I got kissed by a boy... and I liked it
"If you want height and tall buildings, vote for Osmulski; if you want more fees for fire service, vote for Carlesimo; if you want to continue the moderation in growth, vote for me." So ended city council candidate Kit McKeon's final campaign speech yesterday in front of a small crowd of Bay Indies residents and a larger crowd of campaign supporters of about a dozen different wannabe elected officials.

The final campaign stop of the year in this small municipal election circuit is always Bay Indies. It always takes place just a few days before election day. It always features a packed house. Until this year, that is. Cold weather and what turned out to be the final game of the World Series kept most of the huge trailer park's, er, I mean, manufactured housing community's residents tucked into their couches, leaving the final candidate forum of the year to politicos and their hangers ons. Campaign supporters outnumbered the residents by about a 60-40 percentage split in the total crowd of about 150, which created a surreal scene of political chest-puffing and road battle humor.

Candidates worked the small crowd like circus hucksters before the event started, handing out flyers and rhetoric. Sam Rosenfeld's crew handed out reprints of a newspaper endorsement while Morgan Bentley's crew tried to convince the crowd that the papers had gotten their candidate's story all wrong.

While talking with three different Democrat campaign managers, Sarasota Republican Party Chair Eric Robinson walked up, put his arm around me and kissed me on the cheek, this right after I had introduced him to the Democrat campaign workers as the anti-Christ. "You know you love me, John," Robinson said, grinning madly at the opportunity of humorously embarrassing me.

I had to burst out laughing: "You know, Eric, I'm feeling strangely turned on by your dark side. What do you say we get together later on tonight, after this shitfest is over?"

Robinson laughed, and then changed the subject, mentioning that he had two Republicans to one Democrat in the supposedly non-partisan city council race. I corrected him by telling him that all three were registered Republicans.

"Really?" asked Robinson. "I didn't know that. So I've already won that race." He wandered off into the crowd, heading for some Nancy Detert campaign staffers.

"What the hell was that?" one of the Dems asked me.

"Republicans. Go figure."

So slimy that he leaves a snail trail
Emilio Carlesimo, my pick for the worst overall candidate on the current ballot (Vern Buchanan coming a close second), walked by. I told him I had voted for him. He stopped dead and looked at me. "Just kidding," I told him.

Carlesimo scowled and moved on. Once on stage, he spent the entire time staring and smiling goofily at the Herald-Trib's Kim Hackett, who has so far chosen not to mention Carlesimo's involvement in a fraud lawsuit aimed against him and his brethren on the MacArthur Beach condo board. I'm not clear if it was because he was trying to woo her politically or if he just liked looking at her legs, but it was so damned odd that I couldn't avoid checking him again and again through the evening to see if he was still doing it. He was. I dunno, maybe he just needs to get laid.

Returning home from the Bay Indies fiasco, I received an anonymous letter from one of Carlesimo's neighbors, complete with photographs and drawn arrows (and the negatives from the photos, no less), showing how Carlesimo uses  his deluxe barbecue grill on his back porch in violation of the condo rules, rules that he is obligated to enforce as the condo board's vice president. I'm all for a good scandal, and I really can't stand the guy, but I'm hard pressed to get worked up over an illicit burger or steak. No barbecues allowed? What frickin' idiot thought that was a good idea? That's just un-American.

What it does indicate, though, is that Carlesimo has some neighbors who absolutely hate him. I don't know what the hell I'm supposed to do with the pics (and the negatives), but I do have them just in case a barbecue scandal ignites between now and election day.

I know McKeon owns a deluxe barbecue grill because I've seen it, and I'll make a somewhat safe assumption that Osmulski probably likes to char the flesh of various dead mammals in his backyard as well, so whatever scandal that could be mucked up from this is going to be pretty much of a wash. Where is PETA when you need them?

Cavalcade of schmuckery
On stage, Bay Indies' grand poobah, Tony whatever-his-last-name-is, made it a point to mispronounce and slur his way through every single candidates' name as he introduced them. Actually, I think he got Doug Holder's name right. In previous years, Tony had always seemed sober and attentive, but given that he had to miss a World Series game for this cavalcade of schmuckery in front of a no-show audience, his pre-show indulgences and lack of preparation were completely forgivable and understandable.

What wasn't so forgivable, perhaps, was near the end of the event when he allowed Carlesimo to speak for five minutes and followed that by announcing that Osmulski and McKeon were suddenly limited to three minutes due to time limitations. The event ran ten minutes under the pre-scheduled ending time. That's what you get for running against an Italian in Tony's neighborhood.

