Rep. Allen West said Tuesday now that the contentious campaigning which preceded the Florida primary is behind them, the presidential front-runners need to abandon negativity and focus on the issues and the goal of defeating President Barack Obama.
“I think there was a bit too much negativity,” West told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “I'll give you a great example of an issue that no one brought up during this Florida primary, the fact that we’re going to have a Chinese made oil rig put in place about 60 miles off the coast of Florida. We had a hearing about that yesterday, a transportation hearing. No one is going to talk about that the economy if we were to have a Deep Water Horizon event right there 60 miles off of our coast.
“So they need to focus on drawing a contrast between themselves and President Obama, his failures and especially in Florida were we have higher unemployment, higher than the average,” he said. “We need to allow the people to make decisions who they think will be best to go into the arena against President Obama.”
Hannity also asked the Florida Republican about the fact that he will be seeking re-election in a new district this year. West now represents the heavily Democratic 22nd District, which will become more Democratic under proposed redistricting maps, and he said he will move into the newly configured 18th District, which is a bit more Republican.
“For whatever reason, the Florida legislature [is] controlled by the super majorities . . . they drew in more Democrats into the district I represent — so now you are talking about a 57 percent Democrat district,” West said. “So the district that was newly drawn north of us which encompasses about 20 percent of the current district I represent — we made the decision to move to that district. It’s a good plus one district and very fair district — I can’t understand for the life of me the legislature of the state of Florida would have done what they did.”
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