Gabriel Hament is the campaign manager for Sarasota City Commission District 2 candidate Liz Alpert

My name is Gabriel Hament, and I manage Liz Alpert's campaign for City Commission. I was born and raised here in Sarasota. As a young boy, I attended the old McClellan Park School. I went to elementary, middle and high school at Pine View, competed on Sarasota High's tennis team and played violin for the Sarasota Orchestra's youth program. Now, as a 22-year-old with a B.A. in political science and a minor in history from the University of Florida, I’ve come home to where my heart has always lived to what I believe is the greatest city in Florida.

Managing Liz Alpert’s campaign has been an incredibly satisfying, rewarding and constructive experience. Her personal history of hard work raising her girls, sticking with her goals of becoming an attorney and all the while giving her time to public service has made the long days of working our grassroots, door-to-door, get-out-the-vote campaign all the more gratifying. 

When we came away with 44 percent of the vote in a three-way race in the March primary, a lot of old-time pols warned us our opponent might go negative; it saddens me to acknowledge they were right.

Beginning this week—first at a community forum hosted by CONA at the Garden Club, then on an attack mailer originating from a shady political action committee based out of Tampa—our opponent and her surrogates made the decision to unleash upon our city a barrage of low, mean-spirited personal attacks against Liz.

During the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression plenty of everyday people—not to mention banks, large and small businesses, and even major automakers—experienced financial hardship. Poking fun, bullying and attempting to embarrass a member of our community who may have suffered similar hardship while launching her own law practice is a campaign tactic totally out of sync with the Sarasota I grew up in.

Neither our opponent’s unkind CONA remarks nor her attack mailer had anything to do with municipal policy. Both meant to hurt Liz and sully her name. And, though that’s bad enough, it’s what these attacks say about our opponent and her out-of-town cohort that particularly disheartens me as a young person who has come home to make difference.

We’ve all had to deal with bullies. After the negative mailer came out, a friend gave me a piece of advice, "The best way to defeat bullies is to outnumber them." Today, I reach out to all of you not only as a political operative but as a Sarasota boy through and through asking you to tell Eileen Normile to stop laying waste to the spirit of our beautiful city with her spree of negativity.

Instead of tearing each other down, we should build each other up. That's what Liz's campaign has been and continues to be about—how we, together as a team, can build an even brighter future for our great city, my hometown Sarasota.

Vote by mail, vote early or vote at the polls on May12—Send the bullies packing! Get Sarasota back on track!

Gabriel Hament is the campaign manager for Sarasota City Commission District 2 candidate Liz Alpert