A.G. Gancarski
The Westside Republican Club meeting, held at a jampacked church on Old Middleburg Road on Monday night, was devoted entirely to the upcoming election. Though a lot of the media focus has been on where voters in the urban core might go in the May 19 election, turnout in Republican strongholds like the Westside is essential to push GOP candidates over the hump in three weeks.
If Monday night’s meeting, at which Lenny Curry, Mike Williams, and At Large Council Candidate Geoff Youngblood all spoke is any indication, they should be fine with this part of the base.
After the Pledge, a prayer, and some trivia questions about Curry, the meeting started in earnest.
“That’s the best intro I ever had,” Curry effused, referring to the trivia questions about Curry playing football, being on the Boxing Commission, the length of his marriage, and how many kids he has.
Curry started off with a new story: about playing football in high school, and being convinced that he’d be going to college to play football, until his coach made him aware of a non-negotiable reality.
“I had no idea I was five foot, eight and a half inches,” he related, saying that while his coach conceded that he had “heart,” that wasn’t enough for his dreams of football prominence.
Curry, of course, brought that pugnacious style to his political career in recent years, including his work as the RPOF Chair, which was a “good thing” to the partisan Republican crowd, which got to hear Curry making an overt appeal to the right flank of the party.
“We have serious challenges ahead of us,” Curry said, including our “violent crime and murder rate” that result from a “lack of budget priorities” in City Hall.
Unmentioned: The riots in Baltimore, taking place on cable TV as this meeting happened, provided a subtext, along with the spate of murders and shootings in Jacksonville in recent days, as a summer of violence and heartache starts early.
Getting caught up in the crowd enthusiasm, Curry called out, “I’m preachin’!” But his sermon wasn’t about fire and brimstone; rather, it was about our “financial records,” which are a “mess.”
Then, a rhetorical question: “How does that make you feel?”
Curry knew the answer, as he launched into a line of attack that was new in his stump speeches. “The mayor presented himself to the public as a ‘conservative Democrat.’ He had a press conference where he pushed for a raise of the minimum wage. He went to Tallahassee with a full embrace of Obamacare,” he added, via “Medicaid expansion.”
“Is that conservative?”
After an appeal to the GOP diehards to counteract the “mayor’s ground game,” which “will turn out a lot of voters,” questions came in from the audience on a variety of subjects. One subject not addressed: the Human Rights Ordinance or Alvin Brown‘s recent request to the General Counsel regarding discrimination legislation.
The Q&A section allowed Curry to hold forth on topics that aren’t necessarily part of the typical stump oratory, such as his position on taxes, where he’d hold a firm line like Rick Scott on the state level, driving revenue expansion through economic growth.
Curry also addressed combating the rising tide of gang violence, an issue which, the Republican contends, will require more “boots on the ground,” along with a renewed focus on Jacksonville Journey style programs. Drawing a tacit distinction between GOP messaging and the somewhat more disconnected messaging between Brown and Democratic sheriff candidate Ken Jefferson, Curry said that “Mike Williams and I are perfectly aligned.”
Speaking of Williams, he followed Curry in the program. Much of what he said was familiar to those paying attention to this campaign messaging. The most interesting part of his remarks was his clarification of his stances on the Drug War and marijuana, which were a bit more nuanced than usual.
A recurrent theme of his campaign has been its linkage of the Drug Trade to violent crime. Somewhat surprisingly, he said, for the first time that this reporter can recall hearing, that he wasn’t “talking about a new war on drugs” when he talked about attacking the drug trade; he was talking about a “smart strategy” that would address the problems associated with it on the distribution level.
A nuanced distinction; too nuanced for one person in the crowd, who asked Williams if he thought “drug usage was OK.”
The sheriff candidate scrambled to clarify. “Drug usage is not OK,” he reassured the questioner; however, he added, despite his opposition to Amendment 2 last year as a backdoor legalization and normalization measure, he had “no issue” with use of marijuana to address the effects of “debilitating diseases.”
Perhaps the most interesting answer Williams gave was about the crime in the perpetually embattled 103rd Street area, where one questioner claimed that officers were “scared” to walk the neighborhood and enforce the law.
Williams mentioned that in the isolated cases where that may happen, that was a problem with supervision. But he got to the larger problem: one of finite resources for the Sheriff’s Office.
Pointing out the last two acute offensives against crime waves, Operation Safe Streets a few years back, and last summer’s Operation Ceasefire, it was clear that the first operation had more resources to succeed. More doors were knocked; more citizen contacts were made; more time was spent on the project. Still, these operations are the equivalent of the full-court press defense in basketball; unsustainable in the long term.
“We can drive down violent crime,” said Williams, “but we need a long term solution.”
One of the problems, added Williams, in the 103rd Street area is that the officers are so overstretched that they don’t have time for anything but going from one crisis to the next. Community policing and relationship building are casualties of resource depletion, he contended, and there’s “not a lot of time for [officers] to build a relationship” with the community.
Another casualty of diminished resources: the ability for the sheriff’s office to keep tabs on repeat offenders. “These guys who have been arrested 10 to 20 times, we know who they are,” he said, but the lack of resources for anything but response to calls has “caused us to lose track” of many of them. This likely will create enforcement issues down the road.
Continuing in a similar vein, Geoff Youngblood talked about the budget with an increased level of specificity compared to previous appearances in front of crowds. He has evolved from a candidate who relied on social conservative tropes leading up to the First Election to a more credible fiscal conservative in recent weeks. Kudos to whoever is briefing him. Perhaps without expecting it, Tommy Hazouri is in a dogfight as Early Voting approaches.
