We get a lot of emails from Rick Scott. Like a lot.
He never forgets his friendly neighborhood media, and he's always appointing someone to some bureaucracy somewhere. But two days ago, he hit us with this Huffington Post article that made everyone go, "Wuuuuuuhhhh"??
The article concerns how swell a guy Rick Scott is.
What the article missed? How much Florida hates him.
Granted, Florida has rebounded in a pretty dramatic way over the past few years, dropping from an unemployment rate of 11.1 percent at the end of Charlie Crist's term to somewhere around 7.8 percent -- lower than the national average.
And yes, tourism has climbed out of the doldrums, as nearly 90 million entered the Sunshine State in 2012: a record.
But the story misses something EVERYONE in Florida knows.
Florida doesn't like Rick Scott. And he will go down in state history as quite possibly the most successful and least popular governor we've ever had. Yesterday, Quinnipiac University Polling Institute released new numbers showing Rick Scott has only an approval rating of 36 percent. If an election were held today between him and Charlie Crist -- we'd take the old guy hands down. Crist would win with 50 percent of the vote to Scott's 34. Less than one-third of voters say Scott deserves a second term.
What's more, 50 percent of voters view Crist's party switch as a representation of his pragmatism, while only 40 percent think he's a soulless wish-washer.
"There isn't much good news in these numbers for Rick Scott," said Peter Brown, assistant director of the polling institute.
Is this surprising?
Not really.
We live in a media-saturated age in which the ephemera of the moment often trumps reality. Barack Obama got hammered for the failure of the Grand Bargain -- which, as he's even admitted, was a manufactured crisis.
Now, Charlie Crist, who by every account didn't exactly make Florida's economy sing, is coming back. There's really no good reason to explain how this is possible, beyond that he's he's fun to listen to, nice to look at, and Florida loves ditzes.
Meanwhile, Rick Scott, will continue sending us emails trying to get anyone to listen to reality: Florida is better off today than before. But few will listen.
Because, as the Huffington Post has clearly missed, Florida plain doesn't like him. And in two years, he's gone.
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