Although Rick Scott is rarely associated with the Tea Party, the former health chair executive’s lack of electoral experience, strong conservative agenda and anti-Barack Obama rhetoric make him as much a part of the dominant political movement in 2010 as fellow Republican Marco Rubio.
An outsider who has lived in Florida for only seven years, Scott was scorned by nearly the entire Florida Republican establishment in his primary race against Bill McCollum, as he ran an anti-Tallahassee campaign that, aided by over $45 million in spending, saw him end the attorney general’s political career with a stunning upset victory in August.
He has been hammered incessantly since he got into the race — first by McCollum and now by Democratic opponent Alex Sink — about the record $1.7 billion government fine for Medicaid and Medicare fraud incurred by the hospital chain that he led, Columbia/HCA. But the tall, blue-eyed Scott has responded in candidate forums by saying simply that he should have had more auditors reviewing the financial books. With less than a week to go in the race and the polls extremely close, he doesn’t appear to be paying too excessive a price for that transgression.
Members of the Sink campaign believe that many Floridians don’t know much about that tawdry business. That’s why, in the days before early voting began, the Sink forces began airing a two-minute ad in Tampa featuring old news clips of Scott during the Columbia/HCA debacle (when he still had hair) that accused him of essentially being a crook.
But if his past is alarming, his proposals for the future are causing even more concern. Although the state is already looking at what could be a $2.5 billion shortfall, Scott is proposing an immediate $1.4 billion reduction in property taxes. He also wants to end the state’s corporate income tax over the next seven years. Scott says that sans income or corporate taxes, the Sunshine State will be Mecca for businesses.
Some analysts aren’t buying what Scott is selling.
Dan Smith is a professor of political science at the University of Florida. He says if Scott’s proposals go through, it would have a massive impact on K-12 public education, following on the state’s previous actions to reduce property taxes and shift costs to the local level. (Not having a state income tax, Florida derives most of its revenue from property taxes.)
“There’s very little evidence that lower corporate taxes lead to higher economic development and high wage industry, which Florida is in dire need of to replace its heavy dependence on the tourism economy.”
Overall, Scott would like to cut $7 billion from the state’s budget, including $1 billion from the Department of Corrections, which would mean fewer prisons, fewer prison guards and probably, releasing more prisoners.
Surprisingly, Sink has made little effort to use the prison issue as a political talking point against Scott, instead letting some of her friends in law enforcement make the case for her. Both the Police Benevolent Association and the Fraternal Order of Police have endorsed the Democrat, the first time they’ve done so in 20 years.
University of Central Florida Professor Aubrey Jewett says that to suggest there’s a billion dollars of waste in the corrections budget is “just silly.” He concedes that in an overall budget as large as Florida’s ($65-$70 billion) “you can find millions, but there’s not enough to make up for the huge tax cuts he’s calling for.”
In many ways, Republicans disturbed by the notion of voting for Scott have an extremely palatable option in Democrat Alex Sink, the state’s chief financial officer since 2006, and a banker for 28 years before stepping down from Bank of America in 2000.
Several Republicans have come out in support of her, such as Miami state Senator Alex Villalobos and former Citrus County legislator Nancy Argenziano. There’s also a Facebook page for Republicans for Sink.
“She would have been better off running as a Republican, since she acts like one, talks like one, and thinks like one.”
That harsh review comes from Spring Hill resident Brian Moore, who got 23 percent of the vote running against Sink in the Democratic primary. The Socialist candidate for president in 2008 represents the far left of the spectrum, but his complaints have been echoed by other Democrats, who think Sink’s centrist views aren’t dynamic enough to change the culture in Tallahassee, which has been dominated by Republicans for nearly a decade and a half.
Sink is cautious. In fact, despite the fact that the race is neck and neck and CL is distributed to hundreds of thousands of readers, her office refused multiple requests for a one-on-one interview with this reporter.
