Florida: Scott on the Mend?
PrintBy Hastings Wyman
Healthcare mogul Rick Scott was elected governor of Florida in the Republican year of 2010 after a bitter and narrow primary victory over long-time GOP officeholder Bill McCollum and another narrow, hard-fought General Election win over the state’s popular chief financial officer Alex Sink (D). With no experience in government and a checkered career in business – he was forced out as CEO of his company over Medicare fraud problems – Scott was probably ill-prepared for running a state. In any case, whatever the reason, his first two years in office were ill-starred.
Last year his budget, which he signed in May, was very unpopular because it cut some $1.35 billion from education and $1 billion in Medicaid. Moreover, with little political experience, he was noted for a formal manner with the public and lawmakers. As late as December, a Public Policy Polling (D) showed Scott with a 26 percent approval rating.
A month later in January, however, a Quinnipiac University survey showed him with a 38 percent approval. While the improvement was substantial, it still left the embattled governor with the lowest rating of any governor in the seven states where Quinnipiac polls. The question is whether his gain represents a significant trend, or whether he’s still in the political doghouse.
On the positive side, Barney Bishop, a political commentator and former CEO of the Associated Industries of Florida, points out that though Scott is still personally unpopular, his policies are not. Such Scott proposals as drug testing for welfare recipients, teacher tenure reform and tax reductions for certain businesses all get positive ratings in opinion surveys. He has also proposed $1 billion for education, a popular reversal of his previous budgetary priorities, which helped him significantly, says Susan MacManus, political science professor at the University of South Florida. “It signaled a willingness to learn and also pragmatism.” She notes that business in particular “has been pushing for education improvement to attract high tech jobs.”
Scott also appears to benefit from more of his proposals getting favorable treatment in the Republican legislature. Last week the House passed Scott’s proposal to boost the corporate income tax exemption from $25,000 to $50,000. The measure passed by 92 to 22 as part of an economic development plan which included new or larger tax breaks for several business groups. The House also passed a back-to-school sales tax holiday to take effect from August 3 through August 5 as well as tax incentives for companies to produce oil from abandoned wells in parts of the state. And last week he signed the legislature’s congressional redistricting plan, strictly a legislative product, but it showed something getting done on his watch. (Florida Democrats – no surprise – are challenging the GOP lawmakers’ plan in court.)
Not all of his proposals pass, however. The state Senate, by a vote of 21 to 19, voted down Scott’s plan to privatize prisons in the state, which he said would save the state some $16 million. He noted that Florida’s prisons house far fewer inmates than had been anticipated. He is considering going ahead and privatizing them by executive action alone, which some say would be legal.
Another thing Scott can crow about is that Florida’s high unemployment rate recently declined 2.1 percent, the second highest jobless reduction in the nation. But with a high 9.9 unemployment rate still in place, the fifth highest in the nation, there’s not a lot of cheer about this development.
Business groups, however, including the state’s Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business, are touting the governor’s record. “He’s doing the right things and I think people are beginning to understand he’s trying to do the things he campaigned on,” says Marian Johnson with the Florida Chamber of Commerce. The governor makes daily phone calls to companies in the Midwest where the weather is cold and taxes are high, encouraging them to move to the state, says Bishop.
MacManus believes that Scott has benefitted from making himself more accessible to the public. “He’s been much more outgoing, mixing more with people and attending editorial boards.” Unused to political life, his early ventures out of the governor’s mansion were highly scripted affairs accompanied with a large entourage of “handlers.” But last Saturday, Scott and his wife Ann surprised spectators at the Daytona International Speedway by riding in the pace car for the Budweiser Shootout, then stayed for the race. (That’s riskier than it sounds; North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue [D], who also has a low approval rating, got booed recently when she was introduced at a college basketball game.)
The day before, Scott visited workers at Dean Steel Buildings in Ft. Myers, where he sat down – by himself, with no aides – and talked with five employees, asking them what he could do better. Ft. Myers News-Press writer Bob Rathgeber contrasted this with a visit nearly two years ago which was “pure Stiff Rick, Stuffed Shirt Rick,” and concluded that Scott’s approval rating would continue to rise “if he has more visits like this one.” Stay tuned.
