Gloating
My zombie blog is just for gloating today.
Back on April 30th, I wrote a post wherein I basically said that all of the rumors of Charlie Crist’s political demise were greatly exaggerated. At the time, The Times, The Post, and the networks were calling his impending and then announced run as an independent a desperate move to try to save his career. In one article I linked, a pollster from Mason Dixon walked us through how Crist couldn’t win. I disagreed and laid out why.
Yesterday, I got an email from a Democratic fund raiser who has put his law practice on hold to raise money for Crist. I also saw a couple different blog entries (one at the Post, can’t recall the other) that were surprised to see Crist back from the dead. This is the problem with the national media. Once they have a set narrative, the whole lot of them just gets on board and will usually stick with it until (and sometimes beyond) the point where they just can’t deny that the facts say something else.
I’m really not surprised to see Democrats supporting Crist, as I wrote in April. No Democratic governor ever had the guts to take office and then almost immediately restore the voting rights of felons. That’s, by far, not the only thing that a Crist did that a lot of Democrats wished Lawton Chiles or Bob Graham had done as governor. Conventional wisdom says that California is the trendsetter in American politics, but our current polarized climate started in Florida. In the late 80s, the state’s African American leaders in the legislature made a deal with the devil. They got districts drawn that gave them free seats for life (and in some cases now handed down to their kids) in exchange for making the rest of the state permanently Republican. Many of Florida’s districts don’t even field a challenger from the other party. This has lead to an entire state where most of the legislative and (to a lesser degree) the Senate candidates have pandered to the far right to win the primary, knowing they would probably not face a challenger (and not a viable one if they did) from the other party.
Crist has been a moderate as a statewide figure as Attorney General and as Governor. He’s really the first statewide figure since Bob Graham to try to appeal to the broad center rather than his party’s base. If I were still a Floridian and Crist were running for re-election as a governor, I very might well be placing my first vote for a Republican governor. Out of the three candidates running for Senate, he’s the one who would be most likely to get my vote right now. Some Democrats have said (and Rubio’s people made use of this) that Crist was the best Democratic governor of their lifetimes. I will not be surprised at all if it turns out that a big chunk of the Democratic establishment comes out publicly in favor of him and raises money for him.
