Listening to the left wing celebration on Democracy Now on the victory of Andrew Gillum in the Florida Democratic gubernatorial primary wearies me.  First of all, we start with the presumption of guilt — unexplained — on the part of the Republican nominee with the following comment…

We’ve got to work hard to make sure that we continue Florida going in a good direction. Let’s build off the success we’ve had on Governor Scott. The last thing we need to do is to monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state.

The show kept chopping the first line of that out, which does clarify the matter a little and add ambiguity on “monkeying”.  And here the problems comes rushing in:  cue all conservative and Republican media outlets with clips of any Democrat and especially Obama using the term “monkey” in this way, and…

Probably the case of what everyone thinks is going on.  Probably.

Yes.  Years ago, with Bob Corker against Harold Ford in Tennessee, my initial response to the charge regarding his “Playboy ‘call me'” ad was that the racist charge on it was overblown, until the follow up radio ads with bongo confirmed… it was indeed, but plausible deniability is built into these things for a reason.  Ditto his comment describing Gillum as “articulate” — (I suppose he may have gone the Joseph Biden route with his black opponent and said ‘clean’) — the question comes in: what back-handed compliment belittling him can he go with?  If I were a cynical advisor for Ron Desantis, I would get “caught” in a calculatedly “off-the-record” tape of the sort that had Romney recounting 47 percents and Hillary calling out baskets of deplorables and Obama with “bitter” gun clingers… (or maybe just something sure to be caught by a Gillum tracker ala George Allen’s “Macaca”) where he’d be complaining about the “monkey” matter and really stir the fire by acting frustrating on everything and suggesting something like “I say ‘monkeying’ around, everyone knows what I mean, and you know… then the liberal media just goes Apeshit over it…”  Ba da bing, worth a “identify with the candidate” that wins over the gut of pc-hating Floridans who think — rightly or wrongly — they’re just walking on egg-shells.

To his credit, the interviewed spokesperson — left wing political activist — punches the trivial concern away to discuss what he really thinks the campaign should be about.  To his discredit, it comes across as a bunch of blustery noise that doesn’t signify anything.  And now I’m fatigued by things — there are goods and bads with the policy apparatus of the more liberal candidate who won this nomination as opposed to the policy apparatus of the more centrist “establishment” candidate who lost, but I do get tired of being shuffled into the idea that I’m voting for a “movement” that stretches across all issues into a tidy inter-locked package.

But more than that… the happy talk… the celebration gets to me.

And on Tuesday, we saw that the majority of people in the state of Florida want to move forward.

Election results:

Ron DeSantis — 913,997
Andy Putnam — 591,550
Bob White — 32,593
Others — 80,333

Andrew Gillum — 517,863
Gwen Graham — 472,995
Philip LeVine — 306,621
Others — 212,481

It is an unpleasant sign for Democratic chances in November that the Republican vote total was greater than the Deomcratic vote total.

The activist goes on to call the state of Florida a “racist state” and that we have the opportunity to enact a “radical agenda” and…

It has its virtues, and it’s good to be a truth teller, but I’m not sure the framing works to win over a general electorate.

And a crux of the coming elections in November, from the other political activist here.

So, I’m from Chicago, where we have a number of rank-and-file Democrats who actually are perhaps Democratic in name, but in all other ways they are corrupt, they don’t actually act in the best interest of the people—from Mayor Rahm Emanuel in Chicago to various members of our City Council to the person who sits as governor in the state of Illinois.

Fantastic, perhaps?, but in the meantime… on the ballot in Florida… the incumbent Senator Bill Nelson who… currently trailing Rick Scott (the man the Republican nominee is tying his record to and urging everyone not to “monkey it up”)… and… well, Bill Nelson needs the Gillum voters who aren’t terribly enthused by such a centrist figure as he to deign to vote for him, and Gillum needs to stop any bleeding from his voters who are stuck on “Democratic Socialism”…

… Presumably, despite not proceeding with a neatly tied together “movement” grounds, they’d prefer Nelson over Scott — particularly if it spells the difference between a Democratic and a Republican senate, correct?

… And they both will be a bit off each other’s track in messaging as they proceed.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I want to turn to Fox News host Laura Ingraham commenting on Andrew Gillum’s upset victory in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Florida.
LAURA INGRAHAM: Gillum is the African-American male version of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He’s young. He’s kind of dynamic. And he’s running on a platform of universal Medicare, legalized marijuana and abolishing ICE. Exciting. And he’s viewed by hard-left Democrats as kind of a savior from the stranglehold that the party’s establishment have had on their desires, hopes and dreams.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Charlene, can you comment on that? I mean, Fox News, that’s the same network that DeSantis said “monkey this up.”
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yeah, you know, this is more of the same. We saw this in 2008. We saw it in 2012. And we saw a version of it in 2016, where conservatives, Republicans, where the media, that is also controlled by corporate interests, use not just these whistleblowers, but, as Andrew noted, like bullhorns, to really lay their values out on the table.

… Uh huh.  Am I missing something here?  Laura Ingraham said the exact same thing as the group of activists in this DN interview, only with a sarcastic inflection on the word “exciting”, and changing “radical” to “hard left”…

But we’re stuck in the narrow echo chambers, having to twist Laura Ingraham’s message that echoes those of these activists, if from an oppositional stance instead of a supporting stance, into … something that doesn’t?

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