VoteWater’s endorsement of Amanda Cochran suggests the politics of water is now state wide, not just regional or county wide. -VOTEWATER / COURTESY PHOTO

A lot of things have been said about H2O, but few of them include the singularly obvious fact that water has become the great equalizer in contemporary Florida politics.

We have the Republican party, the Democratic party, and water. Maybe we should start capitalizing the word to give it more weight: Water. Maybe we should just capitalize every letter in it, and add an exclamation point: WATER!

Florida has a WATER! problem: development. Not “Smart Growth,” but development. Not the Republicans, not the Democrats, but development.

Which wouldn’t be a problem if we just quit worrying about it. And we could, starting now. Unfortunately, Florida’s local and state politicians have been too timid to insist on the obvious Churchillian solution to all the water challenges we face.

Those challenges include pollution-fueled cyanobacteria and massive red tides in our fresh and saltwater; elected officials who shoulder past old wetland protections and permit multi-thousand-home developments in water-recharge landscapes; state officials who fail to buy land south of Lake Okeechobee and start water flowing south to Florida Bay — that’s essential to making the $23 billion Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) of 60-some projects completed by 2045 or so work effectively, the experts say; and the breakdown of aging sewage treatment plants, among others. You know the tune.

And you’ve heard of the solution, but possibly overlooked it in this age of faux health decorum. The solution is Whiskey. Or put another way: WHISKEY!

We need either to elect politicians who come invested with Churchillian temerity right out of the starting gate, or politicians in places like Lee and Collier Counties who have joined the WATER! party, whether or not they also call themselves Republicans, Democrats or Independents.

Can you imagine if Winston Churchill, as a young Army officer, had been posted to Florida rather than South Africa? Either way, he knew how to deal with bad water.

“The water was not fit to drink,” he once said. “To make it palatable, we had to add whiskey. By diligent effort, I learned to like it.”

See that? Diligent effort is all it takes.

But if we’re not going to add WHISKEY! (or iodine tablets, for example), we have to add politicians who diligently represent good, not bad, WATER!

And that creates a fascinating political reality: Organizations and people from around the state are now taking an interest in local elections elsewhere in the state, because of WATER!, which, as you’ve probably noticed, is not just elsewhere. It’s everywhere.

That’s why a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization on the southeast coast, based in Stuart, endorsed a candidate for commissioner in the Aug. 18 primary election next week on the southwest coast, in Lee County: because WATER!

It’s created a hullabaloo, and everybody knows why: WATER!

The organization is called VoteWater (www.VoteWater.org), and the candidate for commissioner is called Amanda Cochran, a self-described “conservative Republican.”

VoteWater has a single issue: WATER!. Amanda Cochran has two issues: WATER! and transparency in government.

Let me try to sum up this new-age political parade.

Commissioners in Lee County, bisected by the Caloosahatchee River flowing out of Lake Okeechobee to the Gulf, represent five districts. Each commissioner has to live in his or her district, but all Lee County voters get to choose all five commissioners. In the easternmost district, known prosaically as 5, longtime commissioner Frank Mann, a Republican who championed WATER!, died in office, in 2022.

Governor Ron DeSantis appointed a former Boston Red Sox baseball star living in District 5, Mike Greenwell, to the seat, and Greenwell, a Republican who did not champion WATER! was subsequently elected before many people in the county realized that. In that 2024 race, he beat Amanda Cochran in the primary, when the great majority of voters in her district picked her, but Greenwell won in the other districts.

Along with four other Lee County commissioners, Greenwell championed development.

Then last October he also died in office.

As an aside, let me just issue a public health warning to the candidates: Serving as commissioner in Lee County District 5 may be hazardous to your health, whether or not the Surgeon General has issued a formal warning.

Gov. DeSantis then appointed another champion of development, Republican Trish Petrosky, to the county commission. She moved into the district just before her appointment, took the seat on the commission, and has not yet died.

Now, with Democrats and Independents greatly outnumbered in Lee County, the Republican primary winner in August, either Cochran or Petrosky, will likely determine the next District 5 commissioner to vote either for WATER! or for development.

But that’s not the end of the story.

A prominent Republican political lobbyist named Terry Miller manages the campaign of Petrosky and another commissioner up for reelection, Brian Hamman. Miller ran the campaigns for two of the three other commissioners now on the board, along with the late Mike Greenwell’s.

So when VoteWater reached across the state and endorsed Cochran, the Miller folks and Petrosky through a Political Action Committee (a PAC) somewhat misleadingly called “Just the Facts” finally “lampooned” their fellow Republican, Amanda Cochran, for being endorsed by a “liberal group.”

“Lampooned” is the word used by the alert political reporter Charlie Whitehead for the region’s daily newspaper, The News-Press. He pinned down the parade and quoted the PAC: “She should be ashamed of herself.”

VoteWater not only happens to be non-partisan, but it endorsed DeSantis in the past, while sometimes also criticizing Republican leaders like Sen. Rick Scott and Rep. Byron Donalds for failing to support WATER!

And finally, all that brought a Lee County Republican organizer, Mercedes Price-Harry, to call out her PAC-powered fellow Republicans in a public statement:

“Misleading mailers, social media smear campaigns and PAC-driven attacks fracture the party, create distrust and turn neighbors against one another,” she said. “Voters deserve accurate information…”

And WATER!, the great equalizer, deserves  some serious right-now support from Lee County voters who prefer it clean, with or without whiskey.