If Gov. Rick Scott had more friends–well, a lot more–like Tampa Bay’s Sen. Jack Latvala, R-Clearwater, he wouldn’t still be derided as the country’s most unpopular governor.
Scott, asserts Latvala, merely fits the model of the classic political outsider whom an electorate can understandably find appealing. Even, presumably, one who personally shelled out $70 million to fund his version of a populist, outsider approach.
Anyhow, Latvala, who, indeed, considers Scott a “friend,” has explained that “if you elect people like that, you have to give them a little learning curve. I think he has learned. I think he’s getting better all the time.”
Say what? There’s “learning curve”–and then there’s disingenuously expedient makeover.
What Scott is obviously getting better at is insider gamesmanship and all the self-serving optics prompted by political panic.
No, he can’t undo that character-revealing, Medicare-fraud deposition or that faux pas-pocked trade-mission sortie to Spain. Anymore than he can he undo the bid-precluding, high-speed rail debacle that would have brought jobs while fast-forwarding the Tampa-Orlando megalopolis. Nor can he undo his acquiescence in the USF Poly folly. And, yes, he’s still the privatizer from hell.
But what he can do, for openers, is a blatantly hypocritical 180 on voter-suppression gambits, that “$26 billion” it was supposedly going to cost Florida to sign on to Medicaid expansion and frontal assaults on teacher credibility and pay. He can also rein in the Eustis pep rallies and Tea Party love-ins at The Villages as well as do interviews with real media. Being satirized on Saturday Night Live and Hardball doesn’t count.
And as far as Scott risking the alienation of Tea Partiers and the Deliverance crowd as he “learns,” well, where else are those acolytes going to go? To Charlie? Alex? Pam? Buddy? Nan? Allen West won’t be in the hunt.
Scott desperately needs a gullible media to help enable his calculated game plan. And he can always use more clueless friends. Too bad Tampa Bay’s Jack Latvala qualifies.