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TAMPA -- Those attempting to keep up with the ever-changing politics of Florida Governor Charlie Crist (I-Narcissist) will encounter more different positions than are found in The Joy of Sex. Those who parse him too closely risk intellectual whiplash.

Name any position on the issues facing Floridians and some time over the past year Crist has held that position. How he can remember, without cue cards or some other prompt, what his own positions are on a given day, is anyone's guess. 

Exercising his preferred style of executive leadership through photo-ops, Crist toured oil-threatened panhandle beaches with environmental advisor and B-list singer, songwriter Jimmy Buffett last weekend. Appropriately, Buffett wore his Margaritaville flip-flops for the occasion. Crist certainly knows from flip-flopping. (Buffett, unlike Crist, is actually contributing something. He recently sold his Palm Beach home for $18.5 million and is opening the Margaritaville Beach Hotel on Pensacola Beach.)

Ever eager to strike the fashionable pose, Crist says he wants to put an end to new oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. He's called for a special session of the Florida Legislature to put a drilling ban in the Florida Constitution, a ban that would not change current restrictions in the Gulf but would make it clear to voters that the oily Crist opposes oily beaches.

Before the recent Deepwater Horizon cock-up, Crist had favored drilling in the Gulf. Crist opposed drilling before 2008, as did a majority of Floridians. Then Crist so keenly wanted to be on the national ticket with John McCain who supported Gulf drilling. He switched to accommodate McCain and later the "drill-baby-drill" cohort when he was impersonating a conservative Republican. Now he's come full-circle.

Gulf oil drilling is not the only issue on which Crist has hit for the ideological cycle since he became governor in January of 2007. His most famous flip-flop was on President Obama's $787 billion "stimulus" slush fund, which Crist whooped up before it was adopted and while other Republican were urging less spending and targeted tax cuts as a way to right the economy. After the slush fund proved to be an unpopular failure, Crist first tried to deny he supported it, while criticizing the Obama administration for spending too much. When that got the horse-laugh it deserved, Crist tried to defend the indefensible by claiming it had saved thousands of jobs in Florida, an incoherent position as unemployment in Florida increased sharply after adoption of the slush fund.

As a Republican trying to convince Republican primary voters that he, not conservative former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio, was their man, Crist supported a Republican bill that would have introduced some accountability into the Florida public school system by tying teacher pay at least partly to student performance. After his decision to say sayonara to a Republican primary race where Rubio was eating his lunch, Crist vetoed the same bill he had supported. This little about-face earned Crist the co-endorsement, along with Democratic Senate candidate Kendrick Meek, of Florida's teachers unions. It also earned him the contempt of a majority of Florida Republican voters as well as that of the few Republican Florida legislators he hadn't already offended by his big spending plans in a tight budget year.

Last week alone Crist held two positions on the Pentagon's don't ask, don't tell policy on open homosexuals in the military, saying Monday he saw no reason to change it, but then finding reasons to do so by Wednesday. As a Republican, Crist said he thought Sonia Sotomayor unsound and opposed her for the U.S. Supreme Court. As an independent he's keen on her ideological clone, Elena Kagan.

Almost comically, Crist the independent even used his line-item veto power as governor in May to nix an expenditure that Crist the Republican specifically called for in his proposed budget of January. Officials of Shands Hospital in Gainesville are justified in wondering what's wrong today with the $10 million to treat uninsured Floridians that Crist thought was essential in January. A possible non-comical explanation for Crist's feckless switch is that Florida House Speaker Larry Cretul, whose district includes Gainesville, has had harsh things to say about Crist.

As the late Joe Heller might have said, that's some switch that Switch-22.

Floridians who keep up with state politics have gotten used to chameleon Crist's frequent and abrupt changes. They know he can turn on a dime and give you five cents change. But perhaps things will be settling out for our Charlie. Since Rubio ran Crist out of the Republican primary and out of the party altogether, Crist's options are limited to where the non-conservative votes -- Rubio has the conservatives locked up -- are located.

When Crist dropped the pretense that he was a Republican and announced he would run for the U.S. Senate with no party affiliation, pundits speculated (perhaps hoped would be a better word), and some Republicans worried, that Democrats might win the seat because two Republicans in the race would split the Republican vote, allowing the Democrat to win a plurality. Even the usually sensible Wall Street Journal bit on this one this week (Political Diary -- Stephen Moore). 

Crist's actions since going bare April 30 have made it clear that there will be, official registration notwithstanding, two Democrats, not two Republicans, in the general election race. Crist and Rubio will not be dividing conservative votes. Almost certainly Crist will take more votes in November from Democrat Meek than he will from Republican Rubio.

Crist has hauled his vagabond political positions from the right, where he had temporarily stored them while trying to convince Florida Republicans he was the man for them, back to the center and left where he sees his only remaining opportunities for votes. Crist is almost certainly a center-left candidate for the duration in a center-right state, a hill to climb.

Further evidence that Crist's leftward lurch is permanent is that he's stocking his campaign with operatives from the left. Last week Washington-based political strategy firm SKD Knickerbocker came on board. SKD is headed up by Anita Dunn, former Obama White House communications director, the one who made news by admitting that she found political inspiration from Mao Tse-tung. (How many Obama advisors take inspiration from Mao but won't admit it is fodder for another column.)

Last week Crist also announced that his media team will be led by Josh Isay, who formerly worked for liberal New York Senator Chuck Schumer. Isay has worked for other political switch-artists, including New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman.

For years Charlie Crist has been a right peculiar Republican. Now that he's learned to stop worrying and go left, with the aid of Maoist and Schumerist professionals, it will take a right peculiar Republican to vote for him in November. There are some of these around. But not nearly as many as Kendrick Meek needs.