He has spent his own $1 million to run for Miami Beach mayor. Will his London stint hurt him?
Bill Roedy has seen the attack ads — text messages and flyers sent from a political committee to voters around Miami Beach depicting him in a British redcoat uniform and a tall bearskin cap.
“British Bill Roedy lived in London for the last three decades,” the ads read. “Now he’s back in the USA, and wants to be YOUR mayor.”
Roedy has tried to laugh it off. “My kids loved it and are going to frame it,” he said in an interview last week from his oceanfront condo in South Beach.
But the former CEO of MTV
Networks International is serious about becoming the next mayor of Miami Beach. In the four months since entering the race, he says he has spent more than $1 million of his own money. He ran a TV ad during the NBA Finals. His billboards appear over the entrances to the Julia Tuttle Causeway connecting Miami and Miami Beach. He has held meet-and-greet events throughout the city.
“We’re all in,” Roedy said. “We had to get our name out there.”
Increasingly, Roedy is also responding to political attacks as the November election approaches.
At 75, he is the oldest of four candidates to replace term-limited Mayor Dan Gelber. But as the only one who has never held political office — Steven Meiner, Michael Gongora and Mike Grieco are each active or former city commissioners, and Grieco was a state representative — Roedy is getting a crash course in nasty local politics.
He said he has tried to take the Michelle Obama route — “when they go low, we go high” — but now feels his campaign “has to be more aggressive” to counter attacks by his opponents.
That includes claims about his residency.
“No matter where I went around the world, I always considered this my roots,” Roedy said from his home at the north end of Ocean Drive. “I never considered any