Dreaming about Jack Latvala vs. John Morgan for governor

First, a confession, or perhaps a guilty plea.

It is certainly true that elections are serious things. After all, we are voting to place our trust in a candidate to faithfully serve in whatever office he or she is vying for. We all want good governance. We all want our public servants to be competent and honest.

But a little entertainment value on the stump isn’t such a bad thing, either.

So when Clearwater state Sen. Jack Latvala, R-I’m Getting Vewy, Vewy Angry, announced last week he is running for governor, you might have thought of his campaign in policy terms. I embraced it as a moment of grand political theater.

Halfway there.

About the only thing better than seeing Latvala capture the Republican gubernatorial nomination would be to find him running in the general election against Democrat John Morgan, the flamboyant Orlando lawyer. Think of this as a match-up made in anger management heaven.

A guy can dream, can’t he?

There is just a teensy problem confronting Latvala, R-Why I Oughta!.

To be sure, the long-serving state senator is a politically savvy chap. He is an expert in direct mail political strategy. And he enters the Republican primary with a reasonably healthy campaign war chest of about $4 million.

However, outside Tampa Bay, Latvala’s name recognition is somewhere between the Miami Marlins’ clubhouse manager and the last winner of the Key West Ernest Hemingway look-alike contest.

If you walked into a mall in Jacksonville and asked 100 people if they knew Latvala, R-Pick Out Two Fingers, you would probably get more blank stares than the cast of Village of the Damned.

Still, it is early yet, and given long-shot Latvala’s garrulous personality, he could attract enough attention to broaden his profile.

Conventional wisdom holds that the fairly moderate Latvala, R-Shut Up And Say Something!, can create a pathway to the nomination while his more conservative rivals cancel each other out.

In addition to the Mr. Grouchy Pants of Clearwater, the potential Republican field appears to consist of Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, House Speaker Richard Corcoran and U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis, who have been burnishing their credentials as so far to the right they make the tea party look like the ACLU.

Putnam had been viewed as a fairly even-handed politician. But lately the commissioner has been proudly bragging he can be happily had by special interest groups like the National Rifle Association for the price of a campaign contribution.

You know the level of political integrity has reached a new low when a candidate like Putnam promotes himself as a “sellout.”

As for Corcoran, it appears his relationship with Latvala resembles the mutual loathing between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.

Latvala, R-Pie Fight, is one of those people often associated with the phrase, “does not suffer fools gladly,” which certainly would make one wonder why he ever pursued being a member of the Florida Legislature.

It remains an open question just how the 65-year-old Latvala’s prickly temperament will play on the campaign trail. After all, great lip-service is given to how much the public admires a politician who tells it like it is, until the candidate actually does tell it like it is and winds up offending large swaths of the electorate who don’t particularly like being told like it is, especially when it does not comport with how they tell it like it is.

Latvala, R-Head Slap, has offered himself up as a small businessman who knows how to solve problems. That’s very nice. But he knows credentials are often the last measure used by voters to make their decisions. Gov. Rick Scott proved that.

Latvala’s greatest challenge is becoming a known commodity to establish credibility. If he can pull that off, perhaps we might see him debating John Morgan. You could sell tickets to that.

A guy can dream, can’t he?

This story was originally published August 17, 2017 at 1:16 PM with the headline "Dreaming about Jack Latvala vs. John Morgan for governor."