2010 Elections: Let the Lovefest Begin
Carl Hiaasen

Now that Florida's bitter Republican primary is over, party leaders are zipping on their Hazmat suits and preparing to embrace Rick Scott.

With his resume reeking from one of the nation's worst health-care rip-offs, the new GOP gubernatorial nominee is now being courted by the same stalwarts who did everything in their power to sink his self-financed excursion into politics.

Scott's surprise victory last week over Attorney General Bill McCollum was a gift to the Democrats and a blow to the wobbly state Republican machine.

Now comes the fun part, when all the GOP bigshots who spent months trashing Scott now pretend that they didn't do that, or didn't really mean it if they did.

Listen to this kissy-face lie from incoming Senate President Mike Haridopolos: "When you people check the record, you'll see it's only positive from me."

Haridopolos, a vocal supporter of McCollum, was one of numerous Republican leaders who helped raise millions of dollars for attack ads against Scott.

Here's another good one. Two days before the primary, party chairman John Thrasher put out a letter bashing Scott for running "a multifaceted campaign of misinformation in an effort to mislead Florida voters."

By the end of the week, Thrasher was flying to Fort Lauderdale to schmooze with the misinformation-dispensing, voter-misleading candidate.

Said Thrasher (his memory bank, and conscience, wiped clean): "The election is behind us and we're ready to move on. I'm optimistic about where we are."

Scott, too, asserts that the Republican Party is conjoining as one big happy family. This can only mean one thing: He's ready to take their money.

He famously spent between $40 million and $50 million of his own dough on the primary campaign, deriding the special interests and lobbyists who'd lined up behind McCollum.

To beat Democrat Alex Sink in November, Scott will need millions more. No matter how rich you are, it's always better to have someone else pick up the tab.

For Scott, the road to victory won't be easy, or cheap. Making voters forget that you ran a hospital company that bilked millions of Medicare dollars from U.S. taxpayers will be an expensive challenge.

McCollum saturated the airwaves with commercials reminding people of Scott's role in the Columbia/HCA scandal. Despite Scott's victory last Tuesday, some polls showed that 40 percent of voters were left with a negative opinion of him.

More distressing for Republicans is the fact that Scott got trounced by McCollum in South Florida. It will be next to impossible for him to win the general election if he can't carry Miami-Dade, Broward or Palm Beach counties.

In the aftermath of less vitriolic primaries, most voters who supported the losing candidate end up backing the party nominee in the general election. However, Scott campaigned as the anti-party candidate, and his tactics alienated many mainstream Republicans.

Whether Sink can capitalize on the rancorous split in the GOP remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the efforts of Thrasher and others to present a unified front will provide some much-needed comedy, if nothing else.

Expect staged photo opportunities of Scott posing with ex-McCollum backers, pained smiles all around. It will also be intriguing to see how party godfather Jeb Bush devises to appear enthusiastic about Scott, when the truth is the opposite.

As this is being written, Scott hasn't yet received one endorsement that would typically be automatic, one that he sorely needs: his Republican opponent's.

The day after losing the primary, McCollum said, "I still have serious questions ... about issues with his character, his integrity, his honesty, things that go back to Columbia/HCA and I have not had the occasion to really actually even get acquainted with him. As other voters will do I will judge him throughout this campaign."

That's not a lukewarm comment. It's frigid.

Without a tide of McCollum voters, Scott has zero chance of winning in November.

That's why McCollum will face mounting pressure from GOP insiders to hold his nose and praise a man whom he truly believes is unqualified to be governor.

How McCollum responds will be a measure of his own integrity. Either he'll continue to say what he really thinks, or he'll join Scott's make-believe lovefest and paste on a smile.

Available at Amazon.com:

The Feminine Mystique

The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy

The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics

Bush on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks

The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House

Read the latest political news.