Back a short time ago Armando Grundy first appeared in the Alachua County scene. His candidacy for the City Commission certainly was an interesting one. There was the incident at the Rotary Club with Tony Domenech; there was the off-the-record, tense feud with Stafford Jones, there was the friction with his opponent Jack Donovan, there was Grundy's Radikal Q&A, and of course... there was the Ron Paul connection.
What do you guys remember about Armando & that election? Where is he now? And who thinks we'll be hearing this name come up once again in Florida politics?
9 comments:
Heard he was running for office again near Lake Apopka.
We want Will Foster
Armando is one of the dumber people I have ever met. He is barely literate and 300 pounds, doubtful he will go far in state or even local politics
Armando is still around, I'm imagine you will be hearing his name again. He is still out there, you just need to know where to look.
Stafford Jones really dropped the ball with Grundy. I don't know why you even feel the need to give him such clout on your blog. He's supposed to be there for all republican candidates -- where was he for Armando?
The ACREC befpre Jones was far better off in my opinion.
Armando had a lot of vision, too bad the local republicans had a shortage of faith.
I think I speak for everyone when I say that I would have preferred a Grundy-Agrusa commission race. Actually, that would have been like the special olympics...
Grundy just needs time. When we did our Q&A at Panera, people were drawn into the conversation. He's got a good bit of charima, just needs to get with a good crew and work more on fine tuning his political objectives.
If Grundy were on the Left he'd still lose elections at this stage of the game, but he would be much more celebrated (e.g. a Mike Belle) - who now has a column in the Alligator (what's that all about? lol).
Armando is young, a minority, and fically conservative. The older voters distrust the college students, the liberals obviously distrust the conservatives, and Black Republicans are few and far between.
Give the guy some time. Don't piss on him b/c he had a blue collar job like some people I know. Just give him time.
Christian: This past national election seriously challenges the identity politics paradigm you base your reasoning on. The single most important variable in local elections is name recognition. This usually comes in the form of incumbent public officials or well-known community business leaders. By moving from place to place as a serial candidate, Armando has both failed to grasp this concept and very much disadvantaged his prospects of success.
People don't knock Armando because he had a blue collar job. to be frank, the guy was running to be a public official with little or no substantive understanding of the issues he would be asked to deal with - in fact, fittingly, his themes were the same mess of contradictory nonsense that got the national Republican party thrown out of office. If I recall correctly, his goals were to cut city spending AND increase the services of law enforcement and the fire department. Ahem.
The public began to wake up to the incoherence of these platforms in 2006. They realize that a lack of ideological consistency that fails to uniformly found itself on political pragmatism signals that the candidate is either (1) intellectually unqualified for the rigors of public office (Sarah Palin) or (2) largely captured by a slew of special interests (George W. Bush). Either way, the candidate's credentials will be very suspect in the public eye. And that's why he lost.
You're very much welcome for that. I will be signing autographs after the show.
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