News Press: Editorial: Gov. Scott looking like a leader

[Patricia M. McBride]

Very nice write up by a Florida newspaper that supported Alex Sink in the last governor's race...................so you have to know Scott is doing the really good job if they are now touting him (as we all knew he would!). 

 

After two legislative sessions and a little more than a year in office, Rick Scott has come a long way toward proving skeptics wrong.

Gov. Scott's scorecard

2011
• Plan to revamp teacher evaluations based more on student performance passed.
• Requirement for previously exempt public employees to contribute to their retirement passed, later blocked in courts.
• Education spending cuts of 8 percent passed.
• $30 million in corporate tax cuts passed; Scott had asked for $458 million cut
• $1.8 billion in Medicaid cuts passed.
• Drug testing for welfare recipients passed.
• Arizona-style immigration legislation failed to come to a vote
• 14,000-plus state jobs cut
• Scott’s effort to oversee rules on state agencies blocked by courts, who said rules were the Legislature’s creations and governor could not change or repeal.
2012
• $1 billion increase in school funding.
• A $223 million economic incentive package, including $120 million mostly in business tax breaks, passed.
• Reform of personal injury protection in auto insurance passed.
• Tougher penalties for human trafficking.
• Drug testing for state workers.
• Privatization of prison system voted down by Senate; Scott considering doing it by executive action alone.

Mar. 17, 2012

This newspaper, which endorsed Rick Scott’s 2010 opponent, Democrat Alex Sink, doubted a person with no political experience, however successful he’d been in business, could take over cold as chief executive of the fourth most populous state in the union and run it credibly.

But Scott, who beat Sink by a tiny margin, has done just that. He has shown a capacity for growth and moderation, while sticking to his conservative, small-government beliefs.

Scott has loosened up his stiff original style, circulated among people of various sympathies and listened to them, and been more open with the press. He has stuck to but softened his core conservative agenda, which remains popular, and has shifted tone in an effort to improve his personal image.

Scott should continue his opening to the center, sticking to the secular issues such as jobs, the economy, lower taxes and smaller government that have always been popular, even if he wasn’t.

Stay focused on jobs

The governor should avoid the hot-button culture-war issues such as abortion, gay rights and immigration, which have appeal to the right, but, as Rick Santorum has discovered, can limit a politician’s success with more moderate voters, even in the Republican Party. Drug testing for welfare recipients (last year) and state employees (this year) are offensive and needlessly intrusive in our view, but seem quite popular.

In 2010 Scott vigorously supported a Florida law on immigration similar to Arizona’s controversial effort to make life uncomfortable for illegal immigrants. That has not come to a vote in Florida, and we hope never will. Scott says he opposes racial profiling; Arizona-style state laws are an open invitation to just that, one reason they have run into trouble in the courts.

READ MORE HERE:  http://www.news-press.com/article/20120318/OPINION/303180044/0/coas...