Florida Republican Charlie Crist now Independant candidate

[Spice Runner]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36855039/ns ... sion_2010/

Florida Republican governor and candidate for U.S. Senate just announced that he is running as an independent candidate.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - Florida Gov. Charlie Crist announced Thursday that he is running for Senate as an independent, even as one top Republican official says he is irreparably damaging his political career and the party pledges to back his GOP opponent.

The move sets up an unusual three-way race with Tea Party favorite Marco Rubio and likely Democratic nominee Kendrick Meek.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said Thursday that Crist's future political aspirations would be "irreparably damaged" by an independent run. The committee plans to reverse itself Thursday and back Rubio for the general election.

At a breakfast with reporters, Cornyn said his preference would be for Crist to stay in the Republican primary or forgo a Senate campaign until 2012. He called it a mistake for Crist to leave the GOP and expressed confidence that the party would hold the Florida seat.

"Once we get by this drama today, it'll be a general election campaign," Cornyn said, predicting: "People will begin focusing on Kendrick Meek."

Rubio grinned widely at a campaign stop in Coral Gables on Thursday when asked about Crist.

"When I got in this race I knew I was running against people that supported the Obama agenda," he said. "I just didn't realize I would have to run against both of them at the same time."

On the political ramifications of Crist's decision, Rubio said: "I haven't done a calculus on the politics of it."

Cornyn said he expects GOP donors to ask to have their contributions refunded and added: "I will request the money that I've donated to his campaign from my leadership PAC back." Cornyn gave Crist $10,000 when he recruited the governor to run for the Senate in 2009.
Crist, who has $7 million on hand, about twice as much as Rubio, does not have to give back any contributions even if donors ask for them.

Just a year ago, it seemed Crist was the man to beat for the GOP nomination to run for the Senate seat Republican Mel Martinez was leaving early. But he has seen his poll numbers nose-dive as conservatives switched their support to Rubio, many driven away in part by Crist's support for President Barack Obama's $787 billion stimulus package.
Running as an independent may be the only way he can stay in the race, but that decision comes with some peril. He will lose his fundraising base, and likely most of his staff, who won't want to risk their own political careers with other Republican politicians by staying with him.

Meek said a three-way race would be good news for his campaign.

"I feel that I'm running against two Republicans," he said. "There's very little difference between Marco Rubio and Charlie Crist. They both agree on a number of issues and people are sick and tired of politicians flipping and flopping and changing with the wind."

Scott Paine, professor of communication, government and world affairs at the University of Tampa, said an independent run could position Crist well with the large, moderate voting block in Florida.
"You have Rubio to his right and Meek to his left and most Floridians in the middle, which is where Crist appears to be most of the time anyway," Paine said. "What we've seen of Charlie Crist, especially in the last six months, suggests that he really wasn't ever that hardcore conservative Republican and that's the Charlie people know."

Crist, elected governor in 2006, has spent the past several years working closely with Democrats and embracing other causes not popular among conservatives.

Just two weeks ago, he alienated many powerful Republican and business interests by vetoing a measure that would have made it easier to fire teachers and linked their pay to student test scores. At the same time, he scored points with the influential teachers union and other traditionally Democratic constituents who won't have a say in August's GOP primary.

The Florida Democratic Party, meanwhile, used Crist's pending defection to encourage members to give money to Meek.

"Now that Crist has again shown himself to be the typical politician who only cares about himself — we need your help to elect Kendrick Meek to the Senate," an e-mail to supporters read.

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

I think this is interesting. Charlie Crist has been trailing primary challenger Marco Rubio (who happens to be endorsed by the Tea Party) in the Florida Republican primaries for U.S. Senate. We are seeing these sorts of Tea Party conservative challenges to Republican candidates in other parts of the U.S. as well. I wonder if we might see more of this sort of thing before elections this November?

[eion]

If he manages to peel off even a small number of votes from Rubio the election is over for the Republicans.

If by some miracle he actually wins, then he'll be the same middle of the road, lying, hypocrite he's always been and probably caucus with the Republicans.

When he loses, maybe it'll means Crist will finally come out of the closet and stop lying so damn much.

[Crossroads Inc.]

This is so freaking awesome, there is no way this WON'T end badly for the GOP.

the BEST they could hope for is for Marco Rubio to win, which just means they have an extreme wingnut who will no doubt make them look bad if he is indeed a real TeaParty nutter.
If HE wins, it means its a rebuke against everything the GOP organizers have been working for and makes them look like fools, as well as everyone who stabbed Charlie in the back.
And then of course, we all hope, neither of them win, and the seat goes to the Dem challenger.

Really its a perfect setup.

[Spice Runner]

This is so freaking awesome, there is no way this WON'T end badly for the GOP.

the BEST they could hope for is for Marco Rubio to win, which just means they have an extreme wingnut who will no doubt make them look bad if he is indeed a real TeaParty nutter.

