Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Although I’m moderately active politically, my interests have mainly been with federal offices — particularly Congress. They’re small enough races that you might make a difference, big enough that they might matter nationally. This Coral Gables election is really the first time I’ve focused so much on the city’s politics, even though I’ve lived here since 1992. So this has been for me a process of first figuring out what the issues even were, then figuring out who was on which side, then slowly figuring out which side I’m on. Being a blogger with I suppose dozens of readers in the city (apologies to the many many hundreds of you from out of town who are probably sick of the whole subject — hang in there, it ends next Tuesday, barring recounts) I also got to meet some of the candidates, which has been interesting. When there are this few likely voters, even a blog that might reach a few dozen counts, I suppose.

Politically, Coral Gables is not much bigger than a small town. (Sometimes this election feels a little like a run for college class president a big university. There are not that many issues, and a lot of it is very personal.) And when you look at the number of people deeply involved in city politics in a continuing way, it’s smaller still, although not immune to county-wide political currents.

All this is by way of prologue to pointing you to this totally inside baseball posting up at Political Cortadito, Gonzo, the gypsy & the PACman. This stuff is hard to follow without a scorecard, and she seems to have one.

Five more days until the Coral Gables election. Just two mailers today: another in the Quesada series — the one defines “tax” like we don’t know what that means — and a, get this, TWELVE pager from Mayoral candidate Jim Cason. It’s actually a pretty effective piece of mail, but as it opens out like a two-sided fold-out poster, I’m going to have some trouble scanning it.

I’ll update this item when I get it scanned, but it may be a while.

Update 1: Scanned the Quesada mailer.

Update 2 (4/7): I’ve placed the whole Cason 12-page monster in a handy downloadable .pdf file.
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Tuesday saw one phone call, a recording of Ralph Caberra‘s voice urging me to vote for Gonzalo Sanabria. The message properly identified itself as paid and approved by the Sanabria campaign. It had decent sound quality too.

I also got four mailers: a Slesnick (Mayor), a Quesada rerun (Group 4), a new Sanabria (Group 4), and Kerkyk 4-pager (Group 5). Update: The scans are below.

More interestingly, I had a one-hour talk with Frank Quesada yesterday morning, which I will write up as soon as possible. He struck me as a very earnest and sincere person. I think he’s basically well to the right of me, but I was impressed how he’d been studying the Coral Gables budget, one line item at a time.
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