The political car crash known as Katherine Harris continues its collision course in Florida.
And now we have hint why the crash is so bad, via the Miami Herald:
Katherine Harris’ floundering U.S. Senate campaign lost its high-level staff again this week and is groping for a message — which doesn’t surprise Republican insiders who trace the seeds of her trouble to the story of “Joe’s dead intern.”
It was Joe Scarborough, host of the prime-time MSNBC show Scarborough Country and a former Pensacola Republican congressman who was courted last summer by national Republicans to run against Harris. But before he could announce he wouldn’t, Harris called major donors and suggested Scarborough would have to answer questions about the strange death of a former staff member in 2001, according to two former high-level Harris staff members, a GOP donor and Scarborough.
”That was the first clue that something wasn’t right with Katherine Harris,” Scarborough told The Miami Herald in a recent interview, noting that a medical examiner found his staff member’s death was natural and not the result of foul play.
Harris, through a spokeswoman, denied Scarborough’s account, saying she ”would never insinuate publicly or privately” that he did anything untoward.
But her former staff members say they expected her to deny the previously untold anecdote, which they say marked the beginning of the Harris campaign’s tailspin. Since then, Harris has been dogged by her connections to an indicted defense contractor and by heavy staff turnover from last fall through Thursday, when five top aides announced their departure a day after her spokesman quit. Her campaign had issued a news release Wednesday suggesting only spokesman Chris Ingram was leaving.
The bottom line is: there are certain limits, even in the 21st Century era of The Politics Of Personal Destruction. Yes, some Republicans used to (and some talk shows still do) go on and on about Bill and Hillary Clinton and Vince Foster, but this one seemed even zanier.
You could be a cynic, however, and say that in brutal, animalistic political terms her mistake was that she should have used a SURROGATE to slander her competitor and drag his name through the mud — just as most successful politicians do.
But there is also the Bad Boss element: Katherine Harris has gone through more staffers than Michael Jackson has gone through noses and most voters know when they’re reading about a terrible, mean or incompetent boss when they read about one.
So Harris has become a kind of “high concept” subject for political writers: her name now immediately conjures up someone who somehow isn’t quite right, doesn’t seem like someone you’d like to work with or for (let alone elect) and obsessed with running in this election no matter what it does to her party — or that tiny portion of what remains of her longtime-controversial political reputation.
UPDATE: For a different view on the believability of Harris’ reported claims, read skippy.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.