During the campaign, Sink has come out in support of maintaining the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, has gone out of her way to avoid President Obama when he’s come to Florida (but not President Clinton), and infamously, refused to give an opinion last year on the subject of including a government-run public option in the health care reform bill (a particularly painful exchange with reporters in Tallahassee is still accessible on YouTube showing Sink literally walking away when asked if there should have been such a plan in the bill).
On her website, Sink lists a number of proposals for childcare education, small businesses, the environment — proposals that Rick Scott and other Republicans allege will cost over $12 billion, leading Scott to claim that Sink will have to raise taxes. Sink spokesperson Kyra Jennings calls those claims “just more false and misleading attacks by Rick Scott and his allies.”
When it comes to charisma on the campaign trail, neither candidate is exactly goosebump material. Scott, who had never run for any office until this year, has improved on the stump, but it may be that his awkward delivery is a plus, accentuating his first-timer status. (A recent Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll showed that 48 percent of those surveyed said they would rather vote for a congressional candidate with no experience than one with 10 years of experience.)
The brisk, reserved Sink is still more bank president than barnstormer. “Campaigning and retail politics are not her strong suit,” UF Professor Dan Smith says. “When she goes to one of these party executive meetings, the partisans want red-meat politics, and that’s not her style.” But Smith does praise her for taking an aggressive tack against Scott for his business failings.
When Scott and Bill McCollum were going heavily negative in their primary campaign, Sink released an ad that mocked the two, staying above the fray and saying it was time “to get real.”
But the general election has proven to be just as negative as the primary, with Sink and Scott both putting their campaign cash into attack ads. Sink (whose resources include $6 million from the Democratic Governors Association) has managed to remain competitive with the deep-pocketed Scott, who has overall spent $60 million of his own money, busting every spending record ever held in Sunshine State politics.
During the primary, Scott gained traction against McCollum when he blasted him for not supporting Arizona’s harsh anti illegal immigration law. But the “problems” with illegal immigration in Florida have rarely surfaced in the general election campaign, where the Hispanic vote gets bigger every year.
Fernand Armandi is vice president of the multilingual research group Bendixen & Armandi in Miami. He calls Scott’s success in the GOP primary a “Pyrrhic victory, because if it comes at the expense of the biggest-growing part of the electorate, it’s a short-term victory for a long-term loss.”
Armandi believes Sink will win the Latino vote this year, not because of anything she’s done per se to draw such voters to her, but because the demographic is trending more toward Democrats.
But if Sink is to win, she’ll have to amplify her appeal with conservative voters. And with just days to go before the election, party affiliation may trump all.
Sid Dinerstein is chairman of the Palm Beach County Republican Executive Committee. He says Sink’s problem is essentially that she’s a Democrat.
“America is scared, so this is all about who has the skills to solve our very large problems,” he says, “and Alex Sink has none. If she had any, she’d run ads telling what she could do. Her ads are vote for me, the other guy has baggage.”
Dinerstein says that if it weren’t for that baggage, Scott would be winning in a rout. And he says that never in his eight years as party chair has he seen such enthusiasm with his volunteers. “Oh my god, it’s wonderful,” he exclaims. “Everybody can’t wait to knock on doors, we’re so excited.” He says the excitement emanates from fear of two more years of Obama/Nancy Pelosi/Harry Reid.
Of course, those folks are in Washington, while the incumbents in Tallahassee have been Republican for over a decade. But that fact doesn’t seem to be resonating, as polls show many of the state’s Democrats in trouble.
For progressive voters, trouble may lie ahead regardless of who wins the race. Incoming Speaker of the House Dean Cannon and Senate President Mike Haridopolos are self-confessed “hard right Republicans” looking to bring the state to a more conservative condition.
UF Professor Dan Smith says that Alex Sink would definitely wield her veto pen if socially conservative legislation such as SB 1143, best known as the ultrasound bill, gets passed. But when it comes to fiscal issues, programs are going to be cut: the only question is which ones, and which constituencies will suffer. That’s what this race for governor may ultimately be all about.
When it comes to charisma, neither candidate is exactly goosebump material. But Scott’s awkward delivery may be a plus, accentuating his first-timer status.
This article appears in Oct 28 – Nov 3, 2010.
