A news by yahoofreeshop:MIAMI The debate on Monday night between Alex Sink Florida’s Democratic nominee for governor and Rick Scott the Republican candidate featured striking disagreements over abortion how to fix the state’s economy and whether construction jobs trump environmental protection.But when Ms. Sink appeared before a gaggle of Tallahassee reporters this morning none of that mattered: they wanted to talk about what happened during a commercial break when a makeup artist showed Ms. Sink an Android phone with a text message from an aide....
Turns out it was a suggested retort (“The attorney who won the Sykes suit said Alex Sink did nothing wrong. Tell not to let him keep talking about her”). It was also a violation of the debate rules which the Scott campaign immediately labeled “icheating.”
Ms. Sink said Tuesday that she was as surprised as everyone else to see the message. “I looked around,” she said “and she put this phone in my face and said ‘I don’t know who this is from,’ and I turned around and looked and I said I mean I couldn’t tell really what it was.”
Eventually she figured out what was going on, with a push from Mr. Scott, who can be seen on the CNN video calling over a producer and asking, “So we can get notes we can have people that work for us come give us messages?”
Afterward, Ms. Sink said she had asked who sent the message and immediately fired the aide, Brian May, though in a statement Monday night she said he was acting only “out of anger with Rick Scott’s repeated distortion of facts.”.....
The trouble for Ms. Sink the state’s chief financial officer is that she has built her campaign around an attack on Mr. Scott’s integrity. Most of her ads quote Republican law enforcement officials describing her opponent as untrustworthy because of $1.7 billion in fines paid for Medicare fraud by his former company Columbia/HCA......
Both candidates are relatively new to politics; Mr. Scott is running for the first time, and Ms. Sink has been in government for only four years, after a career as a bank executive. And with neither performing particularly well in debates both appeared nervous and awkward Monday their high-priced consultants are probably in constant conflict about when and how to direct their clients.....
But does Ms. Sink’s receiving a message and breaking the debate rules make her a hypocrite or worse a potentially dishonest governor? Does it even matter in a state with record unemployment huge budget deficits and its history of population growth at a virtual standstill?....
In a race this close in a state famous for appearance over substance it just might. “You know, I don’t know how big it is to any individual,” Mr. Scott told reporters Tuesday. “But she wants to attack me all the time and then she doesn’t follow the rules. And that’s a pretty simple rule to follow.......
