Florida’s first great cattle call of the GOP 2016 presidential candidates is taking place on Tuesday, June 2, at Rick Scott’s Economic Growth Summit in Orlando.
Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Rick Perry, Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal have all given their RSVPs to the event.
Speaking to Politico in comments published on Monday night, Scott says that he’ll give each candidate 30 minutes to address the crowd, but they better limit their conversation to fixing the economy.
“When I asked all the candidates for this, I said: This is an economic summit. I’d like you to spend all your time talking about how you’re going to turn around the federal economy. There will be lots of other forums where you can talk about ISIS, you can talk about immigration reform … Everybody will have a half hour. They can do whatever format they want.”
Not surprisingly, Scott says “The guy I’ve talked to the most is Perry,” referring to the former Texas governor, who is still testing the waters about a 2016 run. .The two are friendly, and Scott has often talked about trying to outcompete Perry for the job growth be brought to the Lone Star state.
Regarding Jeb Bush, Scott said “almost all of my conversations have been on education.”
And he dissed Mitt Romney, saying that the former Massachusetts governor “spent a billion dollars and I don’t know what his plan for jobs was. And he clearly didn’t talk about it in Florida.”
Barack Obama narrowly defeated Romney in Florida in 2012 in the presidential election, a contest that took five days to decide.
