The Commissoner Trolled The Democrati Convention Sucking Up and Taking “Selfies” In An Effort to Turn Himself Into Miami’s Next Political Media Whore

While Twitter doesn’t necessarily provide a window into your soul, it often can provide a window into your psyche, or your ambition.

Take Ken Russell. Last year at this time he was diligently walking the streets of District 2 every day in an effort to meet and convince enough people to vote for him.

This year, City Commissioner Ken Russell spent last week walking around the Democratic Convention looking to smooch up to every recognizable media face, because while the fate of the world as we know it might rest on who becomes our next President, Russell was more interested in taking “selfies,” with recognizable members of the news media while obviously hoping to get some face time on television.

Take the following two photos, and especially the caption on the first.

If any of you have read the book Game Change, you’ll appreciate how totally bullshit Russell’s claim is that this book, a book about the political machinations of the 2012 Presidential Campaign, served as the playbook for his low-tech, little money campaign for a seat on the Miami City Commission.

In fact, since Russell was elected there have been several hilarious and ridiculous self-serving versions of how Russell won the election that have floated around City Hall.

In one version, Patricia Vegnani, Russell’s campaign treasurer claimed to some folks that she had been his real campaign manager and was the person responsible for getting him elected. Vegnani coincidently is the same person who Russell threw under the bus for the loss of the Christmas gift list that led to my filing an ethics complaint against him, claiming that it was because she was “old and stupid,” that the list had been “lost.”  If it was really “lost” which I doubt, based on Russell’s comments to me long after she had left his employment, then it was “lost” for a reason.

And then of course there’s the version where “doe-eyed millennial” and now faux Deputy City Commissioner and Chief of Staff Eleazar Melendez, is credited with getting Russell elected.

This version is a 100% fabrication because Melendez never met or talked with Russell until about 3 weeks before the end of the campaign when they met after the last candidate debate held at The Lab, and this I know first hand, because after that meeting, Melendez called to tell me that he had talked with Russell after the debate and found him so completely clueless as to what his job would be if he got elected that he saw this as a great opportunity for him to get a job as Russell’s policy advisor.

It was only after that meeting that Melendez started sucking up to Russell, while at the same time plotting on how to convince him that because of his media connections he could get him good press – which is another more telling story about just how unprincipled and untrustworthy Melendez revealed himself to be.  Perhaps one day I’ll get around to writing about this incident, because it reveals how quickly truth goes out the window when it collidies with ambition.

Unfortunately, it continues to look like Russell decided that given a choice between knuckling down and mastering the intricacies of being a City Commissioner – which his behavior during the recent Rickenbacker Marina RFP fight revealed he hadn’t done – or exploiting his obvious glibness and  boyish good looks into an opportunity of becoming a political media whore  and using that advantage to plot his next political move – and you can bet that now bitten by the goddess of politics, he’s already trying to figure out what that next move should be – went off to Philadelphia with the obvious intent of trying to get noticed and on TV as often as possible.

Given the ease that self-motivated morons and idiots seem to have in coming out of nowhere to become nationally recognizable political players, it’s not hard to appreciate that Russell – who as I’ve previously documented is no slouch when it comes to self-promotion and media manipulation – set off for Philadelphia with a calculated agenda that had little if nothing to do with Hillary Clinton.

Unlike some of his fellow convention delegates, Russell’s Facebook and Twitter page reveal that he’s made no comments or written anything about why he supports Clinton, or why he wanted to be one of her delegates.  

In fact, when I first heard that Russell was supposedly interested in become a Clinton delegate, I was told that he said that he would only be interested if he could get a speaking part at the convention.

There’s something unsettling about a guy who seems to be crafting a persona based on “selfies,” a behavior that’s been noticed by a growing number of folks who wonder whether it’s just the narcissism of the times, or whether it’s part of a more deep-seated and calculated effort of someone who has in a very short period of time become bedazzled by the possibility of fame.

Meanwhile, while Russell was off taking “selfies,” the folks back at Miami City Hall, where the lingua franca is Spanish, and immigration issues are limited to who can portray themselves as hating the Castro brothers more while pandering to the old Cuban exile community were chugging along with the Mayor refusing to reveal which City Commissioners had asked him to reinstate their lucrative pension plan, Commissioner Francis Suarez was continuing to act and sound like he’s the real Commissioner for District 2 instead of Russell, and Commission Chairman Hardemon, sounding more and more like a Donald Trump clone, continued his petty dictatorial ways, revealing just how little respect he has for the citizens of Miami.

In short, it was just another week at Miami City Hall, Bitches!

MR RUSSELL TOOK HIS CELLPHONE TO THE CONVENTION