Florida Gov. Charlie Crist is a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate facing a conservative challenger who is attracting a lot of attention, support and money from conservatives around the country. He is, in fact, the number one target of the Club for Growth and other purge-obsessed conservatives determined to stamp out any hint of moderation in the GOP.
Crist’s opponent, former state House speaker Marco Rubio, has been picking up steam in the early polls, and is routinely trouncing the governor in local party straw polls. Aside from his gaudy national endorsements (including such conservative True Believers as Mike Huckabee, James Inhofe, and Jim DeMint), Rubio is assumed to have the private backing of his political patron, the Big Dog of Florida GOP politics, Jeb Bush. Crist, who aroused national conservative ire by endorsing President Obama’s stimulus package, increasingly has a great big bullseye on his back at a time when the right wing of the Republican Party is in a vengeful and triumphant mood.
So you’d think ol’ Charlie would be spending all of his time kissing the rings of talk radio hosts, yelling about socialism, sending out tea bags with his name stamped on it, and in general trying to build a Cristian Right. Florida is, after all, a closed primary state where the independents and conservative Democrats that Crist has attracted in the past can’t vote for him against Rubio unless they re-register as Republicans.
But to everyone’s surprise, Crist shows signs of doing the exact opposite: attacking not just Rubio, but his supporters, for being, well, wingnuts. In an interview with a Florida newspaper, Crist seems to be mocking Rubio’s supporters for being angry over nothing and for embracing nutty causes like that of the Birthers. Here’s how Evan McMorris-Santoro analyzed Crist’s apparent strategy for TPM:
While his attacks on Rubio’s conservative backers are sure to fire them up even more than they already are, Crist is hoping his confrontational approach will force Rubio into uncomfortable discussions about Obama’s citizenship and other right-wing rhetoric. He really had nowhere else to go — Crist’s record doesn’t allow him to make a serious run at changing the minds of Rubio’s supporters, so he has to run with the moderate message that has been successful in the past.
This being total blasphemy in the contemporary GOP, it will be interesting to see how it works out for Crist. If it does, Crist will become the maximum, and perhaps the sole, symbol of defiance against the rightward trend of the GOP. If it doesn’t, he may backtrack into can’t-beat-em-then-join-em territory, or add his scalp to the collection of the Club for Growth. Either way, that would be good news for Florida Democrats.
