Katherine Harris Jumble

"He's not really going away, but he's going away."

-- Gerry Fritz, Communications Director
Katherine Harris campaign, June 9, 2006

Via yesterday's Raw Story edition, we learn that the usually reliable Roll Call scooped the latest crack-up involving Katherine Harris: the resignation of Fred Asbell.

Technically, Aspell wasn't a campaign worker. He's been chief of staff in her congressional office in Washington D.C. -- the fourth chief in as many years. Still, it seems passing strange Aspell would be leaving if he thought Harris had any realistic chance of becoming a U.S. senator -- unless, of course, he can't see any handwriting on the wall that would pay his bills next year.

Tampa Bay Online today quotes a Harris campaign spokesman as explaining that Aspell is "not really going away, but he's going away." That clears things up, right?

The implication is that while intending "to pursue opportunities in business consulting and development" from time to time Aspell will "also advise Harris on her campaign."

Advising Katherine? Really? Nah. If you buy that, we've got a $2,800 dinner bill we'd like you to pick up.

Testifying, maybe. Our hunch is Aspell knows there are some serious Justice Department subpoenas coming and he wants to put as much yardage as possible between his memory and Katherine's post-prandial conversations.

By the way, we're sticking to our prediction: Katherine Harris eventually will quit this campaign. Remember, you heard it here first -- back in March.

We hope we're wrong. Harris's multiple mishaps provide a rich and hugely entertaining mine of weirdness, as Stephen Elliott reminds us in this month's issue of the venerable Progressive Magazine out of Madison, Wisconsin.

Elliott was one of only two reporters who accepted an invitation a few weeks ago to join the Katherine Harris press "bus." You may recall him as the reporter who snapped those photos showing Katherine playing footsie with a blushing college kid.

Elliott's entertaining and, at points, sympathetic article about Katherine Harris has just been published. He offers several insights along with a vivid description of the footsie episode that will have readers breathing heavily. ("I saw her heel brush his naked foot * * * She lowered her hand to her knee and her skirt rode just slightly up her leg. It wasn’t an accident.")

But our favorite passage concerns Elliott's own puzzlement over a Harris campaign poster:

"The office seemed empty and ragtag, but that’s not unusual for a campaign office six months before an election. The thing that really caught my eye was a white sheet of paper tacked to the wall. It had seven words running vertically in large bold font, all of them left-justified except the last:

INTEGRITY
LOYALTY
DEDICATION
STRENGTH
HONOR
ENTHUSIASM
WIN!
"The word WIN was centered, and I stared at that piece of paper trying to figure out what it meant.

"I thought the first letters of each word taken together would spell something, but all they spelled was Ildshew. Then I thought maybe WIN wasn’t part of the puzzle, since it was the only word centered, but that spelled Ildshe, which didn’t make any sense either. A google search of Ildshew brought back no results and Ildshe only one, buried in a sequence alignment and modeling software system.

"My subsequent thought was that this paper didn’t actually have any added meaning. They were just buzz-words with no particular relation to each other, no different from cutting taxes while promising expanded services. It was like a joke left behind by one of the staff that walked out when it became obvious the campaign wouldn’t win. But then we were all driving and we stopped in a Starbucks and Katherine offered to buy me a coffee.

"I was invited to ride with her the short distance to the hotel. And when I climbed into the mobile home I saw the sign again, the same sign I had seen in her office: Ildshew. Idle wish?"

Can anyone help him out here? We Shild? She Wild? Lewdish?

What's the answer to this jumble?