Earlier in the evening, Christine Jennings touted her integrity and banking experience, while her opponent in the U.S. House race, Vern Buchanan, pulled a no-show. Nancy Detert and Morgan Bentley tried to claw each others' eyes out. Doug Holder, dressed for a yuppie barbecue in wrinkled Dockers and and an open shirt, acted like he had already won his race for re-election to the state house against Sam Rosenfeld (and, in all likelihood, he probably has).

Detert, a career pol running this year for a seat in the state senate, lost my vote long ago when I approached her to beg her for help. Years back, when I had uncovered the embezzlement scheme in the city's computer department, I begged Detert to help kick-start an FDLE investigation. Detert blew me off, saying that I should go to her good friend, Mayor Dean Calamaras. She handed back to me my folder of documented evidence without looking at it, saying that if there was anything to what I was alleging, her good buddy Dean would sort it all out.

Two years later, and with no help from Detert and a lot of interference from both Calamaras and then-city manager George Hunt, the Florida Commission on Ethics stomp-kicked the city's IT director, Steve Randall, for embezzlement. Randall resigned when the preliminary plea-agreement decision was first announced.

I've never been contacted by Detert since that day and I've never forgiven her as a result. All I was asking for was a phone call that would have saved me two more years worth of work, and she couldn't be bothered to even take a look at the cover page.

Detert's opponent, Morgan Bentley, has promised to take any allegations I bring to him seriously. Guess who I'm voting for in that race?

Donna Clarke, running for the county tax collector job, noted that her name was some 30% shorter than her opponent's, incumbent Barbara Ford-Coates, as though that had any significance on any level. Clarke's main selling point was that with her name as payee, it will be quicker to fill out the check when paying your taxes.

After that idiotic opening, I couldn't listen to the rest of her speech. Banging my head on the back wall of the Bay Indies auditorium would have caused a disruption that would have ended up with me being thrown out of the event, so rather than indulging myself in a bit of self-inflicted primal pain therapy, I walked outside to take a short break from this insane circus.

A return to... WTF?
John Osmulski touted his campaign for city council as a return to the balance that was upset in last years' election. That prior balance that Osmulski wants to return to consisted of seven council members all sponsored by land developers. Three were knocked out by a grassroots citizen uprising, which leaves still a 4-3 majority of developer-sponsored council members over citizens. Following Osmulski's logic, this current setup is somehow an imbalance that must be corrected, and God help us all if the land barons actually become a minority, so electing him as one of land developers' best friends will help return the balance to the proper imbalance of developers over residents.

And so ends another year of political warfare and debauchery, local politics gone mad in a bizarre parallel to the national stage, where money rules the dialog and ugly campaign speeches bear little semblance to the real hyper-ugliness of the political dialog that happens under the media surface. The public only gets to smell the blood at a single campaign stop. Follow the trail, attend three or more, take the time to actually talk to the candidates, and you're covered in it. Use all the soap you can, scream "Out, damn spot," but you can't clean this stain from your soul.

The only footnote left is the election night parties and the gloomy sense of waiting for pre-ordained destiny and fate. I'll be with Kit McKeon's bunch, hoping like hell that he can pull it off, and hoping like hell that I don't have to wander over to Osmulski's party for the obligatory ass-kissing.

There is an upside: Carlesimo, despite his hard work, is trailing as a distant third, thanks in no small part to this web site exposing him for the con artist that he is. "I have no baggage" has become his latest campaign motto.

...uhhhh, Emilio? You and your board are being sued for... what was that again?... Fraud? That's some damned huge baggage there, guy. That isn't even baggage, that's a cargo trailer. Thankfully, there is little chance for Carlesimo, except to act as a spoiler by sucking a few votes from Osmulski, so maybe Carlesimo's campaign in hindsight will be viewed as a good thing.

All that is left is the voting, followed, at least locally, by a short period of unnatural pretense that none of the ugliness actually happened, that we're all just one, big, happy community. In turn, that will be followed by a return to the natural order: cannibals and zombies can only go so long without eating the flesh of their own kind. With the Sunshine law lawsuit still ongoing, the feast of intestines and brain meat ought to kick into high frenzy right around late November.

What was it that Bette Davis said about a bumpy ride? Well, forget it. A more applicable quote comes from Night Of The Living Dead: "They're coming for you, Barbara!"

John Patten is the editor and publisher of Venice Florida! dot com and had previously worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He can also be incredibly rude at times.