Peter Schorsch: Florida politicians should be thankful for their good luck

From the Governor’s Mansion in Tallahassee to Charlie Crist’s waterfront condominium in St. Petersburg and from a cafeteria in a drug rehab facility to a Cracker Barrel in Wesley Chapel, politicians across Florida will gather around Thanksgiving dinner tables to celebrate the most American of holidays.

Before they dig into dishes of Parmesan roasted Florida snap beans and scalloped Florida potatoes (recipes courtesy of Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam), these elected officials and candidates will share with their family and friends that for which they are most grateful.

Once God, country, family, and good fortune are given their due, here’s what some of the state’s most prominent leaders should be thankful for…

Gov. Rick Scott should pull out a map and thank the country of Brazil. He should thank it for discovering the extraordinary oil reserves in the Campos Basin in the Atlantic Ocean east of Rio de Janeiro. With this discovery, the Brazilian economy has boomed, enabling its wealthy to look abroad for investments and real estate purchases.

Much of this money has found its way to Miami and the rest of South Florida, boosting the state’s first-in-the-nation job creation numbers. Florida’s unemployment rate is 6.7 percent and dropping. With statistics like that, it may not matter how personally unpopular Scott is. Floridians will be too busy getting back to work to vote against him.

If Floridians do want a new governor, it likely will be Charlie Crist and that’s why the former everything should thank his lucky stars he’s running against Scott and not some other Republican.

Were Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater, Ag Commissioner Putnam, or House Speaker Will Weatherford running for governor in 2014, the election would not be a referendum on Scott, but rather a judgment on Crist’s political history and principles. In fact, Crist likely would not even be running.

Atwater, by the way, should be grateful for his Democratic opponents, Allie Braswell and William Rankin. The former was utterly unqualified to run for CFO, having three times filed for bankruptcy. He quickly dropped out of the race. Meanwhile, the latter, who announced his candidacy in the dead of night, has already been plagued by a series of near-damning blog posts and media mentions.

Florida’s Democrats are not without gratitude, either.

Allison Tant, the chair of the Florida Democratic Party, should be especially grateful for her counterpart, the Republican Party of Florida’s Lenny Curry, who, despite being able to raise boatloads of money and dominate the Twitterverse, has compiled an inexplicable losing streak. As chair of the Leon County GOP and the RPOF, Curry oversaw losses in the Jacksonville mayoral race, the 2012 presidential and U.S. Senate races, the special election in House District 36, and last month’s mayor’s race in St. Petersburg.

Nonetheless, Republicans continue to dominate the state and for that they should thank President Obama, who, for the first time, has a lower job approval rating among Floridians than the notoriously unpopular Scott. The GOP might as well say “thank you” in advance for Obama, whose administration’s bungled rollout of the Affordable Care Act may cost the Democrats the special election to fill the late Bill Young’s congressional seat, just as it might protect many of the state’s most vulnerable Republicans.

Except, that is, for Congressman Trey Radel, who should be thankful he was arrested for cocaine possession in Washington, D.C. rather than Florida. Had he been nabbed in his congressional district, he would now be a felon rather than on his way to much-needed rehab.

And for Radel, Scott, Crist, and so many other Florida politicians, count this and other political writers especially grateful. For there is no more interesting cast of characters or story lines than what can be found in the Sunshine State.

Thank you, political gods, for these gifts.