After hearing the accounts of the first Florida gubernatorial debate today, I came to the conclusion that Rick Scott is a lot like the New York Yankees: a lot of money to built the team, some early success in the polls…but even a big budget doesn’t guarantee success every game or every season.

The political press, like the media everywhere is obsssed with money. The Florida governor’s race is no exception.  Rick Scott has spent — and spent, and spent and spent — millions to snatch the Republican nomination from Bill McCollum.  But as the race comes down to the wire, I’ve noticed a few things about Rick Scott that make me wonder if the race is as in-the-bag as his extremely well-paid consultants are spinning.

Consider the New York Yankees. Yes, they’ve always had the budget to pick and choose the players they want and are the greatest team in baseball history. Now many folks will complain that they bought their 27 championships…well if that were the case, they’d have far more than 27 World Series rings.

(Remember the 2001 World Series where Mariano Rivera uncharacteristically lost the lead…botton of the 9th, final game?) Lately, as Scott has been forced to campaign actively, you can see there are some cracks in the picture. His bus trip was full of small, unforced errors, from the “birther” debacle to unanswered questions to numerous unanswered questions….even by his own mother!

Why a man with decades of experience as a businessman is so scared of debates tells me something. The McCollum team offered 4 debates, and Scott spent months running from them.  My personal opinion is that Rick Scott doesn’t want to have a video clip from the debates of him trying to explain away why his company was involved in the worst Medicare fraud case in American history.  It’s easy to defend in a commercial, but not so easy in a debate where anything can and does happen.

You can’t buy the perfect team; the chemistry has to be there. The talent, the coach and the staff – all need to be in sync, without that, you’ve simply got a roster full of expensive, ineffective players. My friends in Florida tell me that almost everyone working on Scott’s campaign comes out of the DC political world in a state as complicated as Florida, ground game still counts.

I also wonder if Rick Scott is really thinking things through when it comes to running purely as an outsider.  It’s one thing to be an outsider…it’s another to pick fights for no reason. He’s certainly picking a lot of fights with people like Jeb Bush, Rudy Giuliani and the leaders of the Florida Legislature.  These are all people with a long memory and Scott will need the support of many of them in the coming years if he’s elected governor.  In New York, I’ve seen a $40,000 a year staffer stop a billionaire’s project dead in it’s tracks, so Scott may want to keep that in mind.

But back to money.

Rick Scott is a self-funded candidate whose tremendous spend bought him a place in the game, but it still hasn’t really closed the sale with base Republicans. The number of undecided voters in every poll — even the ones showing him up — is keeping his consultants awake at night..and after $25 million dollars. What that tells me is real conservative voters aren’t sold with his inconsistent messaging despite how many times they see an ad.

Aside from the vague “accountability budgeting” message, his campaign seems to have entered a position where it’s defined only by negative attacks on McCollum and playing defense on his own record.

Rick Scott is right about one thing: this isn’t the year of the career politician…but it’s also not a year where the public tolerates fraud or hypocrisy.  The problem for Rick Scott is that his personal history is THE issue in the campaign.  I don’t need to go too far into the HCA story — practically everyone has heard it by now — but you can go through the details yourself.

A few issues that I’m surprised attracted less notice: By taking over $60 million dollars of Barack Obama’s stimulus money, Rick Scott might as well have joined Charlie Crist on stage for the famous Hug.

Or maybe it’s his famous dance moves…

Rick Scott has certainly made a splash in the Florida Governor’s race, and may be about to make an ever bigger one…but not in the same way his multi-million dollar opening media buy did. $300 million dollars will buy a lot, and it looked to me like Rick Scott was doing just that: executing a hostile takeover of the Florida governor’s race. I’ve worked with very wealthy candidates before, and while their resources are a beautiful thing, their business dealings often undo their campaigns.

Now, I’m a raging, confirmed capitalist chick, and I have no problems with Rick Scott making and spending money, but when it comes to a race like this, people ought to ask not only where that $300 million dollars came from (short answer: massive fraud against the taxpayers) but also what Rick Scott did with that golden parachute after HCA kicked him to the curb.

With a little research (thanks, Google!), I found few things that surprised me about his post-HCA investments (more to come) but none more so than Rick Scott’s funding of a company called Emida.

The short story is that Rick Scott invested millions in and profited from Emida, a company ‘that provides services that’ allow foreign workers to send billions of dollars from the U.S. home to Mexico and Latin America. Millions of immigrants, legal and illegal use these services to send billions overseas as remittances. The problem is, companies like Rick Scott’s Emida empower the illegal alien economy, motivating them even more to come to the U.S.

As illegal immigration has been in the news, remittances have become better known. Here’s the deal: Mexico’s economy is run off remittances. Almost a decade ago, Vincente Fox, the then-President of Mexico said remittances “are our biggest source of foreign income, bigger than oil, tourism or foreign investment” … and the problem of illegal immigration has only grown since then.

What’s wrong with that, you ask? First, the Mexican Central Bank says that 83% of the remittances that are sent from the United States come from illegal workers. Rick Scott and Emida aren’t stupid: they should know that the company he set up is a pipeline for illegals to ship money back to Mexico. They should know that the people walking through their doors are are more likely than not here illegally…and many of those illegals are happily collecting government benefits from liberal state governments who turn a blind eye to their status.

First, for a guy who says he’s against illegal immigration, Rick Scott seems to have no qualms funding and profiting from a company that supplies a critical part of the illegal immigration infrastructure.

