Most of the time, we get lousy politicians who refuse to go away no matter the evidence against them. David Rivera, for instance. Occasionally, however, we see a politician emerge from nowhere only to quickly disappear: too rare to survive a campaign, but too weird to ever really be forgotten.
Such is the case with Republican Democratic congressional candidate Justin Lamar Sternad. He is a one-man stimulus to South Florida's headline writers. Just in the past two weeks he has been accused of (1) not really being a Democrat and (2) breaking campaign laws with racially misleading campaign flyers.
Now, after getting trounced on Tuesday, comes his parting gift. Asked by the Miami Herald about his campaign finances, he answered simply via email: "Kiss my 'lily-white' ass."
Sternad was reacting to the Herald's question how he could afford $30,000 of campaign mailers when his campaign was broke and he and his wife earn less than that amount a year, combined.
The owner of the company that published the mailers told the newspaper that Sternad had paid in cash.
That's suspicious, especially given several candidates, including primary favorite (and easy winner with 53 percent of the vote) Joe Garcia, had already accused Sternad of being a David Rivera plant intended to weaken Garcia before the general election.
But Sternad's rude, written response was also in reference to another controversy. A previous Herald article had suggested Sternad was misleading voters about his race by using only his middle name -- Lamar -- on campaign mailers in an attempt to win the African-American vote.
In hindsight, maybe Sternad should have just come out and said "kiss my 'lily white' Republican ass" instead.
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