Rick Scott's mantra: I'll make job creation my mission

After buying and selling everything from doughnuts to hospitals, Rick Scott is trying to make his toughest sale: persuading voters to elect him governor of Florida.

Scott's campaign, with a heavy reliance on his fortune, is a product of savvy marketing, a simple message of jobs and careful management of access to voters and the media.

Rick Scott the TV image -- bald guy who promises to create jobs -- is well known. Rick Scott the man isn't.

``When you come from nowhere -- and we started April 9 -- no one knew us,'' Scott, 57, tells a crowd at a fundraiser at Captain Anderson's restaurant in Panama City. ``I'm going to work my tail off to do everything we said we're going to do when we win. We're going to turn this state around, create the jobs and we're going to run this state like a business.''

In a year when voters seem to crave outsiders as never before, Scott is well positioned. If he wins, it will be on the strength of money, moxie and a rags-to-riches profile packaged through saturation TV advertising.

Funny thing, though: Scott can't stand to watch television.

``He loves to read. I never see my dad watch TV,'' says his eldest daughter, Allison Scott Guimard. ``In two minutes, he either falls asleep or goes and does something else.''

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Already late on a Saturday afternoon, Scott speed-walks to a crowd of 200 tea party members enjoying vanilla and orange swirl ice cream at Mixon Fruit Farms in Bradenton.

LOUD CHEERS

Wearing the uniform of a ``Let's Get to Work'' candidate, starched white dress shirt with sleeves rolled, Scott leaps on stage with his entourage: wife Ann, daughters Allison and Jordan with their husbands, and his mother, Esther, who draws loud cheers from a crowd that recognizes her from a TV ad promoting her son.

``I'm not the smartest guy in the world. I had a mother that told me what to do all my life, and I traded that in for a wife,'' Scott jokes as Ann winces slightly. ``We got married two years out of high school, which is not what you tell your kids to do, right?''

After six months on the campaign trail, Scott is unpolished and at times awkward, talking too fast and sometimes too long. But crowds respond to his promises of smaller government and his blunt criticism of President Barack Obama's ``job-killing'' health care changes and stimulus program.

The tightly wound, hard-charging former CEO of the Columbia/HCA health care chain becomes as shy as a schoolboy when voters fawn over him. He tugs at the forearms of curious voters who have questions, then directs them to his website for more specifics.

When one asks for his autograph, he scribbles ``Let's get to work -- Rick Scott.''

As Scott leaves the citrus plant, Tad Mackie of Sarasota shouts: ``Hey, Rick! Your stage presence is getting a lot better. A lot better.''

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Richard Lynn Scott was born in Bloomington, Ill., on Dec. 1, 1952, the second-oldest of five children.

The birth date is significant, his mother recalls, because it was the last day to be accepted into public schools. As such, growing up, Rick was always smaller and skinnier than his classmates.

``He would have loved to play sports, but he just wasn't able to,'' Esther Scott says. ``He was just smaller.''

Rick's birth father was an abusive alcoholic, his mother says. She divorced when her son was a toddler and married Orba Scott, a long-haul truck driver who adopted Rick. The father was a paratrooper and part of the D-Day invasion in World War II.

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