Rick Scott repeatedly tried to tie rival Alex Sink to President Obama’s health care and spending policies while the Democrat fired back, warning that Floridians could not trust the Republican nominee as the gubernatorial candidates met for the first time Wednesday before a statewide television audience.
In their hour-long debate, the two contenders echoed many of the themes filling their TV advertising – with Scott promising to pull the state out of its lousy economy with hundreds of thousands of new jobs and Sink casting herself as a candidate already tested in Tallahassee.
But the gloves quickly came off as each contender tried to gain an edge in a race most polls rate a toss-up with less than two weeks to Election Day.
“Rick Scott is unprepared to be governor of our state,” Sink said. “I don’t think leading a large hospital corporation that was charged with the largest Medicare fraud fine in the history of our country would rate him as being a highly successful CEO. There’s an issue of trust here, and character, and integrity.”
Scott, a first-time political candidate whose tenure at troubled hospital chain Columbia/HCA has been a steady Sink attack-line, portrayed his opponent as a “failed fiscal watchdog.”
“She clearly is a Tallahassee insider,” Scott said. “She’s been there for years. She’s had her shot. And in her time period there, the state has lost more than 800,000 jobs. The pension fund has gone from 7 percent overfunded to 13 percent underfunded. She’s had a lot of issues.”
The debate at Broward County’s Nova Southeastern University was sponsored by the Florida Press Association and Leadership Florida, bringing the two candidates together on a statewide stage for their first time, although covering mostly familiar ground.
Scott evoked Obama’s name a dozen times – delivering it like an epithet directed at Sink and sometimes loading it further with `liberal.’ He described himself as “an outsider, who has a lot of life experiences, and who has built private sector jobs.
“Our state is clearly headed in the wrong direction,” Scott concluded.
He also accused Sink of using “Obama math,” warning that her policies would lead to vast tax increases.
But Sink used the charge to unleash one of the evening’s best comebacks.
“What I do know is that I was a 4.0 math major at Wake Forest University,” Sink said.
For her part, Sink continued to challenge Scott’s history as chief executive officer at Columbia/HCA, which paid $1.7 billion in fines and settlements to resolve federal charges of Medicare and Medicaid fraud three years after he left the company. Also revived in the debate: Scott having invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself 75 times in a lawsuit involving the company 10 years ago, and refusing to release a deposition involving another firm he founded, health clinic company Solantic, taken just six days before he entered the governor’s race.
Sink, elected four years ago as Florida’s chief financial officer, cited her political and business experience as former head of Nationsbank and successor Bank of America’s Florida operations as being rooted in her childhood on a North Carolina farm.
“I’m still that girl who grew up on that family farm,” she said. “The values I learned there were that the most important thing in life, Alex, is your character and integrity and being honest.”
But Scott turned on Sink – accusing her of shoddy oversight both as state CFO – where he has said she allowed “convicted felons to sell insurance in this state,” and in private business, with NationsBank Florida’s parent company having paid a $6.7 million fine for rewarding employees for steering customers into high-risk securities.
Sink said her office has followed state law in issuing insurance licenses and had no knowledge of the wrongdoing at NationsBank.
She also accused Scott of “throwing mud,” especially when he cited a letter sent to her campaign by Senate President-designate Mike Haridopolos, R-Merritt Island, a Scott supporter, who said her education, health care and jobs proposals would cost the state $12 billion – a figure she said makes no sense.
“I’m going to stand here and be Ronald Reagan: `there you go again,'” Sink said. “You’re just throwing mud out?.There’s no number like that in any of my plans. That’s why we can’t trust Rick Scott.”
With the campaign clock winding down and the rhetoric hardening, tonight’s debate may have left voters struggling to pick a favorite as each contender managed to bloody the other’s personal and political record. Neither candidate, however, made the kind of campaign-killing flub that Sink’s husband, Democratic nominee Bill McBride committed in his 2002 challenge to Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, when he failed to handle a question about the cost of the state’s class-size amendment in a debate hosted by late NBC anchor Tim Russert.
There were few areas of agreement between the two rivals. Still, both refused to embrace efforts to toughen state taxes applied to Internet retail sales and both offered lukewarm support for the state’s standardized school FCAT tests, saying they should be just one method of evaluating students.
Differences, however, were easier to spot.
Sink repeated her opposition to the teacher-tenure ending Senate Bill 6, vetoed last spring by Gov. Charlie Crist, while Scott said he supported the approach. Scott also said he wanted the state to appeal and seek to reinstate the state’s 30-year ban on adoption by same-sex couples after a court ruled the prohibition unconstitutional. Sink said the ban – which had been the nation’s only statewide measure being enforced – should remain off the books.
By John Kennedy
The News Service of Florida
