Sink says the White House got a huge 'wake up call' in the midterms, but took many Democrats down with them. | AP Photo Sink rips 'tone-deaf' White House

In the wake of the party’s worst election drubbing since 1994, the deep frustration felt by many centrist Democrats toward the White House and the national party is now out in the open. And it’s being aired in the battleground state that’s the biggest prize in presidential politics.

Florida Democratic gubernatorial nominee Alex Sink pointed an accusatory finger Friday at what she called a “tone-deaf” Obama White House to explain why she narrowly lost her campaign.


In an interview with POLITICO, Sink said the administration mishandled the response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, doesn’t appreciate the political damage done by healthcare reform and argued that her GOP opponent’s strategy of tying her to the president did grave damage to her candidacy in the state’s conservative Panhandle.

“They got a huge wake-up call two days ago, but unfortunately they took a lot of Democrats down with them,” said Sink of the White House.

She added: “They just need to be better listeners and be better at reaching out to people who are on the ground to hear about the realities of their policies as well as politics.”

Sink’s complaint can, of course, be chalked up in part to sour grapes on the part of a candidate fresh off a tough loss looking for an explanation. She lost her race by a single percentage point.

But Sink's pointed critique expressed the sentiments of other Florida Democrats after an election in which the party lost four U.S. House seats and every statewide contest Tuesday, not to mention statehouse losses that left Democrats facing GOP legislative supermajorities in one of the largest states in the nation.

Sink, the state’s elected Chief Financial Officer and a former banking executive, ran against Republican Rick Scott, a wealthy former health care CEO who spent tens of millions of his own fortune.

“I faced headwinds from Washington that I liken to a tsunami and was going up against a guy who had unlimited resources,” Sink said. “I could have overcome either one but not both.”

Sink even had the advantage of facing a GOP opponent who was a first-time candidate who had previously run a company slapped with the largest Medicare fraud fine ever issued. But Scott countered that liability with a massive ad campaign linking Sink to Obama, a very unpopular figure in the more conservative parts of the sprawling state.

“[People] preferred to vote for somebody with questionable ethics than for somebody who was associated with the Washington Democratic agenda,” the Floridian said.

Sink said there is a disconnect between the White House and the rest of the country.

"I think they were tone-deaf,” she said. “They weren't interested in hearing my opinion on what was happening on the ground with the oil spill. And they never acknowledged that they had problems with the acceptance of health care reform.”

The new law, she said, is “unpopular particularly among seniors” — a key voting bloc in the Sunshine State.

As for Scott’s hard-hitting ads depicting her as an Obama clone, Sink said the spots hurt “particularly in Northwest Florida.”

Sink, who came up just 67,000 votes short out of more than five million votes cast, lost by margins of two-to-one or worse across the most vote-rich parts of the state’s Panhandle.

White House aides and Democratic National Committee officials, however, say that without the involvement of the national party and Obama’s political arm, Organizing for America, Sink would have fared worse.

“The DNC and OFA kept that campaign afloat,” said a senior West Wing official.

The national party transferred nearly $2 million to Florida Democrats — more than any other state — rolled all the Florida OFA staffers into what became the state party’s coordinated campaign and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on black and Hispanic media buys as well as voter contact efforts to rouse constituencies that were otherwise unenthused about the former banker.

Multiple Democratic sources familiar with Sink’s campaign, however, said administration officials were more concerned about the candidate’s effort to separate herself from the White House than with helping her win.

“She needed some distance and the smart thing to do was allow her to have that distance,” said a Democratic operative familiar with the race.“That would have served their long-term interest.”

But when the candidate criticized the White House response to the oil spill and specifically a summer speech by Vice President Joe Biden in a POLITICO article, an angry administration official called her to demand she “walk back” her assessment, said two sources familiar with the situation.

Sink didn’t deny the exchange.

“I don’t follow anybody’s party line if I don’t think they’re on the right track,” she said when asked about the call.

Another heated back-and-forth took place over whether Sink would meet Obama on the Miami airport tarmac when the president arrived in August for a state party fundraiser. The White House was angry, according to Sink sympathizers, about what they saw as a snub when the candidate stayed away.

But the White House official said that if they had taken Sink’s attempts to separate herself from Obama personally, they would have gone public with their anger instead of airing it only to Sink and her aides. And, this official added, they even went so far as to offer to do a get-out-the-vote event in Miami on her behalf the weekend before the election without her present. The offer was turned down, but Obama still recorded a robocall on her behalf for South Florida.

Still, when they weren’t protecting the president’s image, Obama aides were either totally unhelpful to the campaign or trying to big-foot the operation, according to sources familiar with the contest.

In the spring, when Sink’s campaign was adrift and desperately in need of a shake-up, there was a meeting in Washington with a group of senior Democrats.

Following the meeting, a mid-level White House political official sent out a one-page memo that operatives saw as so illustrative of the Obama team’s cluelessness about the race that they had it laminated and regularly mocked it.

The document, obtained by POLITICO, included such numbered headers as “Hire Key Staff” and “Develop and present a holistic campaign plan.”

A White House official said the memo was only a summary of the conversation for the participants — not a strategic plan.

But Sink’s allies also complain that Obama aides too frequently intervened with the state party’s coordinated campaign.

A White House political affairs office staffer flew down to Florida in the spring to meet with major Obama donors to get their input on the joint funding program.

“They went around what we were trying to do and tried to get their donors to influence what the coordinated process was instead of letting us drive it,” carped one Democratic operative involved in the race.

Even as they concede that Sink made mistakes, Florida Democratic operatives who were not directly involved with the campaign make the case that she was dragged down by the national party.

“She talked about jobs, she talked about taxes, but it didn’t matter,” said veteran strategist Screven Watson. “They put Sink with Pelosi and Obama.”

“If only we had worked on jobs and the economy and maybe an energy bill — but no, we tried to do everything,” he said of the national party. “And then they do an awful job of communicating what they did. So what’s the end result? We just saw it.”