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Tom Jackson is in a 12-step program for recovering sports writers; as part of his rehabilitation, he writes a column centered on the people, politics, passions and peculiarities of Pasco County. Email

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Pasco County News | Breaking News

When governors ‘admit’ innocent activities

Posted Jun 29, 2011 by Tom Jackson

Updated Jun 29, 2011 at 01:46 AM

So it turns out Gov. Rick Scott spent at least part of last weekend in Vail, Colo., at a sort of free-enterprise-fest hosted by brothers Charles and David Koch. (Or, as they are known in the paranoiac fever swamps of the lefty blogosphere, “the billionaire Koch brothers, influential contributors to conservative political causes and tea party candidates.” If only they could work “ending Medicare as we have known it” into the mix.)

We would be tempted to say, “So what?” except that Scott’s staff botched the boss’s getaway.

Members of Team Scott aggressively resisted disclosing Scott’s whereabouts during a rare weekend off the state clock, possibly flinching in anticipation of a fresh round of pounding from this easily manipulated image: The polls-challenged governor, having freshly signed into law a bill limiting unemployment benefits, mingling with the left’s two-headed Enemy No. 1 at a swanky, “secret,” invitation-only retreat.

This is impossibly sad. The fact is, once the chief’s staff starts hedging on the governor’s innocent – indeed, potentially beneficial – associations for fear of how they might be twisted by Democratic Party operatives and their eager stenographers among liberal bloggers and the mainstream media, they’ve got you.

When reporters caught up to Scott Tuesday and he readily reported his weekend schedule, the subsequent stories were more about how he came to be in Vail than why he went, what he learned, and how Florida’s emerging story was received by industrialists (not just the Kochs) with businesses to expand or relocate.

Instead, Scott “acknowledged” he’d attended “a secretive policy retreat.” A reporter “got the information out of him.” He “admitted” being in Colorado and it “confirmed … suspicions.”

Admitted? Really? Admitted? When people “admit” their whereabouts, it’s because they were caught dead to rights in someplace they ought not have been. Husbands tell their wives they’re going to dinner with a bunch of buddies from college; but they “admit” attending a bachelor party at a strip club after a photo of their car in Thee Doll House parking lot shows up on their wives’ Facebook walls.

Well, as long as we’re going to attach the spirit of confession to otherwise innocent activities, I admit I attended the wedding of Mrs. Jackson’s goddaughter on the beach at Anna Maria Island on Father’s Day.

I furthermore admit I went to a family reunion at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola last week. I admit I chaperoned five teenagers one afternoon at the base’s game arcade. And I admit – you’d better be sitting down – I went the entire week without abandoning my kin for 18 holes on the base’s inviting A.C. Read Golf Course. Don’t be too hard on me, OK?

In fact, the only confession-worthy behavior in the governor’s Weekend At Dave & Charlie’s adventure belonged (once again) to Scott’s ham-fisted lieutenants – in this case his spokesman, the honesty-dodging Lane Wright, whose instincts engaging the media are so primitive, they’d have to evolve to achieve Pre-Cambrian status.

The conference, honestly organized and ambitiously staged, was designed “to develop support for the kind of free-market policies and initiatives that can get our country back on the path to economic prosperity and sustained job creation,” according to a spokeswoman for Koch Industries quoted in The Denver Post last week. Declining to confirm Scott was headed that way was just goofy.

If disguising his plan was Scott’s idea, it was a bad one. If it was Wright’s, he achieved the astonishing, making former Obama administration press briefer Robert “Uhhhh” Gibbs sound like Pierre Salinger meets Jack Valenti. Either way, the governor was not well-served.

The Kochs, who legally back conservative and libertarian causes persistently – if not nearly as lucratively as public sector unions and trial lawyers support policies and candidates favoring government expansion – drive liberals generally and Think Progress (funded by George Soros) particularly absolutely batty.

Neither Scott nor his aides can afford to worry how their associations with honest free-market conservatives will be perceived. Their rivals on the left will hammer them anyway. But caginess on behalf of the governor’s staff encourages others to suspect Scott’s critics may be onto something. The effect is needlessly corrosive.