Race to be Miami-Dade mayor already is a partisan, red-baiting brawl | Opinion
Brace yourselves for an election season propelled by 1950s-style red-baiting in 21st century Miami.
The battle royal — and sideshow to the presidential election — is the highly partisan Miami-Dade County mayor’s race.
From the mouths of local operatives to the big guns in Washington, the narrative has been set.
Vote for the conservative, Sen. Marco Rubio tweeted, because he “won’t allow Marxist anarchy in our streets.”
A Miami blogger, an old hand at dirty politics, didn’t waste any time after Democratic Commissioner Daniella Levine Cava’s impressive primary win Tuesday over five candidates to come in a close second to Republican Esteban “Steve” Bovo of Hialeah.
“La versión de Bernie Sanders,” the blogger falsely pegged Levine Cava in an email blast.
Bovo supporters echoed similar sentiments on social media, casting the local race as a referendum on socialism in Cuba and Venezuela.
“Yes by all means let’s elect someone that will bring the fantastic marvelous Progressive ideas implement in Cuba and Venezuela to Miami,” said a Facebook post by businessman Felipe Barrios, so wound up he forgot all his commas and grammar. “They have worked so well for the Cuban and Venezuelan people never mind the lack of freedom the institutional racism the broad range of incarceration’s for people that disagree with the government the long food lines the inability to get fuel for your car these are all marvelous things that this wonderful liberal progressive socialist mayor will bring to Miami.”
There’s not an ounce of truth to the political messaging, but the connection to Cuba and Venezuela has wings in a county of exiles and their descendants.
The fear-mongering casts doubts, arouses deep-rooted feelings of impending danger too difficult to overcome at the ballot box.
That’s why they use it; spreading fear works.
It works in Republican strongholds like Miami Lakes, where voters overwhelmingly favored Bovo over Levine Cava, commissioner and former Miami mayor Xavier Suarez, and former county Mayor Alex Penelas, who lives in the town.
It is remarkable when you consider that Bovo is behind the push to open Miami Lakes on the west to massive traffic from overdeveloped Hialeah and Hialeah Gardens.
What happened to the anger at Bovo for the road openings, for the American Dream Mall nightmare and for not speaking up against the blasting damaging homes by White Rock Quarries, from whom Bovo has accepted campaign donations?
They may have packed City Hall, voices cracking over the prospect of the lovely but traffic-clogged town at peak hours becoming even more unbearable, but at the voting booth they developed McCarthy-esque amnesia.
The campaign is only going to get more ridiculous on the road to November as Bovo, who supports President Trump, hangs on for dear life to the president’s tattered coattails.
On her end, Levine Cava is campaigning on local issues with the down-ballot Democratic slate of candidates to the Florida Legislature and Congress, hoping to cash in on the fact that Miami-Dade votes Democrat for president.
She sent out a campaign flier singling out Bovo as a Trump man. No need. It’s obvious from his campaign literature.
“Make no mistake,” Bovo writes in his vision statement, “my administration will not serve the interests of the extreme liberals that are looking to redefine America...”
The partisanship could hurt both candidates — or not, but Levine Cava has more to lose: making history.
Mayor’s post nonpartisan
The powerful strong-mayor’s job is supposed to be nonpartisan; the county charter says so. But it hasn’t been non-partisan in practice for a long time.
The mayor and commissioners frequently take positions on foreign policy pertaining to Cuba and Venezuela as if the commission were an appendage to Congress.
And while local leaders, regardless of party, used to be proud and protective of Miami-Dade’s immigrant soul, termed-out Mayor Carlos Gimenez and Cuban commissioners sided with Trump on immigration to the detriment of the undocumented, whose labor and dollars contribute to the county’s economy.
The 2016 election of the divisive Trump, who delights in courting Cuban Americans — the only Hispanic group to vote for him in the 50 percent range — has heightened the partisanship to toxic levels.
Bovo is an expert at playing the socialism and communism card when he’s against legislation.
When Levine Cava proposed in May in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic requiring that county contractors offer employees seven days of paid sick leave, Bovo and the other Cuban Americans on the commission derailed it by arguing that only the Communist regimes of Cuba and Venezuela forced the private sector to do things like that.
“In countries like Nicaragua and Venezuela and in Cuba, these are the kind of policies that they begin to implement,” Bovo said. “People leave those countries because government begins to put their foot on everybody’s throat.”
The comparison was ludicrous.
There’s no private sector in Cuba, but there was strong unionization in pre-Castro Cuba, and workers liked it. Venezuela doesn’t offer sick days. It’s rounding up and jailing the infected with COVID. Nicaragua hides the number of sick and dead and fires health workers who question the mismanagement.
First female mayor
If Levine Cava overcomes the labels and miscasting — she has denounced the regimes of Cuba and Venezuela with vehemence equal to that of the Republicans — and defeats Bovo, she would become the county’s first female mayor.
She could easily win if she picks up Penelas’ voters and Suarez’s independents — and if Blacks and young liberals turn out to vote in record numbers as they did when President Obama was on the ballot.
But the former social-work executive and lawyer will have to overcome biases on two tough fronts.
She’s a woman and a proud progressive in a county where conservatives are faithful and reliable voters — and many Democrats are centrists who, although they support the Black Lives Matter movement, question the wisdom of calls to “defund police” that fuel the rhetoric of people like Rubio and Bovo.
“In Miami-Dade, we’re not going to defund the police,” Bovo said in Spanish at his victory party. “In Miami-Dade, we’re going to respect the police.”
Levine Cava hasn’t said she wants to defund the police, but truth doesn’t matter.
They’re already calling her “a leftist mayor” to slam the door shut.
Red-baiting. McCarthyism. Fear-mongering.
Welcome to Miami, 2020.
