I had planned to tell you that every time a politician makes a promise, his nose gets longer, or somewhere a butterfly dies.
But I think I'm confusing my urban legends.
It only occurs to me because this week Rick Scott was elected Florida's next governor.
And among his most effective campaign television ads was the one in which he promised to create 700,000 jobs, shrink Florida's government and drug-test welfare recipients.
Joblessness is scary. Oversized government is scary. And some folks find welfare recipients scary.
To Scott's credit, whether you voted for him or not, his ads did not include the stereotype ``welfare recipient'' boogeywoman made popular in 1980s political ads, in the form of a black or brown woman, with horns, a pitchfork, a dozen kids and a gold-plated, diamond-encrusted Cadillac.
The problem with that image -- other than it's silly and offensive -- is that it simply isn't statistically accurate, and doesn't account for the average Janes and Joes of many backgrounds who have tried but failed, as Hank Williams Jr. once crooned, ``to make a dollar out of 15 cents.''
``I'm thinking I don't fit that,'' Claude Holt said wryly, when I met the 48-year-old former electronics store manager earlier this week.
Holt, a recent transplant to South Florida from the Nashville area, was sitting outside a downtown Fort Lauderdale Starbucks reading a newspaper jobs section when I approached.
Once I convinced him I wasn't (certifiably) nuts, I asked Holt how the job search was going.
``Not well,'' he said, adding that he'd soon have to ``get some help'' if things didn't pick up.
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