FL Governor Rick Scott has a double-digit deficit in the polls against presumptive Democratic nominee Charlie Crist. This is no doubt due in part to the fact that Scott is a comically obvious super-villain with a well-documented career as a shady grifter.
But Crist’s polling advantage may also be partly attributable to the completely unprecedented, shocking and outlandish new strategy he’s adopted to try to win back his old job in a state that elected President Obama twice: Crist is unabashedly defending the president and Obamacare against lies from unpopular tea party extremists like Rick Scott:
Some Democrats are running away from Obamacare, but not Charlie Crist. The Democrat candidate for Florida governor is embracing the Affordable Care Act.
“I think it’s been great. The roll-out was difficult. I’m sure the president feels that way, too,” Crist said Sunday morning on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Crist noted that he had seen Obama in Miami on Friday.
“I know that he has a compassionate heart, he cares about people,” Crist told CNN’s Candy Crowley. “People getting health care is like a civil right.”
Crist dismissed concerns that seniors on Medicare Advantage could lose their doctors and said that issue was a fear tactic by Obamacare’s opponents.
“At the end of the day, this is going to be a very popular program because it’s doing the right thing for the people of our country and my state,” Crist predicted.
That’s crazy talk! As any major media figure can tell you, this sort of campaign won’t work because the tea party is a very powerful force. Hell, just this morning in Slate, Reihan Salam noted the following:
If the Tea Party were to fight crony capitalism as hard as it fights wasteful spending, and if its members were to train their anger on the Wall Street-Washington axis that deserves so much of the blame for our stagnant economy, it would be the most constructive and powerful political force of our time.
And if my granny had wheels, she’d be a go-cart. But Scott knew what to do when tacking into such headwinds: Go on a MediScare tour and rile up the millions of selfish old buzzards who are content to let anyone under 65 die in a gutter since they’ve got theirs. Didn’t quite work out for him (via the Florida Sun Sentinel):
“As I travel the state and I listen to seniors they tell me stories about how their plans are being changed, how they are losing their doctors, the coverage is changing, and so what I’m here to do is just hear your stories,” [Scott] said.
Their stories didn’t jibe with the governor’s view. When Scott asked one woman if she’d seen any changes in her Medicare Advantage coverage. “Not really,” she responded. A man said he was “very happy” with his coverage. Another woman said she and her husband are “very pleased.” Another man reported “no problems.”
Sonia Azam, 73, of Coconut Creek, told Scott she found orthopedic surgeons weren’t taking Medicare anymore. Scott asked the group if others were finding physicians were opting out of Medicare, and the response was a chorus of “no”s.
“I’m completely satisfied,” Harvey Eisen, 92, a West Boca resident, told Scott.” Eisen told the governor he wasn’t sure “if, as you say,” there are Obamacare-inspired cuts to Medicare. But even if there are, that would be OK. “I can’t expect that me as a senior citizen are going to get preferential treatment when other programs are also being cut.”
Ruthlyn Rubin, 66, of Boca Raton, told the governor that people who are too young for Medicare need the health coverage they get from Obamacare. If young people don’t have insurance, she said, everyone else ends up paying for their care when they get sick or injured and end up in the hospital.
Eventually, Rubin said, Obamacare will become more popular. “People were appalled at Social Security. They were appalled at Medicare when it came out. I think these major changes take some people aback. But I think we have to be careful not to just rely on the fact that we’re seniors and have an entitlement to certain things,” she said.
“We’re all just sitting here taking it for granted that because we have Medicare we don’t want to lose one part of it. That’s wrong to me. I think we have to spread it around. This is the United States of America. It’s not the United States of senior citizens,” Rubin said from her spot two seats away from the governor.
Okay, it was just one group of seniors, and maybe it was infiltrated by the local chapter of the Silver Alinskys. But when you’ve lost Del Boca Vista, you’ve lost Florida.
flukebucket
Hahahahahahahaha!
c u n d gulag
“…maybe it was infiltrated by the local chapter of the Silver Alinsky’s.”
I know it’s still early, but I think we can shut the inter-tubes down for the day – Betty wins!!!
beth
I love hearing stories like this!
