I thought (and wrote) last summer about the brilliant repositioning that Charlie Crist had taken to make himself a viable candidate for Governor of Florida. I’m starting to wonder now if it was more than just repositioning. Has this guy undergone some sort of moderate personal realignment after spending a few years in government? In his earliest runs for statewide office, Crist seemed to actively court the religious right. The few contacts I had that swam in the stream thought really favorably of him and told me that most people they knew with similar issue positions felt the same way. In his run for governor last year, Crist portrayed himself as a moderate, pragmatic, “get things done” kind of manager. He’d dropped any hint of being an ideologue.

This week, he restored voting rights to 950,000 felons in Florida, including my brother. I can see no benefit for the Republicans in this and only a glint of a benefit to Charlie Crist in this. I suppose if he’s looking to be a two term governor and then maybe a Senator someday (he ran before and got his ass handed to him by Bob Graham), then maybe these felons who might normally vote Democratic would have a soft spot for the guy who restored their voting rights. But at best that’s a marginal benefit for him. Felons with voting rights vote at even lower rates than everyone else.

What is up with this guy?

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 7th, 2007 at 2:52 pm and is filed under blog, Florida Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.