Florida, Here We Come-- Preparing For Tonight's Deadly Tampa Debate That Romney Was Pressured Into

You think Scott Walker is hated? He is, which is why over a million Wisconsin voters signed petitions to recall him. But Rick Scott, the accidental governor of Florida-- he slipped into office with less than 50% of the vote-- has consistently polled as the most despised governor in the U.S. He's so hated in Florida that he's the only governor who all the Republican presidential wannabes have declined to ask for an endorsement. People with short memories wonder how he even got the nomination. After all, the Florida GOP Establishment had their Romney-like wind-up puppet, Bill McCollum, and Scott's criminal record as a Medicare swindler and Medicaid rip-off artist was well known. But the same deranged, Fox-watching, hate-talk-radio-listening imbeciles who made up the primary voters in 2010 will be the primary votes a week from Tuesday. Here's a good look at who exactly, statistically, they are.

Just after the Florida primary in 2010 I wrote:

Florida voters have been rejecting corrupt, right-wing ideologue Bill McCollum for many years. After two decades of disgracing himself in the House-- he was one of the leaders of the attempted coup against President Clinton-- he ran, unsuccessfully, for the Senate against Bill Nelson in 2000 and, in the GOP primary, against Mel Martinez in 2004. This month he was the favored candidate of the Tallahassee Establishment to replace Charlie Crist as governor. He lost again-- and not just lost; he lost to Rick Scott, a former Missouri donut maker who went on to national fame as a career criminal, defrauding Medicaid and Medicare of millions of dollars and incurring $1.7 billion in fines. He was kicked out of his company but somehow managed to avoid prison. He beat McCollum 47-43% in the primary...

Attorney General Bill McCollum was the favorite in the GOP gubernatorial primary, with a moderate record on immigration and strong support from Latino Republicans. His opponent Rick Scott, a political newcomer and self-funded multi-millionaire, decided to make a name for himself by riding the wave of anti-immigrant sentiment so popular with a segment of the Republican base. He emphasized his strong support for an Arizona-like immigration law in Florida and painted McCollum as soft on illegal immigration. Still, once McCollum started attacking Scott as a shady businessman, he regained the lead and was expected to win.

In what proved to be the fatal move of his campaign, McCollum introduced his own version of an Arizona-type law less than two weeks before the primary. McCollum called on the Florida state legislature to enact it in September and bragged that the bill was tougher than Arizona’s.

Turns out, McCollum’s strategy of trying to outflank Scott on immigrant bashing backfired. McCollum rapidly lost support from Latino leaders, and faced a backlash in the press. On Tuesday, many Latinos in Miami-Dade County stayed home. Turnout in what was expected to be a McCollum stronghold was less than 17%, while statewide turnout was 21%. Scott raced over the finish line and pulled off the come-from-behind upset.

Going into the race, Romney is way ahead, having already spent almost $8 million on TV and radio time pushing his candidacy (between his own campaign and the one he's illegally directing via Super PACs). And almost a quarter million Republicans have already voted early, in all likelihood overwhelmingly for pre-South Carolina Romney. Can post-South Carolina Gingrich ride the momentum into a state which is swingy and moderate overall, unlike blood red South Carolina, but has one of the most backward, racist and ignorant Republican Party memberships? Adam Smith in yesterday's Tampa Bay Times:

Mitt Romney is no longer coasting to the nomination, and Florida-- a much different contest than Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina-- should determine whether Romney’s campaign suffered a temporary setback or is in deep trouble.

...Losing Florida could be devastating to Romney, given the advantages he has. And it definitely could happen.

As important as money, television advertising and organization are here, momentum tends to trump everything else in widely watched presidential campaigns. Romney easily outspent and out-organized John McCain in Florida in 2008 and still lost. The nearly 200,000 votes already cast in Florida? That's about 10 percent of the eventual Republican primary vote in 2008.

For all the candidates, Florida presents a very different kind of campaign challenge: the first contest where only Republicans can vote; an enormous state with 10 different and diverse media markets; the first place with a significant number of Hispanic Republicans; and the first primary electorate that truly looks like America-- southerners, Yankees and transplants from everywhere else in the country, as well as urban, rural and suburban voters.

Here's the post-South Carolina bad news Romney has started to face as of yesterday:

1. Contrary to the received wisdom up until now, Gingrich is the favorite in the Sunshine State. Yes, Romney has the financial advantage. Yes, he has been on the air with ads for weeks. Yes, there has been early voting in Florida under way for weeks, during which time Romney’s air of inevitability will have given him an edge. But Florida is a closed primary, the first contest so far in which only registered Republicans are allowed to cast ballots. And the state’s GOP voters are far more conservative and anti-Establishment than many people understand. This is especially true in the panhandle of northern Florida, where Gingrich is likely to take up residence for much of the time between now and the vote on January 31. But watch for Gingrich to play hard for the state’s Hispanic voters-- and not just the Cuban-Americans who are thick on the ground in South Florida but also the polyglot Latino population around Orlando-- by emphasizing his stance on immigration, which is notably more moderate than Romney’s. Between all this and the wave of momentum and free media coverage he’ll enjoy coming out of South Carolina, the former speaker, I think, has the upper hand, though not by a lot.

