Subterranean politics

Behind the scenes, almost below the radar, the Tampa City Council elections (which will be over by the time you read this) went big-time on us.

For the first time that I can recall, statewide shadow groups started playing in the normally local Tampa races. The Florida Democratic Party vowed to counter what it viewed as an attempted takeover of the City Council by the Republican Party. And the bundling of campaign contributions -- the mark of big-time political sophistication in fundraising -- raised its head.

Now don't take this as some kind of priggish "I wish we only talked about the issues" kind of rant. I have no problem with rough-and-tumble politics. This ain't my first time at the rodeo.

My main beef is that the subterranean aspects of the race tell you a lot about the candidates, and it gets short shrift (if that) from the daily newspapers because it is viewed as "inside baseball," the newsroom term for arcane knowledge that the voters can't possibly be interested in.

Take a story we featured on our Blurbex blog last week.

The shadow political attacks that have come to characterize the presidential and statewide races penetrated all the way down into South Tampa's District 4 where incumbent John Dingfelder is in a dogfight with challenger Julie Brown.

"Election Watch--Florida" is the name of the organization that mailed an attack ad to homes in South Tampa this week claiming that "John Dingfelder likes to raise our taxes again, and again, and again." The direct mail piece cites four examples of his tax-raising propensities (even if two of the examples are not taxes but instead the fee the city charges for a service or for developers' impacts).

The mailer is the work of Jack Hebert, who runs a Republican consulting firm called The Mallard Group over in Clearwater. You may remember this firm from its attacks on behalf of Florida Senate primary loser Frank Farkas in 2006, among many other races. Election Watch--Florida is an Electioneering Communications Organization, or ECO, Florida's answer to the federal 527 groups like the Swift Boat Veterans. One lawmaker calls ECOs an "evisceration" of campaign finance laws.

Election Watch is funded by Humana, Gulfstream Park horse racing, Lakeland high-speed rail advocate Charles Dockery and another shadow group, Floridians for a Stronger Florida (a creation of Florida's trial lawyers), according to its last report, filed at the end of 2006. Its spring 2007 report may reveal just who exactly is paying for this attack on Dingfelder. For now, we don't know, as Hebert did not return a telephone call about the hit piece.

Brown said she was not aware of Election Watch before seeing it, and she denied any involvement with the group. She did laud its message as accurate.

The St. Petersburg Times wrote nothing about it. The Tampa Tribune ran an Ad Watch column about the mail piece but did nothing to illuminate who paid for it or why a statewide special interest group is sooooo angry with a relatively unknown Tampa City Councilman.

Or take our other Blurbex post about the link between Harrison and Ronda Storms. Harrison used the same political consultant for his television ads that Storms did in her successful 2006 race for the Florida Senate. The consultant's name is David Millner, based out of New Jersey. He has done hundreds of thousands of dollars of media buys and production for the Republican Party of Florida.

Now, let's not go crazy with the whole guilt-by-association thing. Harrison is no Ronda Storms. Nor is he the only person using partisan consultants in this nonpartisan race. There are no such things as nonpartisan consultants any more. And for the record, his opponent, Mary Mulhern, is using Democratic consultant Mitch Kates, whose last client was Sen. Charlie Justice of St. Pete.

Neither paper thought you should know about Millner.

A note on partisan/nonpartisanship and the Harrison/Mulhern race: Harrison's fellow council member, Linda Saul-Sena, endorsed his opponent. This is something that is not normally done. Saul-Sena is a Democrat, Harrison a Republican. He cried foul.

Disclaimer: The author served as a political consultant to Shawn Harrison from 1999-2003. He also ran several campaigns against Mallard Group clients. Mary Mulhern formerly was arts critic for this newspaper.