Serial presidential adviser and CNN political analyst David Gergen kicked off the lecture series at former Sen. George Lemieux‘s new Center for Public Policy at Palm Beach Atlantic University on Thursday night, speaking to a crowd of about 400.

(Click here to read a news story about the event.)

Gergen — who advised Republican Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford and Democratic President Bill Clinton — revealed that he voted for Democrat Barack Obama in 2008, but not in 2012. But Gergen said he didn’t vote for Republican Mitt Romney last year.

“I didn’t vote Republican this last time around,” Gergen said during a question-and-answer session with LeMieux as both sat on leather chairs in the school’s DeSantis Family Chapel. “I voted for Mayor (Michael) Bloomberg, a write-in, because he’s my kind of leader. He’s very socially liberal but he’s very tough-minded on the fiscal side and I think he’s been a great leader.”

The Department of Energy, a Jimmy Carter creation that has been a familiar conservative punching bag for more than three decades, eluded Texas Gov. Rick Perry during tonight’s GOP presidential debate when he launched into a familiar riff about federal agencies he’d like to dismantle.

“It’s three agencies of government when I get there that are gone: Commerce, Education and the, uh, what’s the third one there, let’s see….”

By the time Perry came up with the Department of Energy minutes later, the episode was already being compared to other legendary self-inflicted presidential debate wounds, including former President Gerald R. Ford‘s insistence in 1976 that “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.”

Moments after he was sworn in as the newest Palm Beach County commissioner this morning, Steven Abrams invoked another unelected Republican who came to office to replace a disgraced predecessor.

Abrams, appointed by Gov. Charlie Crist after Mary McCarty resigned in a corruption scandal, referred to Gerald Ford’s famous quote upon succeeding Richard Nixon in 1974: “I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your president by your ballots. So I ask you to confirm me with your prayers.”

Our Jennifer Sorentrue reports on it here.