Emedia looks to me like the Western Union of illegal alien money transfer businesses. Without an easy system for sending money back to Mexico, the friction of being an illegal worker would be dramatically increased. One profile says Emida has over 10,000 locations in Mexico where the money earned by illegals here can be picked up. I’m guessing a part of that money becomes payments to coytotes who smuggle more illegals into the U.S…making the cycle of illegal border-crossing worse.

When Scott’s very rocky record as head of Hospital Corporation of America came to light, I knew he’d have to address the issue, and I admit I gave him grudging credit for taking responsibility for HCA being hit with a $1.7 billion dollar fine for Medicaid Fraud…even though I knew it was just a political line fed to him by his media team.

I wonder if he’ll take responsibility for Emida and the work it does making illegal immigration easier and more convenient than ever?

Most reporters are caught up in the horserace coverage of how much Rick Scott is spending on the Governor’s race to take a hard look at his record. A lot of Republicans were willing to give him a look – even though the Democrats are salivating over running against Scott’s HCA record alone – but I think when even 30 minutes of Google turns up things like Emida, it’s time for reporters in Florida to dig a little harder.

Watching the Florida Republican primary from afar has been a fascinating exercise. The sudden fall of Charlie Crist  – from being a seemingly unbeatable candidate with 5 statewide races under his belt and an endless Rolodex of high-dollar donors to political trainwreck – has been noted, well, everywhere, as has the emergence of new Republican rockstar Marco Rubio.

The stars have rarely aligned so well for a candidate (though Marco Rubio’s hard work at the grass roots, his aggressive social networking strategy and his compelling personal narrative have certainly helped) and the Republican primary situation in Florida was literally not imaginable a year ago, it looks more and more inevitable that the long run of Charlie Crist is nearly over. How very different from 2006: Florida looked like another state moving from Red to Purple To Blue.

We were in a post-partisan era, remember?  The future of the GOP was guys like Charlie Crist: moderate, soft around the edges and nice to a fault.  The era of ideology was behind us. Charlie was hailed as a future Vice Presidential pick…maybe even a Presidential contender in 2016.

So what happened?

Beyond the moment of the famous hug, Charlie Crist underestimated the permanent symbolic damage backing the Obama stimulus package would do.  In an age where empowered conservatives dominate the social networks that define the poltical landscape more completely than the friendly press he’s always enjoyed, he was blind and deaf to the damage he caused.  He’s rarely been held accountable before either in a campaign or in government, and now he faces angry Republicans, active Tea Party voters and independents for whom the Obama stimulus is a unmitigated failure…and on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and blogs, they’re holding him responsible for his betrayal of conservative principles.

More baffling, Crist keeps digging in deeper, defending his decision to back the stimulus. These decisions tell me that his mindset is stuck in 2006, when the conventional wisdom predicted that Republican leaders would come from the John McCain-Lindsey Graham wing of the party and that robust conservatism was a thing of the past.

But 2010 is the year where fiscal conservatism made a comeback, and Republican voters are looking for someone to go to Washington and tell Barack Obama and the Democrats, “Enough!” We saw it in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts, and I think we’re seeing it again in Florida more clearly than in any other primary.

One observer said that because Charlie Crist could win elections in “purple” Florida that GOP voters looked the other way when it came to Crist.  But recent polls show both Crist and Rubio beat Democrat Kendrick Meek.  So if the growing conservative movement (and Republican and independent voters) can have both – ideological strength and a win in the general election – why not go with the one they love?  There’s no need for the bait-and-switch of putting out a nice-guy moderate: the GOP base and Florida independents are leaning strongly to the right this cycle, and Marco fits the bill perfectly.

Charlie has always grabbed and run on a popular issue: crime in the 1990s, education in the 2000s, climate change in 2006 and seemed to be setting himself up as the “I can work with Barack” candidate for 2010…until Obama’s poll numbers came crashing to earth and took Charlie with them.

Conservative ideological intensity — particularly on the fiscal side — is back in style, and there is no more powerful symbol of that this year than whether or not you oppose the Obama agenda.  Crist’s explicit endorsement of one of the three major legs of the Obama agenda – and his initial reluctance to talk straight on his position on health care — cemented his image with Republican voters. Marco Rubio, a man who from the beginning has stuck with his message of fiscal discipline and real conservative principals was the obvious, inevitable counterweight.

A political hermaphrodite, Crist now wants to be a born-again beacon of conservative purity. His campaign is desperate and attacking wildly…nitpicking Rubio’s American Express statements when he should have been talking opposition to Obama. The Governor clearly has very few ideas left and he’s going to throw everything at the wall he can. Will it damage Marco?  Yes, because negatives hurt, especially when echoed by some plainly pro-Crist voices in the Florida media.  Are they enough for Crist to win a primary? Almost certainly not.

No matter how many times he say’s he’s a strong conservative, the current political climate and that iconic picture have permanently and profoundly locked in his image with conservatives. He’s fighting the battle that won’t help the Republican Party or the conservative cause.  The conservatives are gone, and every poll proves it. And conservatives are the ones who come out on Primary Day. An independent campaign will fail, fast and hard as Crist burns through his money with no hope of replacing it. Every dollar spent on Charlie Crist is a dollar to Meek.

Charlie Crist was always a great campaigner, but never a great leader. He can’t understand why there’s no U-turn on the road he took, but unless he decides soon to leave the race with some dignity, what reputation he has left will be squandered as a man who didn’t realize that his time in political life had come…and gone.