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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: CYBERKEN who wrote (748531)	9/3/2006 8:53:48 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

In the Democratic contest, between Representative Jim Davis of Tampa and State Senator Rod Smith of Gainesville, the powerful sugar industry has played an incendiary role. The United States Sugar Corporation has helped independent political committees pay for fliers and advertisements attacking Mr. Davis and promoting Mr. Smith, the son of farmers and the chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. One flier sent to black voters said Mr. Davis had a “record of shame,” pointing to his 1990 vote as a state legislator against restitution for two black men who had been wrongfully imprisoned for murder. Voters in South Florida, many of whom are Jewish, learned from fliers financed by United States Sugar that Mr. Davis had missed a Congressional vote supporting Israel and condemning Hezbollah. The committees that created the advertisements and fliers have received almost $4 million from sugar companies since Aug. 14, state campaign finance records indicate. Mr. Davis has fought back by painting Mr. Smith as a pawn of the sugar industry and other big business. “His record of siding with special interests comes through loud and clear,” a Davis campaign advertisement says of Mr. Smith. An advertisement broadcast this week by the Save Our Everglades Trust, a nonprofit group, points out that Mr. Smith voted to delay the deadline for a cleanup of the Everglades and depicts him getting buried in a mountain of sugar. Jim Kane, the chief pollster for Florida Voter, a nonpartisan polling organization, said the last-minute mudslinging between the Democrats would only hurt the eventual nominee. In particular, Mr. Crist, who championed a bill that gave the attorney general more power to investigate civil rights violations, could hammer Mr. Davis for his vote in the restitution case if the two men face off in the November general election, Mr. Kane said. “The Republicans,” he said, “are being given on a silver platter the issues they need to drive home in November.”