After being shouted down by an angry voter in public, most politicians would choose to forget the incident happened. Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s PAC went the opposite route.
At a Gainesville, Fla., Starbucks on Tuesday, a woman, later identified by ABC Action News as Cara Jennings, berated Scott over his policies. Scott engaged Jennings in a quick back-and-forth, in which he fared poorly, before beating a hasty retreat exit.
“You’re an “a—hole Rick Scott,” Jennings yells in the clip.
“You cut Medicaid, so I couldn’t get Obamacare,” Jennings said. “You don’t care about working people. You should be ashamed to show your face around here.”
The videotaped exchange quickly went viral. Instead of moving on, Scott’s PAC, Let’s Get To Work, dug into Jennings’s past and released the kind of attack video commonly used against rival candidates, not citizens, even hostile ones.
The video, called “Latte Liberal Gets An Earful,” calls the woman “terribly rude” and shows a brief recap of her encounter with Scott. The video does not name the woman, who was identified as Cara Jennings by ABC News. But it says she was a former government official who refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance and says she’s an anarchist.
Jennings told local reporters she is a stay-at-home mother and is a former city commissioner in Central Florida.
Scott, a combative conservative, endorsed Donald Trump for president after Trump won Florida’s primary. Jennings said she was angry at Scott because he refused federal funding to expand Medicaid under a provision of Obamacare.
The Let’s Get To Work video contends that Jennings’ argument that no one around her has a great job is wrong because more than 9,300 new jobs have been created in Gainesville since Scott became governor.
In the exchange, Jennings responded to Scott’s statement that a million jobs have been created in Florida since he became governor by saying, “A million jobs? Who here has a great job?”
“Who has a great job? Well, almost everybody,” says the narrator in Scott’s response video. “Except those who are sitting around coffee shops demanding public assistance surfing the Internet and cursing at customers who come in.”
