Florida’s 2010 midterm elections are going haywire, thanks to cold hard cash.
Like rich kids trying to buy friends when enrolled in a new school, a couple of heavily loaded guys named Rick Scott and Jeff Greene are shaking up the state’s two highest profile contests, forcing both the Republican and Democratic Party establishments to rewrite campaign game plans on the fly.
Scott burst on the scene first and has had the greater impact so far. He’s a "one step ahead of the law" mega-millionaire who for years ran a corrupt health insurance company in the business of refusing to sell sick people coverage. He was forced to resign as CEO of Columbia/Hospital Corporation of America in 1997 after his company admitted to billions of dollars in fraudulent Medicare overcharges to the U.S. government.
Last year, he spent millions on TV ads attacking Democratic Party efforts to finally provide seriously ill Americans with the kind of equal access to health coverage that he amassed his fortune by denying.
This year, he’s spending millions on TV ads trying to trick anxious, confused voters into believing he has genuine concern about representing and protecting their interests as the next Republican governor of Florida. This media blitz has gotten him up to 24-percent in a recent poll, only 12 points behind front-running Attorney General Bill McCollum.
That’s not surprising, given that McCollum has done nothing to protect Floridians from mortgage and insurance scams or corporate scofflaws during his time in office, is wasting taxpayer dollars on a dangerous lawsuit to overturn health reform, and is now embroiled in a ridiculous scandalover his personal insistence that the state hire a rabidly anti-gay psychologist as an "expert witness" - one who it now turns out paid a gay escort service to have a 20-year-old male "assistant" travel with him and provide "sensual massages". Oh yeah, McCollum also paid the "expert" twice as much as he was supposed to.
The sleazy likes of Scott and McCollum should be good news for likely Democratic nominee, Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink. She’s a solid citizen, a moderate, has introduced a substantive plan for rebuilding Florida’s economy, and has no skeletons hanging in her closet. However, she may soon have interesting competition for the nomination from Lawton "Bud" Chiles III, a well-respected children’s issues advocate and son of Florida’s former governor. More on Chiles if and when he becomes an official electoral alternative to Sink...
Speaking of alternatives - how about the U.S. Senate race? As if things weren’t interesting enough - what with once moderate conservative Rubio making a flaming right turn to pander to the Tea Party, "No Party" Crist making a series of U-turns to pander to everyone, and Kendrick Meek making history by getting on the Democratic ballot via a statewide petition drive - now billionaire Jeff Greene has dug into his pocket for ten grand in loose change to get himself on the Democratic ballot, just hours before the qualifying deadline.
Greene’s background isn’t as soiled as Scott’s, but it doesn’t jibe with his self-portrayal as someone "sensitive to what a lot of Floridians are going through today having lost their livelihoods." Right. Problem is, a lot of those livelihoods were lost due to the real estate crash - which happens to be the source of Greene’s fortune, made by trading in "credit default swaps", winning wagers that millions of people would end up going broke and having their homes foreclosed on. Now that’s what I call sensitivity.
As far as his credentials as a Democrat or Floridian - Greene’s a guy who got beat running for Congress as a Republican in his longtime home state of California, before buying his first residence in Florida (one of his ten homes) only two years ago.
I think we can all spell the word O-p-p-o-r-t-u-n-i-s-t. Greene is defining the word with his current actions, calling Kendrick Meek corrupt because he sought federal funding for a Miami urban redevelopment project run by Dennis Stackhouse, a guy who lied about his true motives and later turned out to be a criminal. Congressman Meek clearly demonstrated a lack of psychic power in failing to read the guy’s mind. But for Greene to already be calling Meek "corrupt" is slanderous.
The worst part about the shady political opportunism of wealthy wheeler-dealers like Greene and Scott is that our campaign finance laws remain rigged in their favor. Perhaps if enough voters who’ve been talked by conservatives into losing trust and faith in government can learn to apply that same level of suspicion and skepticism to rich and deceptive power-seekers like Scott and Greene, perhaps that will help level the playing field a bit.
Smart, creative, tough tactics combined with effective grassroots organizing from more people-powered campaigns like Meek’s, and Sink’s - that can’t hurt either.