Peter Schorsch
I don’t think ex-Commissioner Jimmy Conner is racist — but he sure thought Lake County voters were.
A fixture in local politics for decades, the bombastic Conner bet his campaign on a stridently anti-Mexican, Trump-esque appeal to Republican Primary voters. It turned out to be a bad bet. Voters handed Conner a surprising loss and elected soft-spoken librarian Wendy Breeden to replace him on the Lake County Commission.
How did border politics creep into a county commission race? Last year, Conner voted against a proposal by concrete-manufacturer Cemex to expand its local operations. Then, he made it the centerpiece of his campaign. Many of Conner’s mail pieces and online ads have featured nasty, bare-knuckled attacks on the company. At first, the move raised eyebrows. After all, there are already six active sand mines in Lake County, and the Cemex operation would be small by comparison — not much to base a countywide campaign on.
But Conner wagered Republicans would reward his vote for another reason: Cemex is Mexico-based — a point Conner’s campaign hammered hard.
Ironically, Conner’s Trump-like strategy put him in bed with left-wing Orlando Sentinel columnist Lauren Ritchie, who wrote that “Cemex should go mine sand in Mexico” after labeling it a “despised Mexican company.” Conner and Ritchie may have different partisan stripes, but they both know a dog whistle when they see one — or so they must’ve thought.
The frequency with which Ritchie uses “Mexican” as a four-letter word is jarring, particularly when contrasted with her attacks on one-time whipping-boy Niagara Bottling. While Ritchie blasted Niagara six ways to Sunday, she seldom mentioned the company’s home base (it’s from California). However, nearly all of her Cemex-related columns contain overt — and often nasty — references to the company’s country of origin.
It’s startling that the supposedly progressive Orlando Sentinel — which has blasted Donald Trump for similar rhetoric — would continue to sponsor Ritchie’s thinly veiled ethnic attacks. Sure, she’s a columnist — but the Orlando Sentinel is supposed to be a reputable publication. It’s hard to imagine that its editors are blind to Ritchie’s race-baiting game or that they’re ignorant of the effect it’s had on Lake County politics: the paper’s repeated publication of Lauren Ritchie’s dog whistle provided cover for Jimmy Conner to sound the same note.
Fortunately, it proved off-key. As far as issues go, the sand mine turned out to be a proverbial “nothing burger,” while Conner’s votes to raise property taxes and greenlight Wellness Way — a developer-drafted plan to build 16,000 new houses in South Lake County — proved fatal.
It’s bad enough that Conner thought he could score cheap points with raw nativism; it’s even worse that the Orlando Sentinel abetted him. Fortunately, the moral of the story is that nasty, divisive, transparently xenophobic rhetoric doesn’t always pay off.
Had Conner won, we’d be forced to reckon with a very different lesson.
