Charles P Pierce- Fan Dance
Ah, well, this morning's headlines:
Florida Man Loses Mind At Debate
And, for the tabloids,
Batshit Batboy!
In case you missed it, Rick Scott, by the grace of god and his millions and the Medicaid program, the governor of Florida, declined to come out of his corner at the beginning of last night's debate against newly minted Democratic challenger Charlie Crist. The immediate casus belli was the fact that Crist had rigged up an electric fan under his podium to keep him cool under the hot TV lights. Scott claimed this violated the ground rules that had been set for the debate which specified that no electronic devices were permitted, and the argument hinges, I kid you not, on whether or not a fan is an "electric" device or an "electronic" one. In any case, when the cameras came on, Crist was the only one onstage, and the baffled panel of three journalists tried to keep order, which apparently included telling Crist to dummy up until such time as Scott joined him. (Fairness, after all.) So there now exists copious photographic and video evidence of Charlie Crist, alone on the stage, while Rick Scott is having a snit in the green room. It is now the conventional wisdom that Scott blew up his campaign with this stunt.
If you put your faith in optics, and believe that politics is primarily stagecraft, then that may be true. The visual was quite simply the most bizarre image to come out of a debate since Ned Coll waved a rubber rat at Edmund Muskie in 1972. Whoever convinced Scott to try this stunt should be fed to the Everglades pythons immediately. But, if you hung around and watched the rest of the debate, you fully understand now why the people of Florida are gagging on having to make a choice between either one of these jamokes. Once he arrived, Scott was rattled and jittery. He chattered away like a guy trying to talk his way out of a DUI rap on Biscayne Boulevard. (And he kept bringing up the fact that his mother divorced an abusive husband into almost every answer. It is an admirable piece of biographical detail, but it doesn't have much to do with the death of Trayvon Martin.) But, through all of that, he did a fairly good job of making Crist look like the too-slick-by-half opportunist that he is. He made Crist, the Democratic candidate, own his previous record as a Republican governor.
Meanwhile, Crist was focused and sharply prepared; he spun one question all the way around to pointing out that Scott's company had paid the largest Medicaid fraud judgment in history and that, in the process, Scott had taken the Fifth Amendment 75 times. He came out forcefully for marriage equality, for fixing the state's Wild West "Stand Your Ground" law, and he shook Scott on why the latter has opposed taking the FREE MONEY (!) available to Florida under the Affordable Care Act. (No governor who has chosen to reject the money has a leg to stand on, but Scott had even less.) But Crist also danced around a number of issues in such a way as to leave the impression that his political life began all over again on the morning after Marco Rubio beat him out for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate and Crist awoke to discover that he'd become a Democrat while he slept. So Crist was incredibly slick and Scott was incredibly weird, and I think Zombie Reubin Askew is polling at 38 percent and climbing this morning.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Florida_Man_Vanishes
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And Pierce nails it again.
Seriously, is Scott totally deranged? What else can explain his bizarre behavior? 
