Saturday, September 24, 2011 – Florida Straw Poll-Very Exciting!

Worst Lighting Ever

Woke up still feeling lousy, but at the least the diarrhea seems to have gone away. I was determined to try to see more of the events today, so after a light breakfast, we headed over to the Convention Center where we watched the speeches of some of the candidates or their surrogates, and some didn’t even bother to send surrogates. The actual speakers were Rick Santorum, who did nothing but talk about himself (a losing strategy in our book), Newt Gingrich (who is always entertaining, but is still a bit vague about any actual plans or agenda other than the usual manta of lower taxes and private job creation), and Herman Cain, who frankly, ROCKED THE HOUSE!! He has a great no-nonsense style and a great message, with clear and easy to understand plans that might actually work, or at least start a dialogue that goes in the right direction toward something that might work. It would be great if he could get some traction here. He had a good performance on Thursday, albeit they didn’t give him much of a chance to speak because he’s not considered a top tier candidate, but he makes more sense than any of them in my book. And apparently not just my book, he impressed a lot of people here and ended up winning the straw poll by a HUGE margin!! It was incredibly exciting, because I don’t think anyone believed that anyone but them voted for Herman, so when the numbers came up there was as much disbelief at first as there was ecstasy later. He was impressive, and this should wake up the rest of the country to at least listen to him and judge for themselves, rather than having the media or the RNC pick them for us. Anyway, we were feeling just well enough afterwards to decide to have dinner at a restaurant in the Peabody on the walk back to our hotel, and enjoyed a nice but very slow meal there, which included some nice red meat for which we both had a craving. Our client happened by and spoke to us for a few minutes as well, so overall the day went as well as it could have done, even though neither of us were yet 100 percent. We were one our way, though! Just exhausted and weakened from the experience.