Can Rick Scott Govern Florida?
Time Magazine reports:
Florida has some of the broadest open-government laws in the country. So when Governor-elect Rick Scott held a number of behind-closed-doors meetings with business leaders earlier this month during a five-day jobs tour, many political observers fretted that he might not fully appreciate the Sunshine State's sunshine rules. "It would have been a nice gesture on his part to hold those meetings more in the open," says Ben Wilcox, Florida director of the government watchdog group Common Cause. "But Florida's sunshine laws are going to take some getting used to on his part, since just about all he's known is the corporate world."
Scott, a multi-millionaire and longtime CEO in the health care sector, believes that his corporate experience is what got him elected in the first place: a pledge to lavish his boardroom skills on a bellwether state where this year the recession pushed unemployment above 12%, its worst ever. As Scott, 58, a conservative Republican, approaches his Jan. 4 inauguration, he's trumpeting his "Let's Get To Work" campaign slogan by tapping mavericks like former Washington D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee for his transition team. Rhee, says Scott transition spokesman Brian Burgess, "is a lot like him — they're both impatient with bureaucracy and [with] waiting and waiting for things to happen." (Watch TIME's video on how Rhee became a polarizing figure in education.)
In his Nov. 2 victory speech, Scott declared that "today is the end of politics as usual in Tallahassee," Florida's capital, and he insists that Florida will be "open for business" under his administration. But if Floridians are hoping Scott's corporate acumen can generate jobs for the 1.1 million of them out of work, they're also wary of his corporate past. Scott, after all, had to resign in disgrace in 1997 as CEO of the Columbia/HCA hospital corporation, the world's biggest private health care facility operator (today called just HCA), after it was slapped with $1.7 billion in federal fines for Medicare fraud, the largest such case in U.S. history. Scott himself was never charged with a crime — but the scandal is a big reason people get a tad nervous now whenever the Governor-elect, who refused to talk with any Florida newspaper editorial board during his campaign, ducks out of sight to huddle with executives. In a state facing a projected $3.5 billion budget deficit, some of Scott's pro-business proposals, such as eliminating Florida's corporate tax, can sound almost recklessly dogmatic.
Scott supporters insist that was the mandate of the voters, who swept in so many conservative, Tea Party-backed candidates like him in the November election. But Florida voters hardly handed Scott a mandate. A slew of Florida conservatives did bury their opponents in November, including former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio, who thumped current Governor Charlie Crist in the U.S. Senate race. But even after spending an eye-popping $73 million of his own money on his campaign — a layout that prompted even some Republican leaders to complain that he was buying the statehouse — Scott scored less than 50% of the vote and defeated a fairly weak Democratic candidate, Florida CFO Alex Sink, by just a percentage point. (Watch TIME's video on Marco Rubio's Tea-Party triumph.)
As a result, Scott stands to wield less clout in Tallahassee than the establishment Republicans he belittled during his primary campaign, but who happen to control both Florida's House and Senate. "Scott is one of those people who always thinks he's the smartest one in the room," novelist and Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen wrote recently, "but he will soon be educated otherwise."
Still, those Republicans — whose state party is embroiled in an embarrassing finance scandal of its own — know that Floridians expect them to help Scott make good on his "7-step" pledge to create 700,000 new jobs in seven years (even though the gubernatorial term is only four years). They may wave off some of Scott's less viable ideas — this month he revived the push for a school voucher-like plan for all of Florida's 2.6 million schoolchildren, even though Florida's Supreme Court in 2006 ruled the scheme a violation of the state constitution's public education provisions. But they'll have to be engaged for a change in efforts to shake Florida out of its complacently low-tech, low-wage economic model, which depends inordinately on beaches and oranges. (Read "The Florida Everglades Cleanup: A River of Morass.")