Belafon
I’ve heard a couple of other Democrats running on the ACA. Mary Landrieu and Mark Begich have both been running on the ACA, contrasting it with what the Republicans are offering.
ruemara
For once, yay Florida!
Face
Jesus Crist, another Chuck story?
rikyrah
Charlie Crist is a Human Oil Slick.
But, he’s what can win as a Democrat in Florida, so, just get thy asses to the polls and vote for him.
The good part about Crist being a Human Oil Slick is that he knows every trick in the book and isn’t afraid to do them all.
How he showed up Valdemort’s Lt. Governor the other week was a thing of beauty.
RaflW
This totally brightens my day.
Its about time that shitheels like Scott actually heard from people who understand basic compassion and human decency.
It must have been shocking, bless his heart.
Ruckus
It’s nice to hear that bullshit doesn’t always work in politics. Gives one hope, however small for the future.
some guy
That is a traditional Deem district. I hope Gov Valdemort gets the same reception in Clearwater and the Tampa suburbs.
geg6
My wingnut staff assistant was waxing lyrical about Obamacare the other day. Her son, who turned 27 last year, was tossed off her health insurance and, after much prodding by me, she went onto the exchange in January and found him a great, affordable plan. He went on and signed up and he’s very happy with his coverage. She’s getting less wingnutty every day since this happened.
It’s a funny world out there.
Comrade Dread
Seems there are a few Democrats who are unafraid to run on populist positions. Wish there were more, but it’s those few (whether they do it for genuine or self-serving reasons) who keep me voting for the party as a whole.
While the GOP embraces the gospel of Rand.
The two parties are not the same no matter how much some people want it to be so.
Ash Can
Also on the topic of prominent Republicans scoring own goals, Tony Scalia gets his own fucking court opinion bass-ackwards, people notice.
geg6
@Ash Can:
I read that earlier today. Laughed and laughed and laughed. Fat Tony isn’t the brilliant legal mind he’s been made out to be, it seems.
JGabriel
Betty Cracker @ Top:
I confess, I was honestly surprised when Scott opposed Medicaid expansion. I mean, I know Scott’s a Screw-the-Poor Republican, I just thought his reaction would be, “Cool! More money for Medicaid Fraud!”
NorthLeft12
Up here in Canada, I have had more than a few surprising open discussions with seniors [NOTE: I am nearly there myself] sort of like this.
The monolithic group of greedy, stodgy, reactionary conservative seniors does not really exist in my experience. They have been more dovish and supportive of programs to help children and young adults…..because….they have children and grandchildren that they care about. Go figure.
BTW Mr. Eisen and Ms. Rubin have my thanks and admiration for being fine examples of thoughtful, generous, sensitive, and caring human beings.
Betty Cracker
@JGabriel: He tried to take it, probably to explore the grift opportunities, but the wingnut supermajority in the FL legislature shot it down.
Craig
So the Tea Party would be awesome if it just turned into Occupy?
I love the smell of Slatepitch in the morning.
some guy
Betty, will the double digit lead Charlie has tempt more Dems to think about jumping in the race?
JPL
@Ash Can: I doubt he cares.
JGabriel
@Ash Can:
That’s hilarious. Although I do have one small problem with a quote in the article:
TPM:
I mean, I’m failing to see how it’s at all unusual for a conservative justice to make a mind-blowing misstatement of a basic fact. Isn’t that just par for the wingnut jurist course?
JGabriel
@Betty Cracker:
Ah, thank you. That make much more sense.
Belafon
@Craig: I think you’re making the same mistake that Scott did: Not everyone on Medicare is a member of the Tea Party.
Betty Cracker
@NorthLeft12: Agreed. I’ll admit I’ve become more sensitive recently to comments like “the country will improve when the Boomers die off” since I lost my hippie, Obama-voting, 60-something mom a couple of months back. The country isn’t better off without her, goddamn it.
Now, I think it’s true that there are generational fixations that result in bad governance, such as Reagan’s “the government is the problem” lie and the need to frame every issue as hippies vs. squares. But bad, destructive ideas occur in every generation. Always have, always will.
Ash Can
@JPL: No, he won’t care, but he’s definitely lost face with an error like this. This is the sort of thing that gets people talking behind one’s back in DC.
