TAMPA — The gubernatorial campaign in Florida this year — no
surprise — is the usual exchange of distortions, non-sequiturs,
whoppers, irrelevancies, and other nonsense. (Odd word,
gubernatorial. Makes it sound like Florida’s top office is called
the gubernator. Probably should be, so many gubers have run for
it.) But a little hypocrisy can at least add entertainment value to
an election where neither candidate has much prospect of affecting
issues that matter.
Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist is a pleasant enough
fellow with the right amount of white hair and a good suntan. He’s
a professional politician who’s run for virtually every office in
the state. Even won a few. He likely would have run for others had
they just been there. I doubt that either Charlie or Florida voters
remember when he last held a real job.
Now Charlie wants to be governor, and it looks like he will be.
Republicans, oddly cursed with a thin bench in this red state,
nominated him. And most polls show him comfortably ahead of the
Democratic candidate, a U.S. Congressman from Tampa even less
distinguished than Charlie.
Crist has a reputation as a law and order guy, even earning the
sobriquet “Chain Gang Charlie” for his tough-on-criminals positions
when he was a state legislator. Not a bad rep for a Republican
politician in the reddest of red times. But now, fishing for votes
among Democrats and independents in a not-so-strong Republican
year, Charlie has apparently decided that a kinder, gentler
approach is called for.
So tough-guy Charlie has discovered a deep sympathy for a group
he’s never been solicitous of before, to wit: criminals. Crist
recently announced he’s in favor of the automatic restoration of
voting rights for felons who’ve completed their sentences.
This is peculiar (nothing new in Florida politics), as Charlie
has been comfortable with Florida being one of the few states that
do not automatically restore voting rights to felons after their
sentences have been served. Comfortable through all those years as
a state legislator and years as attorney general when he could have
worked to do something about the matter. In fact, as recently as
last summer he said all the state needed to do about the issue was
to fine-tune the time-consuming hearing process through which
felons who’ve managed to get and keep their lives between the
ditches can get their rights restored.
But not all folks who have “paid their debt to society” plan to
spend the rest of their lives in choir practice. Many felons in
Florida, as elsewhere, are repeat offenders who’ve been allowed to
plead to lesser offenses, much lesser in many cases, and plan to
return to the family business as soon as they are no longer guests
of the state. Exactly why folks who for a lifetime have been unable
to obey the state’s laws should be allowed to help choose the
people who make and administer those laws is not something that
Charlie has bothered to explain to this point.
THIS MATTER PROBABLY WON’T be a tiebreaker in the election. Florida
voters are too stressed out about Hurricane-fueled homeowners
insurance rates and taxes to worry much about whether or not crooks
are voting. And there’s no difference between the candidates.
Democrat Jim Davis also favors automatic restoration, as do most in
that party. But then you expect Democrats to want to make life
comfortable for criminals. (This doesn’t explain why Democrats, who
controlled state politics in Florida from shortly after The Flood
until the back half of the 1990s, did not do something for their
felonious patrons during that time. But let it pass.)
The Democrats, remember, hammed it up in 2004 when Florida
Secretary of State Glenda Hood sent around a list of almost 50,000
felons who should not be allowed to vote. The list went out months
ahead of the election and included a notification process and a
procedure that would allow anyone who thought he was incorrectly
included on that list to clear the matter up well before Election
Day. But Democrats saw this for what it was, a vile Republican plot
to keep Democratic voters, especially black Democratic voters, away
from the polls. Democrats squalled. Republicans, as usual,
capitulated. The list was history and who knows how many felons
voted in 2004.
It’s easy to see why Democrats want felons to vote. Almost 60
percent of the people on the infamous felons list in 2004 were
Democrats, only about 20 percent Republicans. In our post-shame
society, don’t expect Democrats to show the slightest embarrassment
that one of their most reliable voting blocs is criminals. Looks
like Crist just wants to do some poaching in the criminal pond.
There may well be less here than meets the eye. (This is often
the case with Charlie — he reminds me of that great line from Art
Buchwald who said long ago — I paraphrase from memory, “When I was
younger I wanted to go into politics myself, but I was never light
enough to make the team.”) Those whose family business is burglary
or drug dealing or other branches of the criminal arts probably
aren’t that interested in participating in the pageant of
democracy. We may well get more felons on the voting rolls no
matter who Florida’s next governor is. But how many will
bother?
It’s a good thing for both Crist, and Jim Davis that there’s no
such charge as felony hypocrisy. Or felony silliness. If there were
this would raise serious questions about whether, under the present
rules, either of them could vote for himself next Tuesday.