2. To fend off Gingrich and regain his status as the frontrunner, Romney needs to “refine his message, not sharpen his knives,” as the influential conservative blogger Erik Erickson puts it. The Romney people, however, are instinctively inclined to do the opposite. Incredulous at the notion that anyone on God’s green earth could ever take Gingrich seriously as the Republican nominee, their plan is to step up their attacks on him, beginning at the debate in Tampa tomorrow night. There are two obvious problems with this strategy, though: (a) When it comes to wallowing around in the mud, Gingrich is King Hog, while Romney isn’t even a hog farmer in waders-- he’s the CEO of the agribusiness conglomerate that owns the place, worried about getting any flecks of dirt on his starched white shirt; and (b) Gingrich’s rise represents as much as anything a rejection of Romney, his themeless pudding of a campaign, and the Establishment support of it. At Romney’s final rally in Charleston on Friday [...] he ended his speech by declaiming, “I love this land, I love its Constitution, I revere its founders, I will get America back to work, and I’ll make sure that we remain the shining city on the hill.” It would be hard to conjure a stanza less suited to rousing the hot-eyed Republican base of 2012 than that.

3. Romney needs to get comfortable, and quick, in talking about money-- his, that is. In South Carolina, his handling of the calls to release his tax returns in South Carolina was something like a slow-motion train wreck. This morning, Romney quickly moved to defuse the issue by announcing he will release his 2010 returns and estimates for 2011 on Tuesday. This was smart and necessary, but does nothing to address the deeper problem, which is Romney’s obvious awkwardness when questioned about his personal wealth and, to a lesser extent, his background at Bain, and also the unfortunate appearance he gives of being out of touch with the lives of monetary mortals. From “corporations are people” and “I like being able to fire people” to, most recently, his comments that he made “not much” money in speaking fees when they in fact totaled $374,327 last year, Romney has done much to paint an image of himself as a combination of Gordon Gekko and Richie Rich. No doubt this will be a bigger problem in a general election (if he gets there) than in a Republican nomination fight-- but heading into Florida and Nevada, where the jobless rates are 10 and 13 percent respectively and the median income is roughly what Romney gets paid for one speech, no one should think it’s not a vulnerability with the increasingly blue-collar GOP electorate.

4. If Gingrich wins Florida, the Republican Establishment is going to have a meltdown that makes Three Mile Island look like a marshmallow roast. Why? Because the Establishment will be staring down the barrel of two utterly unpalatable choices. On the one hand, Gingrich's national favorable-unfavorable ratings of 26.5 and 58.6 percent, respectively make him not just unelectable against Obama but also mean that he would likely be a ten-ton millstone around the necks of down-ballot Republican candidates across the country. And on the other, Romney has shown in two successive contests-- one in a bellwether Republican state, the other in a key swing state-- an inability to beat his deeply unpopular rival. If this scenario unfolds, the sound of GOP grandees whispering calls for a white knight, be it Indiana governor Mitch Daniels (who, conveniently, is delivering the Republican response to Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night) or Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan or even Jeb Bush, will be deafening.

5. No matter who wins Florida, the race is now destined to go on a good long time. Again, why? Because Romney has plenty of money (and can always pump in more of his own should the need arise) to go on all the way to June; because this is his last chance to be president, for there will be no third time around for a two-time loser; and because he believes that he alone has the organizational muscle and fortitude to go the distance. As for Gingrich, his near-100 percent national name ID and his magnet-like capacity to draw free media coverage will give him the ability to compete around the country even if his financial and organizational deficits remain. Also, his sense of himself as a man of destiny and world-historical significance-- who, as the Romney campaign cheekily pointed out, has compared himself to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Henry Clay, Charles De Gaulle, William Wallace, Pericles, The Duke Of Wellington, Thomas Edison, Vince Lombardi, The Wright Brothers, Moses, and “a viking”-- compels it. Oh, and also: the two men, Gingrich and Romney, are quickly coming to hate each other. So buckle up; this should be fun.

I hope every DWT reader has already gone through The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin at least once. Robin hammers home the point about how reactionaries thrive on the sense of loss. In the South, especially, the sense of near-martyrdom, and passionate hatred, is palpable among the Republican faithful. Unlike Gingrich, who practically wrote the book on it, Northern Republicans like Willard and most of his inner circle are clueless about using language that animates Southern Republicans. As one wag on Twitter put it yesterday, "It wasn't lack of tax returns, it was lack of grievance" that won Gingrich ever single up-country county in South Carolina. Romney held his own along the coast and won five counties in the relatively sane part of the state. But up-country South Carolina is the Heart of Darkness, the soul of the Old Confederacy and the most backward, poorly educated and hate-filled, satanic area of America. The whole section of the state has been cursed.

We won't be just sitting around eating popcorn and laughing, though. So far there are four outstanding progressives running for Congress in Florida. Alan Grayson and Nick Ruiz have already been endorsed by Blue America; Dave Lutrin is next; and then we'll deal with Lois Frankel.