Ash Can
@JPL: FYWP won’t let me add: Consider the fact that this was a big enough blunder that the pencil-pushing underlings at the SC had to get to work and clean up his mess. I’m betting the other justices are feeling no small amount of embarrassment for him, with the exception of Clarence Thomas, who as we all know is sleep-walking through his entire SC career.
Higgs Boson's Mate
And shame on you if you think that he’s just using them as props.
Ash Can
@Betty Cracker:
QFT. Blanket condemnations aren’t helpful.
Ben Cisco
Ready this makes me feel good.
Meanwhile, in my neck of the woods…
Marc
I hope they have matching jackets.
danielx
I have always wondered how it is that Florida voters could elect Lord Voldemort as guv, but hey, what do I know.
Betty Cracker
@danielx: By the thinnest of margins and with less than 50% of the vote. Scott spent $73 million of his personal fortune on the race, it was a wave election in a non-presidential year, and the Democratic Party of FL, which is a hot mess, nominated a fucking BANKER who ran a shitty campaign. I dragged my ass to the polls to vote for her, but too many stayed home, is the long and short of it.
beltane
The Del Boca Vista Floridians tend to be old-school New Dealers who are probably somewhat more liberal on economic issues than their own children. When Gov. Scott gets a hostile reception at a GOP cesspool like The Villages I will be more impressed.
Hillary Rettig
Wonderful piece, Betty! Thanks! And I add my kudos to Eisen and Rubin.
Dexter's new approach
Orthopedic surgeons in Florida not taking medicare? Calling bullshit. That’s almost the entire patient pool.
beltane
@Craig: I’m sure the Tea Party’s billionaire sugar daddies would be very generous in funding opposition to corporate corruption and crony capitalism. Makes perfect sense.
MomSense
@c u n d gulag:
YES! Where do I sign up for the Silver Alinsky’s?
catclub
Has no one else noted the Silver Alinskys as a band ( polka, yes) name?
slag
Well-timed, BC, well-timed! I LOLed.
kindness
My Grandparents used to winter in Del Boca Vista. Snowbirds. What can I say it’s what old folk do back east. Out here in CA? Not so much.
Roger Moore
@Comrade Dread:
If they do well, maybe there will be a few more in the next election. Republicans descended into wingnuttery because it was an effective strategy. If running on progressive ideas turns into a winning strategy for Democrats, we can hope to see more of it in the future.
Duke of Clay
@c u n d gulag: I concur! I’m definitely a Silver Alinsky. And I’m that rare liberal that actually heard of Alinsky BEFORE the RWs made him into the Boogeyman.
Kirbster
@Dexter’s new approach:
The other two Medicare goldmines are opthalmology and urology.
Another Holocene Human
@rikyrah: Charlie Crist got rid of the racist anthem that was played at inaugurations as his first act as governor. One of his last was to reform restoration of rights for felons. (Unfortunately, Scott came in and reversed that act.) The entire time Crist was governor there were no assaults on FRS or municipal pensions or unions, which have been an annual occurrence since Scott came to town.
I don’t care if Crist changed parties. Because we already know what he’s about. And while Nan Rich might be a real progressive and all that, she doesn’t have the name recognition to win a statewide election.
And I really don’t give a shit who he fucks.
MomSense
@Betty Cracker:
Sad to say but I think that the x-er generation, of which I am a member, has definitely gobbled up this particular lie. I hear it all the time from my contemporaries.
Another Holocene Human
@JGabriel: He was for it before he was against it.
maya
@Ash Can: Yeah, but his ignorance has been cleaned up already.
He was clearly arguing about the proper “texture” of the Constitution, as usual. Just about all school children know it is written on parchment. Scalia believes it to be Charmin.
Jacks mom
I think I heard something about Scott getting behind the tuition for kids born and raised here but aren’t citizens. I’m sure that stance has nothing to do with that double digit deficit though. Just his true feelings about his brown brothers & sisters.
maya
@catclub: It’s a Klezmer band.
Betty Cracker
@MomSense: Yep. Our kids are probably SnapChatting behind our backs about how everything will be just great once we finally kick off already!
