It's Easier Here: Wait, the election is five days away?
A daily Florida Times-Union newsletter with local political commentary by columnist Nate Monroe on all that is easy — or sleazy — in the Bold New City of the South.
SINCE THIS IS THE LEAST NEWSY MAYORAL CAMPAIGN EVER, let's have some fun and reflect for a moment on Wednesday's big news:
It’s official - QB Nick Foles is a Jaguar, by John Reid.
Jaguars front office chief Tom Coughlin addressed a major offseason need Wednesday when he completed perhaps the biggest chess move he has made since returning to the franchise in January 2017.
It’s official. Quarterback Nick Foles is a Jaguar.
The Super Bowl LII MVP signed a four-year, $88 million contract that contains a franchise-record $50.125 million guaranteed. With incentives included, Foles’ deal could escalate to $102 million.
Before any other loyalties, I'm a Saints fan first – as mean, unfaithful and ungrateful a fan base to an under-performing player as one can find in the NFL. So I found it a bit admirable, if not perplexing, that Jags fans were so ready to embrace Bortles, despite his obvious warts; to validate him for mediocre play; and to put his face on T-shirts to spite the haters. Maybe Jacksonville saw some of itself in the man, a quarterback with clear promise who just couldn't quite get it together.
Bortles simply wasn't worth the money he was being paid. I know, I know. He's a nice guy, and apparently friends with the mayor (eye roll), and he didn't have enough talent around him. He had trouble throwing a spiral. It doesn't take an NFL scout to figure out that's a problem.
I don't know if Foles is the answer, or if the team is overpaying him. I was partial to Teddy Bridgewater myself — maybe more irrational Saints-first thinking on my part. And hey, none of you should be listening to me anyway.
THE ERA OF GOOD FEELINGS CONTINUES: Lenny Curry’s closing argument: Anna Brosche can’t be trusted, by Florida Politics' A.G. Gancarksi.
Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry is dominating the resource war in his re-election campaign, and is able to run two ads concurrently as early voting comes to a close.
The negative ad has somewhat more narrative juice than the positive spot. With time bought via the Florida Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, it makes the closing argument against opponent Anna Brosche.
The contention: Brosche is “running for Mayor, and from criminal investigators,” as the voiceover asserts.
The ad’s message is ironic given that Brosche is running on a transparency/open government platform.
It was about as predictable as a sunrise this investigation would end up in a political advertisement from Mayor Lenny Curry's campaign. This is one reason State Attorney Melissa Nelson's investigation was politically fraught. She shared political advisers with Curry, one of whom is now Curry's chief of staff. Overseeing an investigation that involved Curry's political adversaries, and releasing those results in the middle of the city elections was always going to be controversial. I don't know if it will turn out to be a consequential factor – again, we have to assume it's close enough in the first place – but it certainly doesn't help Brosche.
BETTER THINGS TO DO: Between The Players, the NFL free agency drama and March Madness, no wonder turnout in the city elections so far mirrors a high school class president race. Only about 8.8 percent of registered voters had cast ballots by the end of Wednesday, and the electorate still skews Republican by about seven percentage points. If that holds through the weekend, it'll be bad news for Brosche, a Republican who is counting on support from Democrats to keep Curry under the 50-plus-1 threshold and force a May runoff.
FIVE DAYS.
SHAMELESS PLUG: River on our doorstep gets higher, by Nate Monroe.
Jacksonville — bordered by the Atlantic Ocean on its coast, split down the middle by Florida’s longest river, and subdivided even more by a maze of feeder creeks, tidal marshes and the Intracoastal Waterway — likely has more shoreline than almost any other city in the United States, about 1,100 miles in all. It is strange and tragic, then, that Jacksonville also happens to be one of the most clueless about sea-level rise.
Lacking in both national profile and elected leaders willing to draw attention to it, Jacksonville’s increasing problems with rising waters don’t draw the same kind of outside interest that, say, Miami’s fight against sea-level rise does, and yet things are getting worse here all the same. Nuisance flooding — that is, flooding during high tide — is not a South Florida phenomenon. Ask the residents in San Marco about that.
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Email Nate Monroe at nmonroe@jacksonville.com. Sign up for Nate’s daily newsletter.