled over health care, immigration, gun rights and the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh in their second and final debate.
Throughout the October 10 event at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Blackburn sought to tie Bredesen to Hillary Clinton and other national Democrats, noting several times that he had donated $33,400 to her 2016 presidential campaign and insisting that if he gets to the Senate, he would support Democratic priorities on immigration, health care and gun control.
Bredesen shot back by with a call to “stop with all the ideological stuff and setting people against each other.”
“You seem to have a crystal ball about talking all the time about what I’m going to do when I’m a U.S. Senator,” Bredesen said to Blackburn. “I’m going to act when I’m a senator exactly the same way I acted when I was a governor, which is independently. I was an equal-opportunity offender of both parties in Washington.”
Both Blackburn and Bredesen supported the Kavanaugh nomination, which became mired in controversy after a woman alleged that Kavanaugh had assaulted her when they were teenagers in the 1980s. But Blackburn noted that Tennesseans supported the nomination and that had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election with Bredesen’s support, “you would not have had a Judge Kavanaugh.”
“It took Phil a while to make his mind up on this issue. And he finally did. It could have been because of the sexual harassment claims in his administration when he was governor,” she said.
The reference was to a controversy over how sexual harassment claims were handled in the governor’s office during Bredesen’s tenure, including an episode in 2005 in which an aide accused of sexual misconduct was moved out of the governor’s office and into a different state job and a state investigator shredded his interview notes.
“There was a path for friends of Phil where sexual harassment claims were handled, and there was also the path for everyone else,” she said. “The voices of those women were shredded. They died in that shredder.”
Bredense, took issue with Blackburn’s characterization of the incident, insisting that the allegations had been handled appropriately.
“The individual who performed these acts was gone the next day from the governor’s office,” he said. “That woman was protected in every way we know how.”
Bredesen and Blackburn disagreed on President Donald Trump’s proposed physical wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, which he dismissed as “political theater.”
“I believe very strongly in controlling our borders,” he said. “But I think there are much better ways of doing this than building a wall.”
At that, Blackburn pounced, saying Democrats “have advocated for open borders, for abolishing (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).”
“He thinks that building the wall is political theater? Well, let me tell you something, Tennesseans want to see that wall built because open border policies have made every town a border town and every state a border state,” she said. “Walls work. Just ask Israel.”
On health care, Bredesen criticized Blackburn for voting “time and time again to repeal the Affordable Care Act without having anything to replace it,” which he said would “remove any ability of someone with pre-existing conditions to obtain health insurance.”
“I think that is just plain wrong,” he said.
But Blackburn insisted that Republican plans to replace Obamacare did protect pre-existing conditions, and she again sought to tie Bredensen to his party’s 2016 standard-bearer.
“Hillary Clinton is the mother of government-run health care. That is a concept that Phil supports,” she said. “Tennesseans don’t want government-controlled health care.”
Both candidates agreed that people who are a danger to themselves or others because of mental illness should not have access to firearms. But Blackburn noted that she has an A rating from the National Rifle Association to Bredesen’s D, and she highlighted a recent trip Bredesen took to New York to meet with former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is a prominent gun control advocate.
“If you had Democrats in control, and Hillary Clinton who he wanted to be president was president, you would see them taking away your guns,” she said.
But Bredesen said he was a lifelong gun owner who supports the Second Amendment and “got crossways with the NRA because I vetoed a bill that allowed people to carry guns in bars.”
“I thought that was crazy. It was stupid,” he said.
Recent public polling has put the Tennessee Senate race between Bredesen and Blackburn within the margin of error. A Democrat has not won a Senate race in the Volunteer State since 1990.
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