The Thin Black Duke
@MomSense: Yeah, but I think that’s a delusion that primarily resonates with white people. Non-whites have learned through bitter experience that the government is the only entity that’s strong enough to enact meaningful changes in society. Depending on the kindness of strangers won’t do it.
danielx
@catclub:
I’ve heard worse band names by far…the band name I’m still holding out hope for is…Black Velvet Elvis, which I think would totally rock.
Another Holocene Human
@Jacks mom: A lot of activists working really hard on that this year. Call it a state DREAM act or tuition equality.
Another Holocene Human
@The Thin Black Duke: You mean Rand Paul was wrong?!?!
hitchhiker
@Betty Cracker:
Speaking as a hippie, Obama-voting, 60-something mom myself, I’m really sorry for your loss, and thank you.
I was hearing a conversation like this the other day from a couple of bitter 20-somethings and I wanted to shake them.
Dudes, when you vote in the same percentages as the olds, you can dish all you want on how bad you have it because of their stupidity and greed. Please, please, show up and make your move.
SatanicPanic
I know this isn’t a popular opinion, but I like malleable politicians, so I’ve always kind of liked Crist
Fair Economist
@Ash Can:
Scalia is pretty obviously going senile. When he was arguing against the ACA, he was arguing against the Fox News version as opposed to the actual act and made a number of major factual errors. That means he not only can’t read the laws anymore, he can’t even follow the briefs his undoubtedly excellent clerks provide. Also, in the past, there were a few areas where his intellectual honesty would win out over his Fascisette personal inclination, like criminal court procedure, but even those have gone away.
The Thin Black Duke
@SatanicPanic: Maybe it’s not a “popular” opinion, but it’s a realistic one. A politician is supposed to do what the voters elected him or her to do, after all.
Mnemosyne
You know, if a politician is going to convert to a new party, I like them to go whole hog and become true believers. We’re probably going to be bitching about Crist being too friendly to corporations, but it’s not like that would be anything new on the Democratic side.
And maybe Florida will get their high-speed train back! That would be good for you guys.
SatanicPanic
@The Thin Black Duke: This. And even there, I think they get outsized attention because they can’t shut up about Ron Paul. I noticed a few years back these people were always the ones saying “people should talk about politics more”- like, uh, we’re not talking about politics because we agree with each other.
satby
@geg6: I suspect that Fat Tony knew what he was doing and that, like all Republicans, he just decided to make history match up with whatever he needed it to say today.
Belafon
@The Thin Black Duke: The Democratic government keeps trying to create possibilities for all Americans, negating the white advantage.
1s
@The Thin Black Duke: That is a great point to make whenever “the government is the problem” is raised. Ask that person, “Name one meaningful change society’s made without governmental action”…
The Thin Black Duke
@Belafon: Yep. That’s what America is supposed to be about. That’s what makes Democracy so great; it’s a game that the whole family can play. But it only works when people get off their asses and vote, because voting does make a difference. If it didn’t, the Usual Suspects wouldn’t be trying so damned hard trying to take it away from us.
srv
Bob Hoskins RIP
mai naem
@Dexter’s new approach: I was looking at an ortho for my mom a couple of years ago and I ran across a website for a doc who had a long note on his website about why he wouldn’t be taking old fashioned Medicare anymore because it didn’t cover his costs, he’d been eating it for years.etc. etc. He took medicare HMOs and he took AHCCCS(AZ’s medicaid.)
I still have never understood why/how Florida voted for Scott in the first place? This would be like ND voting for an anti-Bakken drilling candidate.
Origuy
@danielx:
There was already a band called Velvet Elvis.
Roger Moore
@maya:
It’s actually written on velum, not ordinary parchment.
raven
@srv: Oh damn!
Mnemosyne
@MomSense:
I’m still not sure how I managed to escape the infection of Reaganism that seems to have hit so many other people of my generation (GenX), but I’m grateful I did. Never liked the guy, always thought he was a jerk even as a preteen and teenager, but my older brother (by 6 years) still worships the guy.
Belafon
@Mnemosyne: His statements kept hitting my reality, even when I was a kid. It also helped that he bounced all disabled veterans off of social security and didn’t let my dad know that he could have reapplied.
