TAMPA — With hope and change along with our rookie president’s
popularity tanking hereabouts, with Floridians self-identifying
conservative over liberal by two to one, and with political
enthusiasm much higher among Florida Republicans than Democrats, it
would be very difficult for Florida Democrats to beat conservative
Republican Marco Rubio Nov. 2 for an open U.S. Senate seat if they
had one good candidate. What they have is two bad candidates.
To have a chance of stopping Rubio, who has run on the
pledge of vigorously opposing Obama’s and the Democrats’ left lurch
across the board, the Democrats need a game changer. Will they get
one in the form of lawsuit the Republican Party of Florida is
considering filing?
Back to the candidates for the moment: Bad candidate
number one is Miami Congressman Kendrick Meek. He’s been
down-the-line for the Obama agenda and every leftist cause and
enjoys little support outside of South Florida. He has chronically
polled in the low twenties in Florida’s three-way Senate race, even
with campaign help from President Obama and former President Billy
Bob Clinton. Meek is a large, pleasant fellow, a former state
trooper who would doubtless make a fine neighbor or a good guy to
watch a ball game with. But he’s just politically wrong in
center-right Florida where ObamaCare, which he voted for and
defends, is about as popular as the swine flu.
The other bad Democrat — a Democrat in all but
registration — is Florida Governor Charlie Crist (I-Charlie), a
former RINO now running as an independent. In April Crist
parachuted out of the political party that he had been either
running for or holding office in since 1992. He left because
Florida Republicans showed a distinct preference (so distinct as to
be about two to one in most polls) for the conservative Rubio over
the moderate to liberal Crist in the Republican primary campaign
for the Senate seat.
Before Crist left the Republican Party he made a
multi-month effort to portray himself as a conservative, clearly
the approach Florida Republican voters prefer in 2010. With a
straight face Crist compared himself to Ronald Reagan. This didn’t
wash as what Crist was saying on the campaign trail was so wildly
at variance with what he had previously said and done as governor.
It’s really hard for a guy who championed Obama’s nearly
trillion-dollar “stimulus” slush fund before it was adopted and had
actually issued an executive order to put Florida under a state
carbon cap and trade policy (the legislature with help from Rubio
put a stop to this) to claim the mantle of conservatism.
Since going party-less, Crist has moved his positions on
issues starkly to the left across the board. He’s appealing to
Democratic constituencies — union members, gays,
environmentalists, teachers, et al. — and is being supported by
Democratic interest groups like the Teamster’s Union and trial
lawyers. Crist is crooning that he will take the best ideas of both
parties. But the evidence so far is that he will talk up whatever
ideas are polling well at the moment.
It’s tricky business being part of the radical middle,
finding things to support that won’t offend members of either
party. And Crist needs the votes of a fair fraction of both
Republicans and Democrats to have a chance of winning Nov. 2. Only
about one in five Florida voters is an independent, and polls show
Rubio doing well among independents, a group whose sentiments are
well to the right of where they were in 2008.
To this point the “I-feel-very-strongly-both-ways”
approach has not worked. Polls of likely voters (as opposed to the
merely registered kind) show Rubio between 10 and 16 points ahead
of Crist with Meek in third, though not so firmly in third as he
was before the August 24 primary. As voters tend to desert third
and no-party candidates on Election Day, if the campaign stays on
its current trajectory Crist’s chances of finishing third are
better than his chances of winning. But will it?
THE LAST NAME FLORIDA Republicans need in the news-cycle
right now is Jim Greer, the former Republican Party of Florida
chairman who was charged in March with six felony counts of grand
theft and money laundering from a consulting company he allegedly
set up to siphon off money from the RPOF. But they may get him back
in all his un-glory.
At a closed-door meeting last weekend the RPOF executive
board considered filling suit against Greer and other players who
benefited from the spending, including Crist. The suit would be to
vindicate the party and recover money misspent by Greer et al.
Executive committee members will decide over the next week or so
whether or not to file the suit.
The party will likely soon release a forensic audit that
(1) lays the blame for misspending on Greer and associates, (2)
shows the party has cleaned up its house and has set up policies to
prevent future desperados from using it as an ATM, and (3) that
Rubio didn’t have anything to do with the waste and
criminality.
There’s no way of knowing how the state’s media will deal
with the audit, or the suit if it’s filed. But it’s no secret that
much of Florida’s larger media are liberal and have no affection
for Republicans, conservatives, or Marco Rubio. There’s always the
chance that the conversation, at least in the media, will be
changed from the issues that have put Rubio well ahead to
“Republican incompetence and corruption,” subjects the media love,
regardless of whether there is any merit to them or not. Democrats
will be all over it, spinning their little hearts out. At a minimum
the suit would open the RPOF to a charge of just wanting to torpedo
the apostate Crist’s campaign.
Will all of this be a game changer? It’s too soon to tell.
But probably not. One thing we can know now is that regardless of
how this story plays out in the media, Florida Democrats still have
two bad Senate candidates.
