Politics & Government

What Tom Lee Told Supporters at Brandon Chamber Primary Election Night (Video)

Former state Sentate president Tom Lee, a past president of the Greater Brandon Chamber of Commerce, chose the chamber as the venue for watching the 2012 Primary Election returns. Lee handily defeated Rachel Burgin in his District 24 state Senate race.

 

Tom Lee spoke to a small gathering of the local electorate in the conference room of the Greater Brandon Chamber of Commerce building on Aug. 14 as results poured in from the 2012 Primary Election.

He spoke just before the final count came in from the 124 precincts that collected ballots for the District 24 seat of the Florida Senate, for which Lee handily beat his Republican opponent, Rachel Burgin.

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  • With 25,268 votes cast at 124 precincts, Lee defeated Burgin with 59.29 perecent of the vote. Lee had 14,981 votes; Burgin had 10,287.

In a room decorated with the pictures of the current and past presidents of the Brandon chamber, his included, the former state Senate president talked both about what is different and what is the same in the political landscape he faced, and faces, then and now.

In making his decision to return to public life, Lee said he “did so with a little trepidation” after Ronda Storms, the senator who now fills the District 24 seat, called to inform him earlier this summer that she would forego reelection and instead run for the office of Hillsorough County Property Appraiser.

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“I had been out of public life for six years,” Lee said. “I didn’t have a Facebook account. Certainly didn’t know anything about Twitter, although it sounded like something that if you do it you ought to at least excuse yourself.”

Acknowledging that “the politics of this community and this state and this country have changed a lot,” Lee said he nevertheless believed in five things, including “the name my family gave me” and the “25 years working in the trenches in conservative causes in this state, the relationships I had built over time.”

“I believed in my decade of public service,” Lee added. And, with his parents, his pregnant wife and his school-aged children looking on, Lee added that he “believed in my family, my friends, my business partners, the people in this community who have consistently been there for me.”

As for his wife, Laurel, she was planning to go to the hospital today, Aug. 15, to give birth to the couple’s daughter. Laurel is Lee's second wife. He has two children, Regan and Brandon, from his marriage to Amy Carey Lee.

Lee said he took very personally a campaign flyer impugning Lee that was mailed to homes in Eastern Hillsborough County, drawing a rebuke from state GOP leaders. The flyer mentioned Lee’s marriage and pictured him alongside Hillsborough County Property Appraiser Rob Turner, the incumbent candidate embroiled in a sex scandal.

Burgin said at the time she didn't know about the contents of the flyer until it arrived in local mailboxes but that "it does raise questions that should be answered."

"Clearly we set a new low in this campaign," Lee said at the chamber Aug. 14. "Seems like we all have respect for the unborn except for my unborn, as if my wife doesn't have a right to have a baby."

Having called it the "dirtiest campaign I’ve ever been a part of in 20 years in public office” Lee said his mission now is to focus on the race ahead, which pits his cause against that of Democratic challenger Elizabeth Belcher and write-in candidate Randolph Link.

Both Lee and his mother graduated from Brandon High School. His father worked in Dick Greco's first administration. Greco in 1967 ran a campaign to become Tampa's youngest mayor.

With his bid to return to public life, Lee said her son brings to the task a newfound maturity.

"I can see a change in the way he looks at things," she said. "It's a new, more mature outlook. When you're young, everything's great. As you get older you look at things a little differently, you look at people a little differently. You don't act as quickly, you think about it before you do it, think even more about what the ramifications are going to be. He has matured and with all he was able to do in the Senate before he'll be even much better [at it] today."

Lee talked about his 44 years in the Brandon community and his affiliations over the years with such groups as the chamber and Rotary club.

This time around in public life, "there's a lot less pressure on me to prove myself," he said. "At the end of the day it's about making a difference in your community, it's about leaving a legacy for your children, it's about positively impacting people's lives."

Brandon, he added, is a community of small businesses, "people trying to feed teir families and trying to buidl a legacy they can pass along to their children."

He acknowledged the pressures people face in today's economic and political climate.

"You see the electorate is very polarized," he said. "People have a lot of fear, they're very frustrated. We're a nation swimming in debt and budget deficits. People are afraid to invest because they don't have confidence in our economy. They don't have confidence in our political leadershp. Our responsibility as elected officials is to bring some stabiity to the marketplace."

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