Six months into the Rick Scott Administration, the public is increasingly familiar with the governor’s singular MO as well as who the members of his inner circle are. True believers see what they like — and were promised. Others, lots of others, see it differently.
But no one could have foreseen this. The governor who disdains polls more than he despises editorial boards has one of the country’s most prominent pollsters on staff: street-smart, Brooklyn native Tony Fabrizio.
Nor would most folks have imagined this. Fabrizio, inexplicably, still seems dumbfounded by a key catalyst in Scott’s tanking popularity and abysmal poll numbers.
“I don’t think anybody expected high-speed rail to be as big a deal as it was,” recently noted Fabrizio. “We didn’t know it would last like that.”
Say what?
A Tea Party intern could have anticipated what that $2.4 billion in federal dollars would have meant to the Orlando-Tampa megalopolis during the Great Recession. Even if projected job numbers were rounded up. Even if it was referenced as “ObamaRail.”
And even a Cato Institute rookie could have predicted the no-win uproar across the political spectrum when the governor signed off on the high-speed rail-juxtaposed SunRail, also known as the financially suspect Poinciana-Deland commuter line that will cost Florida taxpayers more than $650 million. Everyone–or almost everyone–knew that SunRail, the litmus-test-of- “principle”-from-hell for an ideologue, was looming. High-speed rail precipitated the perfect political storm.
Not that “big a deal?”
Perhaps Fabrizio, the hired gun with a reputation for being a savvy strategist and a take-no- prisoners pragmatist, has been paying too much attention to Scott’s self-congratulating, counterproductive robo calls.
Karl Rove, call Tallahassee.