Betty Cracker
@Mnemosyne: Reagan was president when I was in high school, and even as dumb, self-absorbed, teenage pothead, I knew he was a fool and a charlatan.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne: I hated Reagan so much in my youth. In 1984 I had a young, Republican social studies teacher who liked to devote a day to current events. He had his faculty observation from the department chair one of those days, after that terrible presidential debate between Reagan and Mondale. I remembered it as a typical current events discussion. He told me years later that the department chair had asked him afterwards, “Who was that kid who was so pro-Mondale it was crazy?” It was me. Age 12.
MomSense
@Mnemosyne:
I spent my high school career with a pin on my pack that said “Jane Wyman was right” but at my school it was like the entire student body -2 in support of Reagan. Good times.
MomSense
@Betty Cracker:
HA!!
@The Thin Black Duke:
Sadly, this is also true. Don’t even get me started on the voting habits of married, white women. I want to go on a Cher from Moonstruck crusade. SNAP OUT OF IT!!
mai naem
I,a Gen X’r was the only “out” liberal in my college clique. There was possibly one other person but if he was he wasn’t vocal about it. All my friends were either Reagan Republicans or Evangelicals. Campus for Christ or whatever it was called was big on my campus. Two of my HS social studies teachers were old time mormon conservatives. My last social studies teacher was from Massachusetts and a huge Kennedy fan. I firmly believe the Gen Xrs are in general the worst combination of libertarian free market clap trap and evangelical xtian save the baybee, screw the child garbage. This is topped off by support of the military because of Gulf War 1 and movies like Top Gun. Ugh.
MomSense
Ok, to all the Xers here. Do you all remember having a school assembly to watch Nancy Reagan’s “just say no” video to teenagers? I remember looking around at all the teachers and students watching it and nodding in agreement and thinking WTF–this school is like 99% partiers.
FlipYrWhig
@MomSense: I don’t remember that, but my high school had a rock band come to play covers of popular songs and lecture us about not doing drugs. I remember “Living on a Prayer” was their big number. And when they talked about drugs a few students said “Whoo!” and they did a well-practiced Steely Stare Of Shaming.
Southern Beale
This is exactly the message Dems need to run on in every race, every district, every election. We are the party of compassion. Republicans, increasingly, have become the party of cruel, sadistic, mean-spirited assholes. No one wants to vote for mean assholes.
It’s really that simple.
jonas
FTFY, Reihan.
JGabriel
@MomSense, Mnemosyne, & Betty Cracker:
Hail & well met, fellow Gen-Xer’s.
Anyway, like the three of you, I never got the whole Reagan thing. The guy always struck me as the creepy Uncle Used-Car-Salesman, and I couldn’t understand how anyone could even watch him talk for more than 5 minutes, much less take him seriously. I’m still, 34 years down the line from the 1980 election (when I was 15), gob-smacked and bumfuzzled by the idea that Reagan had any appeal at all.
I suspect it’s because, unknown to myself, I had perhaps already osmotically become a socialist from teenage reading of GB Shaw (co-founder of the (at the time) Fabian Socialist leaning London School of Economics), Scott Fitzgerald, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Village Voice, and sundry other commie writers and periodicals.
Edited to Add: Also, hanging out with the other liberal/commie/anarchist freaks at the college radio station no doubt reinforced my already left leaning tendencies.
jonas
@MomSense: As a gen-xer as well, what I find is that a lot of my contemporaries express a kind of anti-government ennui stemming from the frustrating fact that much of our political system has in fact been captured by corporate interests who use government to create a system that benefits themselves rather than average citizens and workers. So government sucks, right? Even Democrats fail to effectively push back against this (with the exception of a few figures like Elizabeth Warren). What they then fail to recognize is that when some Tea Party tool runs around expressing some of the same “frustration with Big Government,” it’s really code for “let’s cut taxes even more for rich people and let corporations have even more leeway to run roughshod over average people.”
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Mnemosyne
@MomSense:
We didn’t have that, but we did have a guy come in and tell us a bunch of urban legends about drug abuse, including this one.
After that, I tried to get a peer counseling line started so other students with problems could call in (a neighboring high school had one) but our principal nixed it because Liability. So he was teaching us from early on that trying to solve problems was pointless since those in power would always slap any attempt at change down. ;-p
Tom Morello (from Rage Against the Machine) went to the same high school a few years ahead of me and one of my friends from high school was involved in the Occupy movement in Chicago, so I guess it was producing either asshole conservatives or flaming liberals without much in-between.
