Peter Schorsch
During a story arc of the third season of 30 Rock, Jon Hamm plays Drew, the boyfriend of Tina Fey‘s character Liz Lemon. In the episode “The Bubble,” Fey begins to notice that people treat Hamm differently because of his good looks.
After watching a traffic cop rip up a ticket for Drew, and fashion designer Calvin Klein offers him a job as an underwear model, Liz brings the matter up with her boss, Jack Donaghy (played by Alec Baldwin), who tells her that Drew is in “the bubble.” Jack tells Liz that she should stay with Drew and enjoy the perks of the bubble, but Liz begins to realize that living in the bubble has left Drew without some essential skills. After discovering that Drew cannot perform the Heimlich maneuver, even though he is a doctor, and cannot play tennis, despite the fact that he worked as a tennis coach, Liz decides that she has to leave Drew, and ends their relationship.
Thinking about this episode got me wondering what Jack Donaghy would say about Steve Crisafulli. Is the speaker in “the bubble?”
Let’s face it, this Legislative Session will likely go down as one of the worst of the Republican era. It’s so dysfunctional, it makes the ones presided over by Dean Cannon and Mike Haridopolos look as if they were managed by Accenture. Not only is the regular session likely to end without a budget, many other key questions – gaming, medical marijuana, water policy – will go unanswered.
Yet there has been relatively little criticism of Crisafulli for this train wreck.
Speaker Designate Richard Corcoran and the arch conservatives in the House caucus are blamed for their obstructionism.
Senate leadership is blamed for its insistence on expanding Medicaid.
Gov. Rick Scott is blamed for, well, he gets blamed for everything, but in this case, he mostly gets blamed for having little influence over the Legislature.
President Barack Obama gets blamed. The feds get blamed. An alphabet soup of agencies and issues – AHCA, CMS, FHIX, LIP – all get blamed.
But not Steve Crisafulli. He’s in “the bubble.” No one wants to call out Crisafulli because he’s so damn good-looking and nice. He’s affable and polite, too.
Heck, if Hollywood were making a movie about the Florida Legislature, Jon Hamm would probably be cast to play Crisafulli.
Yet the trains are not running on time, as they did under Dan Webster and Will Weatherford and all of the Republican speakers in between.
At what point does the bubble burst and Crisafulli start shouldering his fair share of the blame?
There’s been a lot of discussion lately about reforming the process by which the House selects its leaders and that identifying a speaker-to-be four to six years before they would serve in that position may not be a good thing. Perhaps there’s some merit to those arguments.
But isn’t there some merit to the argument that identifying the speaker-to-be early on allows them to be mentored by other legislative leaders? Being selected so early means they get to sit at the table, even if it’s at the foot, during the hard-nosed negotiations between the House and Senate.
Crisafulli, tapped to be speaker only after Chris Dorworth was defeated at the ballot box in 2012, did not have to climb the cursus honorum like other speakers did. That’s not to blame him for this – it wasn’t his fault Dorworth lost – but it is a strong argument against not fixing what isn’t broken.
As for Crisafulli, he seems to be able to move in between raindrops. Meanwhile, the rest of the Legislature is riding out the storm.
That’s what life in the bubble is like.
