TAMPA — Charlie Crist is trying to dress himself in the borrowed
robes of a conservative. Even Macbeth, another ambitious guy,
knew when the robes weren’t his.
It’s a transparent scam. But will Florida Republican primary
voters buy it? They’ve given Crist a pass on a lot of things over
his career. But he’s asking them to buy some pretty outlandish
things now.
It’s easy enough to see why Florida’s
“whichever-way-the-wind-is-blowing” populist governor is worried.
An Insider Advantage Poll last week showed Crist’s approval
rating had dropped to 48 percent, with 41 percent disapproving of
the job he’s doing. If this poll is accurate it marks a
significant fall-off from approval ratings in the sixties that
Crist enjoyed for his first two years as governor. The poll
contains other questions about taxes and the economy which yield
about the percentages one would expect, an argument that the poll
does reflect reality.
Perhaps a cooling of enthusiasm for Florida’s governor is not too
surprising in a state with 11 percent unemployment and which is
suffering other ills of the current economic unpleasantness.
Meanwhile, Crist’s conservative opponent for the Republican
nomination for the U.S. Senate seat that Mel Martinez recently
gave up is doing extremely well. He’s excited the party’s
conservative base, most of whose members have long ago lost
patience with Crist and are convinced the “R” after Crist’s name
stands for RINO.
Marco Rubio, a charismatic, young Cuban-American from Miami with
a conservative record in the Florida House,
collected a little more than a million dollars for his
campaign during the quarter-three reporting period. Much less
than the sitting governor who’s tight with the party’s
establishment money men, but still enough at this point in the
campaign (the primary is next August) to ensure he can get his
story out across Florida.
On top of his financial success, Rubio, a skilled and articulate
campaigner who runs on conservative issues, continues to clean
Crist’s clock in straw votes being taken by Republican groups,
mostly county executive committees, across the state. In the
latest, last week, members of the Palm Beach County Republican
Executive Committee went for Rubio over Crist by a margin of
90-17.
In 11 straw votes so far — eight county executive committees,
two Republican women’s clubs, and the Florida Federation of
College Republicans — Rubio is 11-0 and has bested Crist by a
total of 495 to 58. Until last week Crist supporters could parry
Rubio’s straw-vote victories by saying they took place in small
counties that are to the right of the state as a whole. But this
can hardly be said of affluent Palm Beach, home to almost 1.3
million souls, including more than 238,000 registered
Republicans.
I had the opportunity to ask Crist about these straw votes and
about Rubio’s successful financial quarter at a Reagan Day dinner
in Tampa a couple of Friday’s back. “Well, it was better than
last quarter,” the ever-smiling and unruffleable Crist told me.
As for the lopsided straw votes, “I don’t make much of them.
There are different factions in the Republican Party. That’s just
one group.”
A pretty large group, though. And as these are the party
activists and workers, the folks who follow politics most
closely, they are the people in the party who know Crist best.
They show up to vote in primaries. They also showed up about
35-strong at the site of the Reagan dinner in 92-degree heat (in
Tampa, not a dry heat) to wave Rubio signs as attendees arrived.
Zero Crist signs.
Later at the dinner Florida Republican Chairman Jim Greer,
appointed to his post by Crist, sought me out to clarify. “We
have to respect” the straw voters, Greer said. But went on to
suggest the straw voters were local activists who are “not in
synch with Republican voters across the state.”
I asked Greer about some of the more liberal stances Crist has
taken since he’s been governor, and Greer had some remarkable
things to say. Asked about the inconsistency between Crist’s
saying that he is against more taxes and more government while at
the same time supporting cap and trade, Greer said he “couldn’t
find where he [Crist] has ever said he supports cap and trade.” I
guess I’ll have to lend Jim my clip file. Perhaps it’s difficult
to get newspapers delivered or TV reception at Greer’s office.
Crist has said this repeatedly, though not lately as support for
the idea seems to be sagging.
Greer also insisted Charlie shouldn’t be gigged for trying to get
Florida’s fair share of stimulus funds, but he failed to mention
that Charlie helped our rookie president whoop up the stimulus
package in Florida before it was adopted. This was in February,
when Obama and his policies were more popular than they are now.
Greer ended our conversation with this assault on credulity:
“Charlie Crist is conservative to the core.” Misfortunately for
Crist, much of the conservative base of the Florida Republican
Party is convinced, on the available evidence, that Charlie
doesn’t have a core. He’s trying to convince them
otherwise.
Last week in Lakeland (the largest city in conservative Polk
County), Crist told a lunch crowd of about 200, put together by
the Lakeland Republican Club, that he’s “about as conservative as
you can get.” The governor who crooned about the need for Obama’s
elephantine slush fund (aka the stimulus package) just eight
months ago is now saying in sensible venues such as Lakeland,
“The message I have for Washington is enough is enough — no more
runaway spending.” (No wonder Crist was recently nominated for
the 2009 Bill Clinton Shamelessness Award.)
Lakeland is a civilized place where visitors are treated
graciously. This may be the only reason that no one in the
audience yelled out, “You lie!” Crist’s record as governor, the
office he was elected to in 2006, cannot be tortured into a
conservative mold. Even Crist wasn’t trying to do this in
December of 2007 when he was asked by a Sarasota Herald-
Tribune reporter if he was a conservative. His answer
was, “sure.” Asked what being conservative meant to him, his less
than reassuring answer was, “I don’t know. It doesn’t really
matter to me. I’m not absorbed much by what labels people put on
me.”
But it matters now, when it appears conservatives are deserting
him in division-sized units. Crist is spending some of his
substantial campaign war chest on radio ads, some of them airing
in Ft. Myers, where Crist went on stage to plight his troth to
Obama’s stimulus piñata. The ad says:
“Washington is out of control. Yet the president has the same
tired answer for every problem: to spend more of your money. I’m
Charlie Crist. I’m running for the U.S. Senate because Washington
needs a dose of Florida common sense… In the last two years
federal government spending has grown by over 25 percent. Here in
Florida, I’ve slashed government by 10 percent. That’s $7
billion…. Less government, less taxes. It’s more than a slogan.
It’s my commitment and the record I bring from Tallahassee to
Washington. We can’t spend our way into prosperity or tax our way
into growth. Let’s cut the size of the federal government and
return your family’s money so you can decide how best to spend
it. I’m Charlie Crist and I approved this message. ”
Even for a political ad this is truly breathtaking in its
hypocrisy and dishonesty. In addition to the about-face on
Obama’s stimulus, most folks paying even minimal attention know
that Florida’s constitution requires a balanced budget. So the $7
billion in reduced spending Crist is claiming credit for came
about because the recession reduced the state’s revenues and the
Florida Legislature was obliged to cut spending. Newspapers and
other media across Florida called Crist on this one.
If Crist had been saying things like he’s saying now in his ads
from the start of his governorship, and then following up on his
rhetoric, he could now put his Senate campaign on cruise control.
It’s doubtful Rubio would even be in the race.
Instead Crist has been a political chameleon, changing colors
every time the political winds change direction. More and more
Floridians have begun to notice this. So another change from blue
back to red may be problematic for Crist. If this is the case, it
increases the chance that the U.S. Senate may have another
conservative member beginning in 2011, rather than just someone
for Olympia Snowe to go to lunch with.
