Peter Schorsch
Former St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Baker snubbed sitting City Council member Ed Montanari last week when he rescinded his endorsement for Montanari in the House District 60 race.
It was a move that smacked of juvenile politicking that benefits no one, at least no one in the GOP. On the contrary, the only person it could help is Montanari’s opposition, incumbent Democrat Lindsay Cross, though even that might be a stretch.
Why? Because Baker has become mostly irrelevant, and he has no one to blame but himself.
Baker could have gone out on top. He could have remained beloved in St. Pete for the progress he made reshaping the city from God’s waiting room, filled with green benches and not much else, into the booming metropolis it is today. He could have gone out as the rare Republican who managed to win the hearts of the city’s Black community.
But he didn’t. He squandered his legacy through an ill-advised campaign for Mayor in 2017.
To be clear, his decision to run for Mayor against then-incumbent Rick Kriseman was not the ill-advised part. Kriseman, though popular among Democrats, was facing a rash of frustration from city residents writ large over the city’s emerging sewage crisis. Baker, with his strong contingent of support, was probably the only man who could unseat an otherwise popular incumbent.
But like the decision to write off Montanari, he made a series of bad choices.
Let’s start first with why the Montanari snub was such a bad idea, and only cements his position as the ‘Burg’s nothing burger.
First of all, Montanari is running in a situation similar to Baker’s in 2017. He’s a moderate Republican running in a district with an advantage (albeit shrinking) for Democrats, against an incumbent that is at least relatively popular. There are few Republicans who could take Cross on with any chance of winning, and Montanari is likely at the top of that list.
If anyone should see the need for unification around a common goal — in this case, flipping a blue seat red — it should be Baker.
Second, with one singular decision, Baker just turned himself into the Kathleen Ford of St. Pete politics. For those familiar with Ford’s almost rise to power and her descent into conspiracy-prone antics, I don’t need to explain much further. For the rest, all you really need to know is, she went from a progressive Democrat, at a time when being a progressive was almost a dirty word, to aligning herself with Republicans in the name of giving the finger to what she sees as an establishment that screwed her over. (She hasn’t said this, of course, but it’s not hard to take liberties with her thinking.)
Baker was once the star of local GOP politics. His support often made the difference between victory or defeat. Now, he’s the one who looks like he’s got an ax to grind with his own political party.
And over what? A stadium deal.
There are strong opinions on both sides of the Rays stadium issue, though the opposition has proven to be a relatively small group of very vocal detractors. Baker is one of them. The rest of the city is either supportive, or somewhere in the middle in the land of ambivalence.
So to give Montanari the figurative finger over a generational deal that goes back to, get this, Baker’s time in office, is not only shortsighted, it’s plain dumb.
If he wanted to, Baker could have publicly declared his disagreement with Montanari over the City Council member’s “yes” vote on the deal. He could have ensured voters knew where he stood on that issue while still making certain they knew that a difference of opinion on one thing doesn’t change the united goal of growing GOP power in Tallahassee.
But he chose to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The good thing for Montanari is this: Baker stopped being relevant when he blew a race he should have won.
Read about the 2017 race for Mayor and you’ll find that, before the Primary, the question wasn’t whether Baker would win, it was whether he would win outright in the Primary. Not only did he not, he actually narrowly lost, and then lost bigger in the General Election.
There was much analysis of what went wrong back then, and a lot of it pointed to Kriseman’s decision to bring national politics into the local race. Tying Baker to then-President Donald Trump was no doubt a winning strategy at the time. And Baker’s reluctance to say anything about whether he supported Trump didn’t do the former Mayor any favors.
But some silly campaign choices also helped land Baker in the realm of political has-beens. Remember those ads he kept showing? He transformed himself from the professional, put-together image of the Baker we had come to know and respect, and attempted to brand himself as a super hip, guitar playing, sunglass wearing badass. I told him at the time it wasn’t the boon he thought it would be. But he went ahead anyway.
Let’s not even get into those goofy shirts with the missing vowels.
Voters then didn’t need a suave Baker, they needed the Baker who got shit done.
Today, voters don’t need to ask Baker for his opinion on races, because many of them probably don’t even remember who Rick Baker is.
