Rick Scott delivers Florida.

• Author: Papantonio, Mike
• Position: Essay

During his tenure as president of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean did his best to implement a fifty-state strategy to help Democrats build a strong political base in local elections throughout the country.

The idea was that every political race--from school superintendent to President--was important to the party's future. Many establishment Democrats balked at the idea of wasting their time trying to help smalltime politicians win elections when there were larger, more important contests to focus on. Eventually, the party's fifty-state infrastructure fell apart, but not until after the successful 2008 Presidential campaign of Barack Obama.

Where old, worn-out establishment Democrats blew it again, conservatives recognized an opportunity. The Koch brothers in particular were intrigued by Dean's ideas, and they slowly began to funnel money, talking points, and their candidates du jour into elections all over the country. Some were hyper-local, such as school board members in rural Colorado or a mayoral race in a small town in Minnesota.

These small-fry victories sent ripples of pro-business, anti-union, anti-regulation sentiment throughout the nation. But the Koch fifty-state strategy still needed to reel in a few big fish, so they did what all good anglers do when they want to catch a whopper. They went to Florida.

The state of Florida is an integral part of the electoral puzzle. It is nearly impossible for a Presidential candidate to win the White House without Florida's twenty-nine electoral votes, and only once in the last forty years has the state not gone to the winner of the Presidential election.

Beyond Presidential politics, the state had been largely ignored by Democratic organizers and the media, allowing the Koch brothers and the Tea Party to methodically seize control of one of the most important electoral blocs in the country. They accomplished this feat to a large degree by way of Republican Governor Rick Scott.

Scott was their perfect candidate: He was a self-made millionaire, a champion of capitalism, and his Ayn Randian philosophy towards government and private industry played well within the Florida Tea Party circles. It was as if Rick Scott was a long-lost relative of the Kochs, raised by Gordon Gekko and Karl Rove. And the best thing about Rick Scott? He wouldn't have to rely on anyone else's money to win an election. He was loaded.

Before he had dreams of being one of the least-respected governors in Florida history, Scott was running what turned out to be one of the more corrupt health care organizations of his day. In the late 1980s, he...