A.G. Gancarski
Tonight, the Sun Ray theater in the Riverside area of Jacksonville hosted a “conversation with the candidates” in the District 14 City Council race between incumbent Republican Jim Love and his nominally Democratic opponent, Jason Tetlak.
I say “nominally Democratic” because last week, the local Democratic Party purged Tetlak for breaking ranks with party orthodoxy and supporting Bill Bishop for Mayor. They have renounced him as a candidate, and will not offer any material support, which Tetlak confirmed to this reporter tonight.
Thus, Tetlak is dependent on support from outside party lines. Events like tonight’s, in which moderator John Citrone (a longtime local journalist and former A&E editor and current columnist for Folio Weekly) urged the candidates to “step away from stuff in your campaign literature”, are theoretically his only hope to even make things interesting. Regrettably for Tetlak, tonight didn’t help him.
Throughout the evening, there was a father/son dynamic to the pairing on the stage — one that wasn’t helped along by Tetlak, at one point, mentioning playing soccer with Love’s son. On issue after issue, Love showed why he’ll get four more years on Council. He knows how to find a centrist position on issue after issue, one that isn’t revolutionary but which works as a compromise position for his district.
The first discussion the candidates had, on dredging the St. Johns River to 47 feet in order to expand the port, set the tone for the rest of the conversation. Love sold the dredging project on utilitarian grounds, saying that dredging will bring jobs and “prosperity to more people”, adding that “if you care about people, you’ll support dredging.”
“We will lose jobs if we don’t dredge,” says Love, who adds (in case you didn’t get it) that “dredging will bring jobs for a long time.”
This position spans Jacksonville’s version of a political spectrum. Ander Crenshaw and Corrine Brown, the two United States Representatives with a stake in the area, support it. Tetlak does not. He doesn’t think there will be sufficient benefit for the project. He also argues that bigger ships can come through the river already, as long as they’re not fully loaded.
Tetlak isn’t exactly a single issue candidate — but his primary reason for entering the race was that Love didn’t vote for the “inclusive version” of the Human Rights Ordinance expansion in 2012. “Convincing people to do what’s right is what we’re elected to do,” he added.
Love has been pilloried for not voting for the original version of the bill, which lost 16-2. He voted for the compromise version, which lost by one vote when Councilman Johnny Gaffney voted against it, surprising activists who’d been assured that he was a solid yes.
Love gave the best explanation of the realpolitik on this issue that he has yet.
“I didn’t know how everyone was gonna vote. It’s a little tricky, with the Sunshine Law, to strong arm support on these issues,” he said, adding that the vote was not a simple Republican Versus Democrat issue, as there are some socially conservative Democrats who won’t vote for it.
Love also spoke of the pressure put on him to vote the other way.
“I had a lot of Republicans tell me not to vote for the HRO. They came to my office at State Farm,” he said, and told him that if he voted for it, he’d never win another election in Jacksonville.
He’s a few weeks from reelection now, barring some bizarre occurrence. Jacksonville politics is a compromise game, one in which successful politicians generally have to build sustainable coalitions across demographic boundaries to win. This is a game that Jim Love understands instinctively, and that Jason Tetlak has yet to learn.