Betty Cracker
@JGabriel: Same here. Lefty lit was my escapist relief from the manatee-infested Confederate backwater where I grew up.
@jonas: An excellent point, and yes, exactly why we cannot have nice things.
JoyfulA
@Ben Cisco: A really tepid endorsement of Tillis as more likely than the 7 other teabaggers to consider North Carolina’s interests once in a while.
JGabriel
@jonas:
That’s another thing that never made sense to me. The political system being corrupted by corporations didn’t mean gov’t sucked, but that corrupt corporations sucked – which seemed as obvious as the sun in a clear sky. Still don’t get why something like 60% of my generation believed otherwise.
JoyfulA
@Fair Economist: Has anyone checked the source of Scalia’s clerks? They might be from Liberty U Law School, now that the Bush Justice Department isn’t grabbing all its best and brightest.
Trollhattan
“Del Boca Vista” sounds like something from a Mike Judge movie. Doesn’t that mean “view of head” or something? I hope it’s a nice head, although any “view” in Florida has to be from a high-rise parking lot or somesuch.
Kay
I feel like a lot of this could have been avoided with one word, “impersonation”. Conservatives did a really clever thing. They used the phrase “voter fraud” over and over and over, and the public just lumped everything that could possibly happen during registration and voting under that phrase. You still see it in media. There will be some over-hyped report on something to do with voter registration and it will be presented as “voter fraud”.
When you talk to people about this and they understand conservatives are claiming that one person enters a polling place and impersonates another , that’s the supposed risk we’re trying to eliminate, they start to get how nutty the original claim was.
We really have made huge strides, though, with the public. No one here cared a bit about voter ID when this started, in 2005 or so. They all have ID and they didn’t see the big deal. The whole thing was considered a little eccentric and obsessive, a “special interest”.
By 2012, Democrats here were asking about suppression and process constantly. Ohio mixes up the ballot line order because there’s an advantage to a candidate who is listed first. So, for example, on one batch of ballots the Libertarian line comes first on the ballot, and then they rotate thru in each successive batch, GOP first, etc. I got questions from people here about why Romney was listed first on their ballot. They were really scrutinizing process in a way they hadn’t before.
Trollhattan
@srv:
Just read that. Quite a shock, although I’ve not seen him in anything for quite awhile, One of my favorite actors; first encountered him in “Mona Lisa.”
Villago Delenda Est
@Trollhattan: He was great as Khrushchev in Enemy at the Gates.
Rest in peace, private eye to Roger Rabbit.
jonas
@Trollhattan:
Not quite — it’s the name of the Florida retirement community where Jerry’s parents live on Seinfeld.
MomSense
@JGabriel:
I had hippie parents and was involved in performing arts–so I had a life outside of school which saved me not from buying in to the Reagan BS but from feeling isolated. And yes, reading everything I could get my hands on was a big help.
@jonas:
I do think you are correct in what you say but my direct exposure has been of the anything government can do business can do better with the horrific “sterilize and drug test welfare recipients”. Of course no one I grew up with is a racist. Even pointing out the racist stereotypes is just me playing the race card again. Sigh. The other problem is a structural one and that is that wealthy conservatives made a point of funding right wing think tanks and professorships at just about every college and university in the country.
D58826
Over on HuffPost, there are a set of maps showing healthcare outcomes by state. As you would expect the solid red states have the worst outcomes and yet the voters in those states will continue to elect GOPers who oppose Obamacare. Simply expanding Medicaid would help millions of these GOP voters. There was a piece in the Philly paper about a devoted Faux news watcher. He didn’t trust Obamacare and refused to signup for it. He also needed expensive heart value replacement surgery if he wanted to see another Christmas. In spite of all that he initially refused to signup because of what he heard on Faux. A friend finally convinced him to signup and he has had the necessary surgery. FAux and the GOP claim to be pro-life when it comes to a fertilized egg but once that egg develops into a walking talking human being they don’t give a darn. And the voters keep returning them to office. And if the Senate goes republican we will see the same effort to roll back the 21st and the 20th centuries.
