Was Charlie Crist supposed to have a fan at Wednesday’s Florida governor’s race debate? That depends what “temperature issue” and “necessary” mean.
As you’ve probably seen, Gov. Rick Scott did not appear on stage at the start of the debate because his campaign objected to a small electric fan located behind Mr. Crist’s lectern. Debate rules specified that electronic devices were prohibited on stage, “including fans.” When Mr. Crist, a Democrat, signed the rules agreement, his team added a proviso that “the debate hosts will address any temperature issues with a fan if necessary.”
On Thursday, the debate’s organizers, the Florida Press Association and Leadership Florida, released a statement saying Mr. Crist had violated the rules by using the fan. In the statement, they acknowledged the existence of Mr. Crist’s fan clause. But they checked the temperature on stage at 6 p.m., an hour ahead of the debate, and found it to be 67 degrees. With no temperature issue in evidence, a fan was not necessary, and therefore was not permitted.
But who decides what temperature constitutes an issue? Dan Gelber, a former Democratic state senator and a Crist campaign representative, was on stage before the debate and says it was too hot for Mr. Crist, whatever the organizers’ thermometer was reading. “We felt uncomfortable and we put the fan in the place where it was supposed to be,” he said.
“The hot lights were on,” he added. “Eight hundred people were coming into this auditorium in the next half-hour, and it clearly was getting hotter.”
So, who’s right? Naturally, this is a question for lawyers.
“It does not matter what the temperature was,” says Charles Ortner, a partner at Proskauer Rose specializing in entertainment litigation. (Since this is basically a diva fight, I thought an entertainment lawyer was the right expert to start with.) “The addendum did not say that it was up to the hosts to determine if there was a temperature problem. The fact is that the temperature level at Crist’s podium was an issue for him.”
Trevor Potter, who served as counsel for John McCain’s presidential campaigns in 2000 and 2008, agreed the document left the existence of a “temperature issue” up to Mr. Crist’s discretion. “It sounds like they reserved for themselves the ability to decide if there was a temperature issue.” Mr. Potter, an attorney for Mr. Scott’s 2010 campaign for governor, has no affiliation with this year’s campaign.
But George Triantis, a professor at Stanford Law School with expertise in contracts, wasn’t sure how a court would rule. “Whether there were temperature issues and whether a fan was ‘necessary’ would be interpreted by the court, in the absence of guidance from the contract, according to what a ‘reasonable person’ (maybe even a Floridian) would have thought,” he wrote in an email. “I have to say that 67 degrees before stage lights seems warm to me for a debate, but I am a Canadian who finds a hockey rink to be the right temperature.”
Mr. Potter noted any ambiguity could have been avoided through better drafting.
“There should have been an addendum negotiated defining what a temperature issue is and who decides if one exists,” he said, “including potentially a number in there, saying if the temperature is at, say, 66 or below, there is no issue, and if it’s above that, an issue exists and you can use a fan.”
Of course, that level of specificity about fan rules sounds crazy. (“It’s a fan,” Mr. Gelber said to me repeatedly, to emphasize the silliness of the dispute.)
But sweating in a debate is widely credited with damaging Richard Nixon’s 1960 presidential candidacy. And it’s clear the fans are a big deal in this campaign: As David Lauter noted in The Los Angeles Times, Charlie Crist “doesn’t go anywhere without his fan,” and somebody was bothered enough by the fan to insert a rule prohibiting it. Mr. Potter says this is the first set of debate rules he’s ever seen with a specific provision about fans.
Mr. Gelber alleged that the no-fans rule had come at Mr. Scott’s behest: “He’s been trying in all the debates to keep out all cooling.” That might not be a bad strategy for rattling Mr. Crist; his intense determination not to sweat, despite being a politician in Florida, has been extensively chronicled in the press. A spokesman for the Scott campaign did not respond to a request for comment about whether they’re literally trying to make Mr. Crist sweat.
But Dean Ridings, who runs the Florida Press Association, said the reason for banning fans had nothing to do with sweat. It’s about an audio problem created by a fan at a previous debate. “It created a real hum for the broadcast feed,” he told me. “We wanted that to be in the rules so there would not be an issue of a hum.” (Mr. Gelber, for his part, said that the association had never raised the audio interference issue in what were apparently extensive fan-rule discussions ahead of the debate.)
Mr. Scott and Mr. Crist will debate again on Tuesday, and CNN has announced that no fans will be allowed at the debate. CNN may want to take some advice from Mr. Potter and make sure the anti-fan language in the debate rules is airtight.
