The full-contact race for a U.S. Senate seat between former
Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio, a red-meat conservative, and
Charlie Crist, Florida’s ideologically agnostic governor, threw
off a few sparks Sunday morning in a lively 40-minute
debate on Fox News Sunday. Chris Wallace asked the
questions, refereed, and broke the clinches.
Sunday’s match-up gave viewers across the nation a close-up
and personal look at this high profile race, and instructed them
as to why Crist has steadily lost ground to his conservative
opponent in a pro-conservative, anti-incumbent year where
big-government Republicans are as out of style as leisure
suits.
Both fighters were standing at the end. But conservative
Florida Republicans, those most likely to vote in the August
primary, would find it difficult to conclude that Crist won even
a single round. What they saw was a desperate Crist, behind in
the polls and hobbled by having to run on a moderate-to-liberal
record as governor, swinging wildly on credibility charges
against Rubio. Charges that are themselves of questionable
credibility.
Asked what was at stake, Rubio focused on his pledge to
oppose the leftward lurch of the Obama administration and the
Democratic Congress. He talked about the threats from the left to
all things that have made America the free and prosperous country
that it has been (though less free and less prosperous when the
left, or compassionate conservatives, call the shots). He painted
Crist as an Obama enabler. Asked the same question, Crist talked
about Rubio’s haircuts and tax returns.
I’ve done an exhaustive review of the list of 100,000 top
concerns Floridians have for their potential U.S. Senators. I was
unable to locate “where the candidate gets his haircut and how
much he pays for it” on the list. But Crist has been in politics
for 18 years now, and may be on to something the rest of us just
haven’t realized yet.
The haircut issue comes from a $134 charge Rubio placed on
a Republican Party of Florida credit card when he was Speaker of
the Florida House and traveling the state to recruit and support
Republican candidates and causes. Of the $134 spent in a salon in
Miami, Rubio has said $20 went for a haircut and the rest was for
gift certificates purchased in the salon to be used as silent
auction items at a Republican Party event. Crist knows
this.
So the guy who supported Obama’s $787 billion “stimulus”
slush fund before it was adopted and attempted to saddle Florida
with its own carbon cap and trade program wants to turn trifling
items such as this “haircut” charge into evidence that Rubio is
untrustworthy and fiscally unsound. Good luck with that.
Crist also charged that Rubio was a lobbyist while he was
in the Florida Legislature. Technically true because of a
peculiar ordinance of Miami-Dade County, where Rubio practiced
law, that obliges attorneys arguing land use cases before the
county commission to register as lobbyists, though clearly they
are not engaging in lobbying as that vocation is usually
understood. Crist knows this. Even the reliably liberal St.
Petersburg Times, which rarely misses an opportunity to
criticize Rubio, says the lobbying while legislating charge is
nonsense.
When Wallace was able to nudge the issue-averse Crist back
to the subject of what voters are actually interested in, Crist
didn’t help his case. He conceded that had he been in the Senate
in 2009 he would have voted for Obama’s budget-busting slush fund
saying, “It was the right thing to do at the time. The economy
was literally falling off a cliff.”
And it continued over the precipice after the slush fund
was adopted and $8.2 billion of “stimulus” money was spent in
Florida. Crist makes the comically precise claim that 87,000 jobs
in Florida, including the jobs of 20,000 teachers, were saved by
slush fund spending. This has to be a dazzling example of new
math (perhaps Democrat math), as 211,000 Floridians have lost
their jobs since the slush fund was adopted, and Florida’s
official unemployment rate is 12.2 percent, the highest rate
since the state began keeping these statistics in 1970.
The national unemployment rate is 9.7 percent, more than
two points higher than when Crist was trying to get the Florida
Congressional delegation to vote for Obama’s hyper-spending plan
rather than the targeted tax cuts and more seemly federal
spending other Republicans were supporting. The slush fund was so
popular in the Senate, which Crist wants to join, that only three
Republicans voted for it: Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of
Maine, and Arlen Specter of Planet Specter, who is now a
Democrat.
While we’re dropping names, Crist said that the U.S.
Senators he admires most, and who he would presumably emulate if
he went to the Senate, are John McCain (who Crist endorsed for
president in 2008) and Lindsey Graham. Both are quirky guys who
give conservatives the fantods, night sweats, large bowel
complaints, and the odd case of lockjaw. Both are supporters of
cap and trade. Both whooped up a 2007 immigration law,
fortunately beaten back, which would have effectively given every
person on Earth and on the closer planets a get-into-America-free
card. They both gave speeches saying anyone who opposed their
awful bill, which was a clear majority of Americans, were
nativist yahoos.
Rubio says his favorite senator is conservative icon Jim
DeMint, the South Carolina Senator who gets it. Gets it so well
that he is one of the few to have earned a 100 percent rating
from the American Conservative Union for his voting
record.
Unlike Crist, Rubio said that had he been in the Senate he
would have voted against the slush fund and instead would have
lowered capital gains taxes, corporate taxes, and flattened tax
rates. “The Stimulus was a failure,” Rubio said, demonstrating a
firm grasp of the obvious.
Crist also bobbed and weaved on Social Security and other
entitlement reform. He said he’s opposed to raising the
retirement age for SS and claims we could fix things by
eliminating that hardy Washington perennial (all together now),
waste, fraud, and abuse. Rubio conceded that the retirement age
for his generation — he will be 39 in May — may have to be
raised, cost of living indexes recalibrated, and perhaps even
means testing introduced to ensure Social Security will survive.
It takes a sturdy testosterone count to say these sorts of things
in retirement-haven Florida.
Other issues were touched on, but these are probably enough
to demonstrate why Crist trails Rubio, depending on which poll
you believe, between 11 and 32 points. And to understand why
Crist is going negative, even though the stuff he’s going
negative on is thin gruel indeed.
Perhaps when Crist loses in August, which barring a miracle
he will, a grateful Obama will recognize the early support Crist
gave his administration and will reward Crist with an appointment
to the newly created post of Secretary of Haircuts.
