If you are a billionaire candidate for office running in a primary that’s going to be held in six days, you might well have mixed feelings about looking at Politico today and seeing an image of your BFF Mike Tyson above the headline: “I Never Did Drugs on the Boat.”
Yes, it’s probably helpful to Jeff Greene that Tyson is backing up his claim that he had a “zero tolerance for drugs” policy on the yacht that the ex-champ lived on during an extended tour of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. But beyond that, reminders of Greene’s rather sketchy background as a rich playboy are not exactly what the political doctor ordered right now. The voluble Tyson didn’t help much when he went beyond his immediate talking points and offered some details from his cruise itinerary:
Tyson also voluntarily described an incident in Sardinia, where the yacht docked at what point that August, in which he was charged – and later cleared – of a sex assault in which the woman making the accusation claimed he’d wanted her to do drugs.
“I got into a problem with a young lady that came on the boat,” he said. “Jeff and everyone was sleeping…She said I had beat her or something. The cops came over she said we had drugs on the boat, we had guns on the boat.”
He said, “Cops came and searched the boat and they found nothing.”
Nothing to see here, folks.
On another front, Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com has published a column addressing the contradiction between several polls showing Kendrick Meek moving ahead of Greene in the Florida Democratic Senate primary, and an Ipsos survey showing Greene still ahead despite his recent troubles. Ipsos, says Blumenthal, is testing the opinions of a lot of Democrats who probably aren’t going to turn out for an August primary:
Their survey was focused mostly on the general election and they appear to have included the primary voter question almost as an afterthought. Nevertheless, the looser likely voter screen they used helps explain why their Democratic primary subgroup is so much friendlier to Greene than the samples drawn by the other pollsters. It probably includes many voters who rarely vote in Democratic primaries and have less knowledge of or affinity for Meek, whose campaign has been touting endorsements from mainline Democrats like Bill Clinton.
It’s looking more and more like Jeff Greene will be able to return to luxurious obscurity after next Tuesday, and stop worrying about what anyone other than law enforcement personnel think about acceptable leisure-time activities on his yacht.