It's Gonna Get Ugly, by SunshineUnderground

Over the weekend Real Clear Politics ranked Joe Garcia as the South Florida candidate most likely to defeat an incumbent and the Miami Herald's Naked Politics Blog was quick to pick it up.

Garcia's campaign was elated by the news on Sunday at the Cuban American National Foundation's commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the Exodus program, a project which Garcia lead for CANF after he graduated from law school.

Deputy Press Secretary Andy Diaz noted that the race was about to get ugly, and quick.

He accused the Diaz-Balart campaign of lying in it's latest ad, which ties Garcia to disgraced former Enron CEO Ken Lay, saying it was a sign of things to come. Diaz hinted that the Garcia campaign would soon respond by flooding the airwaves with a new ad of its own, without getting into particulars.

"The level of stretching the truth, it's going to be amazing,” he said. “I mean if this is what they're opening with, an outright lie, I can only imagine what they're going to go for next."

“Honest, we're not going to let them drive us down. We're going to talk about the facts, we're going to talk about the issues. You know, the thing with the Republican party now is that they can't talk about the issues. They can't go into a debate and talk about healthcare, they can't talk about the economy, they can't talk about the war in Iraq."

(For background, on the ad, check out the Herald piece on it. Notice how the reporter shows that the ad rather blatantly stretches the truth, and also notice how the Herald is too timid to call out the Diaz-Balart campaign for doing so.

My impression of Garcia, from speaking with him, and seeing him Sunday as well as on Saturday at an event sponsored by the Grey Panthers, was that he seems like professor, rattling off points and sub points as he plunges into a topic. Ask him a question, and take a seat, he'll handle it from there. I wondered whether he could combine this level of detail with enough emotion to connect to an audience, but on Sunday, at least, when reminiscing about his past work with CANF, he seemed to do the job. We'll have to see whether the same can be said after the debate the two campaigns have finally agreed to with Channel 4.