Credit: ThinkStock
Florida governor Rick Scott may want us to "Say Yes To The Candidate" per his recent so-offensive-toward-women-as-to-be-amusing ad, but he proferred up a distinct no for his part last night.
In an event at Broward College, he was slated to debate former governor and Democratic challenger Charlie Crist in the heated run-up to elections coming up in a few weeks. Only . . . he refused to come onstage. Because of a fan. And we're not talking about the erratic, gun-toting variety. We mean a tiny, electric fan.
And damn did it make for some incredible announcing/viewing. Local news anchor Elliott Rodriguez, who was moderating the debate, grasped for eloquence at explaining the odd circumstances:
“Ladies and gentlemen we have an extremely peculiar situation right now . . . We have been told that Gov. Scott will not be participating in this debate . . . Gov. Crist has asked to have a fan, a small fan underneath the podium . . . The rules of the debate that I was shown by the Scott campaign say that there should be no fan. Somehow there is a fan there. And for that reason, ladies and gentlemen, I am being told that Gov. Scott will not join us for this debate.”
Alone on the stage, Crist said, "Are we really going to debate a fan?"
Ultimately, after seven painfully awkward minutes (inducing, I am sure, at least several ulcers in Scott's campaign team), Scott stood down and joined his opponent onstage to Rodriquez's calls of: "That has to be the most unique beginning to any debate."
Um, yes, quite possibly.
It goes without saying, Twitter was aswirl with commentary, with the hashtag #FanGate raging across social media like a typhoon (no one asked me, but I would have offered up #Fanghazi instead. But hey, to each his own when it comes to Internet humor). The jokes were endless, and now, this morning, the commentary only continues to build.
From The Washington Post, we have a fairly lengthy, supposedly earnest think piece contemplating Crist's sudoriferous glands (you're welcome for learning what that is) called "The truth of #fangate and why Charlie Crist absolutely hates to sweat." For comic relief, however, Jesse Berney of Blue Nation Review offered his own take, "FanGate and Other Rules in the Florida Governor Debate You Didn’t Know About," which includes:
3. No purple nurples, wet willies, swirlies, or Indian burns.
13. Moderators will include Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin, and a dog wearing a Ronald Reagan mask.
16. No references to Lex Luthor, Skeletor, or any other hairless supervillains.
Although it's probably Molly Ball's Atlantic piece, "Charlie Crist's Fan: A Love Story," that takes the cake. Surprisingly elegant—indeed, almost heartfelt—the piece describes Crist's long-standing relationship with his fan, spanning the length of his political career. The man loves his fan, and for the fan's part, it's stuck by him. And now it could have potentially ushered him back into the governor's mansion (the Florida GOP's tweet that "THIS. IS. WEIRD." with a link to a Buzzfeed "article" on the omnipresence of Crist's fan just seems sad and desperate at this point, especially because Crist has openly owned his weird relationship to his electric whirring device for so many years).
We'll let you watch the awkwardness for yourself, however, and judge whether Scott can overcome what is hard to spin as anything other than a temper tantrum played out in the public eye.
Ah, to be a white, straight, male Floridian politician—not only does your venue not get mass death threats police refuse to do anything about (game commentator Anita Sarkeesian offered up in sharp contrast), but you don't even have to put up with the innocuous presence of your opponent's tiny, electric cooling device!
