All Politics Is Local: Why Progressives Must Fight for the States by Meaghan Winter

Author:Meaghan Winter [Winter, Meaghan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781568588377
Google: I_GQDwAAQBAJ
Published: 2019-10-01T12:38:14.715000+00:00

Rick Scott told voters what was at stake. He laid responsibility for the global financial crisis at Alex Sink’s feet. During their televised debates and in his ads, which with his tens of millions of dollars he could run whenever he wanted, Scott accused Sink of losing a giant portion of the state’s pension fund—a major issue in a state with the nation’s oldest electorate. He also claimed that Sink oversaw securities fraud at Bank of America, which amounted to taking money from retirees, and that while CFO she had “funneled” $770,000 to Bank of America. In stump speeches and commercials, he charged that she was “an Obama liberal” who did “Obama math.”27

“It was a total lie,” Sink said. “We Democrats have a hard time dealing with that.” The press had a hard time with that, too. Unraveling Scott’s false claims required too much for a quick soundbite. Florida’s pension fund had decreased during Sink’s tenure as CFO. Investment funds depreciate when the stock market plummets, and it had in 2008. Bank of America had been sued for securities fraud. The very attorney who had sued Bank of America over that fraud told the Palm Beach Post that Sink “didn’t have anything to do with it” because those decisions were made in the bank’s national headquarters. Sink had overseen the commercial side of banking—a staid business uninvolved with the complex new financial products that had felled the economy. But in the narrative that Scott was spinning, those distinctions seemed beside the point. When the Tampa Bay Times’ Politifact.com disproved some of Scott’s claims about Sink, the explanation filled a two-thousand-word article full of rules about securities brokerages. Those nuanced refutations were no match for Scott on Fox News promising to create seven hundred thousand new jobs.28

“We were just being outstrategized and outmessaged,” Sink told me. “He’s a broken record, and all he says is ‘Let’s get to work.’” In her talking points, Sink criticized Scott’s company’s record of fraud, but he responded with more charges that she was responsible for Bank of America’s role in the financial crisis. “He was out there repeating the same glib sound bites everywhere he went. It stuck with people. I had much better policies and much better plans, but my team was never able to come up with, ‘What’s Alex’s soundbite going to be that’s effective?’ I think Democrats in general are really, really bad about that kind of messaging stuff. What are three words that the voters are going to remember that are really simply said?”

Sink’s media strategist had told her that as a female candidate she needed to be reserved, advice she later doubted. Being a female candidate for an executive position came with unique perils. Professional women of her generation had fought to win respect by remaining calm and reserved no matter what. When Sink spoke about the economy, she often spoke in euphemisms. And yet it’s hard to see how she could have substantively changed her 2010 message without becoming a different person.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.