Roger Moore
@jonas:
Obamacare is the best antidote to this kind of thinking. A new government program that gives people obvious, tangible benefits will do more to advance the argument that government can be a good thing than any amount of theoretical argument. That’s why the anti-government forces are so implacably opposed to it. They not only oppose what it’s trying to achieve, they don’t want to admit that it’s possible for any government program to achieve anything positive.
jonas
@JGabriel:
Here’s the low-information voter paradox: 1. Government sucks because all the politicians have been bought off by corporations to do their bidding 2. Electing candidates who pledge to make it ever easier for corporations to influence politics and policy, get special tax breaks, offshore jobs, weaken regulations, etc. (sorry, I mean “create jobs”) is somehow the solution to this. I can’t understand it either, but it seems to make sense to a lot of people who aren’t otherwise persuaded by the old “government wouldn’t be so awful if it didn’t waste so much money on lazy ni*CLANG*s” argument also much beloved by middle-aged white men who think they know what they’re talking about.
Trollhattan
@jonas:
Oh god, even better. Has there ever been a better addition to an ensemble cast than Frank and Estelle Costanza? They managed the impossible–making George a (somewhat) sympathetic character.
Serenity now!!
Trollhattan
@Southern Beale:
Exactly right.
Have Charlie Crist and Roger Sterling ever been seen together? Swear they’re the same guy.
Frankensteinbeck
Who are these Democrats running away from Obamacare? Are these the same Democrats that are in Disarray? I’ve certainly noticed that the national media desperately wants everyone to believe Obamacare is such a failure that even Democrats want nothing to do with it.
Villago Delenda Est
@Southern Beale:
I don’t know. The GOP majority in the House indicates that a lot of people very much want to vote for mean assholes, who reflect their mean asshole values.
StringOnAStick
Doesn’t Del Boca Vista translate as “view of the mouth”? I thought that was part of the joke.
Trollhattan
@Villago Delenda Est:
Chris Christie’s reelection sort of refudiates the “won’t vote for mean assholes” theory. Even without the bridge thing everybody knew what a prickly, aggressive tool he is.
PaulW
@mai naem:
Scott got past the primary for the GOP by out-Teahadisting the standard Republican candidate (McCollum), even with everyone screaming then that Scott was a Medicare Fraud.
Then the Democrats nominated Alex Sink, someone who has a nice resume but is a lousy campaigner (her attempt to win the 13th Special just last month showcased the same flaws), and the Dems failed to stir up enough voter interest even though they’ve had a 300,000 registration lead on the Republicans. Scott ended up winning 2.6 million votes to Sink’s 2.5 million… out of a state with 11 million registered voters. That’s 5.1 million roughly voting out of 11 mill: they didn’t get half the votes of those who could vote. This is why voter turnout is so GODDAMNED IMPORTANT PEOPLE!
Jebediah, RBG
@StringOnAStick:
I always assumed the joke was that it was just some Spanish words strung together for the sound by people who didn’t know or care what they actually meant.
Epicurus
@Jebediah, RBG: I believe that it’s an alternative definition of the word “boca,” which does mean mouth; it can also refer to a body of water, as in Boca Chica and Boca Raton. “Bay” or “Gulf” might be a more accurate translation. Now, about that whole “Festivus” thing….
louc
@Jebediah, RBG: Here’s the history of Del Boca Vista from someone who used to live down there.
t’s a multi-layered joke that combines the name of two towns — Delray Beach and Boca Raton. And yes, Boca Raton means mouth of the rat. And since everyone else in South Florida hates the fake snobbery of Boca Ra-TONE, it has led to many jokes.
The condo communities, Century Village and Kings Point, in the Delray-Boca area are legendary. They were the “affordable housing” for the senior set, so drew a lot of retired Jewish, blue-collar lefties from New York. They were famously ultra-liberal and consistently voted to fund the schools and elected more liberal politicians. They were former Rep. Robert Wexler’s constituency.
On the east coast of South Florida, the greedy geezers lived on the beach, and the blue-collar types lived 10 miles west, so it wouldn’t surprise me that a woman from Coconut Creek, also located in the west burbs, would be so clear-eyed about the future.
PS. CV and Kings Point were legendary also for their condo politics, which Seinfeld captured so well. I think either Jerry Seinfeld’s or Jason Alexander’s parents lived there.