Patrick Murphy And David Jolly Want To Insert Third Way Into The Florida Governor's Race

Patrick Murphy's papa bought him a congressional seat in the West Palm area (FL-18) in 2012. It was incredibly close but Murphy had a perfect foil-- lunatic fringe neo-fascist Allen West. Even Murphy looked almost like a lesser of two evils. Murphy's father started a PAC, American Sunrise, and financed his ne'rer-do-well son with $118,578. Sensing thew kind of DINO they love, the DCCC put in another $548,517. The final score was 166,257 (50.3%) to 164,353 (49.7%). Murphy went on to be lazy, incompetent backbencher with no achievements at all except to raise Wall Street cash by backing the banksters (along with Republicans and his fellow corrupt New Dems) on the House Financial Services Committee. In 2016 Schumer and Reid picked him to run for the U.S. Senate and Rubio beat him 52-44%. He drew 4,122,088 votes while Hillary Clinton was getting 4,504,975 votes on the same day. Nearly 400,000 Democratic voters decided to not cast a ballot for Murphy. Maybe his "F" rating by Progressive Punch helps explain why.

There is a lively election to replace Rick Scott as governor now. And Murphy is back, rearing his ugly drunken heard again. Now he's the "bipartisan candidate," offering to run on a ticket with with former Congressman David Jolly, who was ousted in 2016 by flip-floppy conservative Charlie Crist from his Pinellas County seat.

There are already 4 serious Democrats in the race, a female version of Murphy, DINO Gwen Graham, plus two other wretched conservaDems, former Miami Beach mayor Philip Levine and random rich businessman Christopher King, and one progressive, Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum. (There are also a dozen of so Republicans running for their party's nomination, though the top two are mainstream establishment conservative Adam Putnam and neo-fascist Trumpist Ron DeSantis.)

Monday evening Alex Leary broke the news in the Tampa Bay Times that Murphy and Jolly had put together a DINO/RINO ruse to attract attention. Their theory of the race is that a "split ticket idea recognizes growing dissatisfaction with the polarization of both parties and a possible third way."

"Working across the aisle was a hallmark of my two terms in Congress, and the relationships I formed with members of both parties were invaluable," Murphy said at the outset of the town-hall tour last summer. "I look forward to joining my former colleague as we share our perspectives on ways we must work together to improve our broken political system."

Jolly added, "Even in times of great disagreement there are ways of finding common ground, there are opportunities for bipartisan leadership to solve some of our country's toughest issues."

Geoff Burgan, Gillum's communications director, had a riotous response: "We welcome anyone who wants to talk about Florida’s future. The contrast in vision and background between the three millionaires running against Andrew Gillum couldn’t be more clear." Meanwhile, one of Murphy's former congressional colleagues laughed and told me that "it's sad but true: being unprincipled and unscrupulous, zero accomplishments to your name, and standing for nothing except self-promotion, now qualifies as 'bipartisan.'" Another of his former colleagues (from the House Financial Services Committee) referred to him as "a smarmy jerk-boy" and that was really the only think I can repeat about what she had to say about Murphy.