TAMPA — Heading into the weekend before the election,
Floridians thought the three-way race for a U.S. Senate seat here
could not become stranger without one of the candidates checking
into a hospital before Tuesday for a sex-change operation, or
another dropping out to attend seminary. Wrong.
On Thursday evening, bulletins started coming out of
Washington, beginning with a report in Politico that
former President Billy Bob Clinton had tried to talk Democratic
Congressman Kendrick Meek, who trails Republican Marco Rubio and
free-agent Charlie Crist badly, into dropping out of the race in
order to give the liberal Crist a chance of defeating the
conservative Rubio. The reports said Meek had twice agreed to drop
out but had each time changed his mind and decided to stay the
course.
Later reports added that the whole thing was orchestrated
by Crist who started the ball rolling by contacting the White
House, where operatives know that Meek has no chance of winning,
that Crist would caucus with the Democrats if elected, and that
conservative Rubio would be bad news for President Obama’s agenda.
Crist must have felt compelled to take this course after he had
asked Meek last Monday to drop out and Meek declined the
opportunity.
The talk shows dined out on this story for a good part of
the weekend and would have rolled and snuffled in it even more in
the absence of the terrorism bomb story. Meek, Crist, and Rubio
gave their conflicting versions of events on just about every
network and local talk show. Rubio had more fun than the others.
His only chore was to point out that the episode was cynical,
absurd, desperate, and beside the point.
The dreary little tale is a non-sequitur because Rubio has
built up such a lead that if Meek had announced he’d become a Druid
and planned to immigrate to Tasmania right after the election it
would have made no difference in the outcome.
A Mason-Dixon poll released Friday shows Rubio at 45
percent, Crist at 28, and Meek at 21. A Sunshine State Poll
released earlier showed Rubio with a 20-point lead over Crist and
Meek below 20. Most importantly, the assumption that Meek
supporters, absent their champion, would vote for Crist is faulty.
A Meekless Tuesday would see lots of Democrats, many of whom don’t
trust Crist any more than they like Rubio, sitting this one out.
More than a million Floridians have already
voted.
These two polls are consistent with what most polls have
consistently shown over the last few weeks. Crist’s flagging
campaign, with no ideas and no money, enjoyed a flicker of hope
last week when both a Zogby and a Quinnipiac poll showed Rubio with
only a seven-point lead. But these two measurements were almost
surely aberrations.
The debate now is about just how cheesed off black voters
are over this high-handed treatment of Meek, and how many will stay
home Tuesday and not be available to vote for Democrat Alex Sink
for governor. Polls in the contentious race between Sink and
Republican Rick Scott are mostly within the margin of error, the
latest being a New York Times regional newspapers poll
showing Scott with a 44 to 39 percent lead with 11 percent
undecided and the rest favoring minor party or independent
candidates.
The weekend he-said, he-said on what exactly Clinton and
Meek and Crist did and/or said produced minimal heat and no light
at all. Clinton said he never asked Meek to drop out and that they
had just talked a little politics, sort of in the manner that he
didn’t offer Joe Sestak a job in the administration if he wouldn’t
run against Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania (or perhaps like he
“didn’t have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky”).
Clinton’s description of events is inconvenienced by his
aides (perhaps soon to be former aides) who say he did talk Meek
into withdrawing. Crist, who admits he spoke with folks at the
White House but won’t say who, is quick to claim the withdrawal
story is true, though it’s not clear how he could know what Clinton
and Meek said to each other.
For Rubio, the whole business was a belt-high batting
practice fastball over the heart of the plate. And he drove
it.
“If you ever needed a reminder of what’s wrong with
American politics today, this story is a great reminder of
back-door deals,” Rubio said at a campaign stop. “That’s what got
us ObamaCare. That’s in part what I’m running against… people in
Washington who are willing to compromise principle to acquire
power.”
Various Republican officials took their turns over the
weekend teeing off on Clinton and an almost certainly complicit
White House. RNC Chairman Michael Steele speculated on just how big
the fertilizer storm would now be had a former Republican president
urged a black candidate to get out of a race so the white guy could
defeat the Hispanic. Liberals would have hit their fainting couches
faster than Maureen Dowd could yell, “racist, sexist, homophobic,
right-wing, nativist yahoos!”
This peccadillo is the more bizarre considering that the
candidate Clinton almost certainly urged Meek to butt out in favor
of was a Republican just six months ago. In his race against Rubio
for the Republican nomination last spring, Crist was trying to
convince Florida Republican voters that he was Ronald Reagan redux.
This is the same guy who pulled every string he could in an attempt
to get on the ticket with John McCain in 2008 and then, disguising
his utter disappointment, enthused about what a great VP pick Sarah
Palin was.
It’s almost impossible, on the basis of conflicting
testimony, to determine what in fact happened in this political
slight-of-hand. But Meek has a better record of telling the truth
than either Crist or Clinton, so for the moment Las Vegas is going
with his version of events. In the end, this probably won’t matter
much to Rubio’s prospects. But it may well do short and long-range
damage to the Democrats’ relationship with blacks, many of whom
will feel shafted by this shabby little maneuver. And Clinton’s
trying to talk Meek into dropping out between campaign events at
which he was telling the faithful that Meek is a terrific candidate
and would win if Democrats just turn out to vote, is pretty
high-octane cynicism, even for politics.
In what appears to be an attempt at damage control, the
Meek campaign reported Saturday that Clinton will appear with Meek
in Orlando today. Perhaps the two old friends will kiss and make-up
on stage.
Wednesday can’t get here too soon. With any luck the votes
will have been counted by then.