I would love to see the GOP take it up the rear just like any good liberal. However If this Rubio wins won't it just encourage the right wing Tea-Bagger types? They would use this to show that they had right all along and the GOP will lurch ever further toward the right.

[eion]

Crist has nearly $8 million cash on hand. That's 5 million more than the Republican frontrunner (Rubio) and 4 million more than the Democratic frontrunner (Meek). He can outspend Rubio 2 to 1 right now, but he's going to want to hold on to some of that money since his fundraising can't tap into the Republican machine as much anymore. Though he does still have the assets of the governorship to tap into, and he may well get some funding from democratic circles to keep him in the race to spoil Rubio. However this turns out, it's going to be interesting.

[Rogue 9]

I didn't get all the details since I was driving at the time, but NPR reported this afternoon that the RNC has said it will demand the resignation of any Republican official who supports Crist.

[General Mung Beans]

I certainly hope the Republicans will once a clear primary front-runner or winner appears will agree to support that candidate. The same thing's happening with JD Hayworth in Arizona too. Hopefully he will concede...

[Crossroads Inc.]

I certainly hope the Republicans will once a clear primary front-runner or winner appears will agree to support that candidate. The same thing's happening with JD Hayworth in Arizona too. Hopefully he will concede...

JD doesn't have a chance in the upcoming election, the numbers look "close" right now, but you have to take into account the Huge retired population in SunCity that are die hard McCain fans. Most of them dont participate in polls and few of them are swayed by what JD is saying right now. Not htat he isn't Sweating of course, personally Im rooting for JD, he was kicked out by a Democratic challenger after years in congress, and if he actually gets McCain seat, its only a mater of time before hes kicked out.

[The Dark]

I think this is interesting. Charlie Crist has been trailing primary challenger Marco Rubio (who happens to be endorsed by the Tea Party) in the Florida Republican primaries for U.S. Senate. We are seeing these sorts of Tea Party conservative challenges to Republican candidates in other parts of the U.S. as well. I wonder if we might see more of this sort of thing before elections this November?

Crist trails Rubio in the primary polls, but he leads Rubio and Meek in overall election polls. Then again, I don't think I've even seen a Meek ad yet,since he doesn't have significant primary competition, so he could climb quickly.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

I certainly hope the Republicans will once a clear primary front-runner or winner appears will agree to support that candidate. :( The same thing's happening with JD Hayworth in Arizona too. Hopefully he will concede...

JD doesn't have a chance in the upcoming election, the numbers look "close" right now, but you have to take into account the Huge retired population in SunCity that are die hard McCain fans. Most of them dont participate in polls and few of them are swayed by what JD is saying right now. Not htat he isn't Sweating of course, personally Im rooting for JD, he was kicked out by a Democratic challenger after years in congress, and if he actually gets McCain seat, its only a mater of time before hes kicked out.

Yeah, replace John McCain with a rabidly homophobic Teabagger like J.D. Hayworth. That'll work out real well. I'm rooting for Hayworth to win an ugly, drawn-out, mud-filled, and expensive primary so he can lose the election and a Democrat like Glassman picks up the seat.

[Crossroads Inc.]

You did catch WHY I was 'rooting' for him? Its specifically because I know what a nutcase he is, and that it will be easy to knock him out of office.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

You did catch WHY I was 'rooting' for him? Its specifically because I know what a nutcase he is, and that it will be easy to knock him out of office.

I did, and I found it to be the most ridiculous thing I've read today. Put him in office, and he can do a lot of damage in the minimum of six years he will spend in the Senate. He can help the Republicans paralyze the Senate for the rest of Obama's term and guarantee that Obama becomes a one-term President . . . replaced by some Teabagger-pandering wingnut. Worse, when those six years are up, he becomes the incumbent. And unless the GOP takes a hard swerve left in the next six years, his primary race will be an easy one and he can focus all his money and energy on burying his Democratic challenger. Hoping J.D. Hayworth gets elected to office so people will see what a wingnut he is; is a breathtakingly stupid thing to hope for.

[Gil Hamilton]

Yeah, replace John McCain with a rabidly homophobic Teabagger like J.D. Hayworth. That'll work out real well. I'm rooting for Hayworth to win an ugly, drawn-out, mud-filled, and expensive primary so he can lose the election and a Democrat like Glassman picks up the seat.

John McCain is going to win this one. As much as a jackass as the rest of the US might see him after his last Presidental run, he's still beloved of the old and crotchety in Arizona, which is a sizable voting block. Hayworth doesn't have that.

[General Mung Beans]

Politics in America it seems has become so poisoned that people are actively hoping extremnists on the opposing side will win the election so their party will dominate. However JD Hayworth as others have mentioned has a real chance of winning so I suggest people will reminded of the saying "Be careful what you wish for".

[Crossroads Inc.]

Politics in America it seems has become so poisoned that people are actively hoping extremnists on the opposing side will win the election so their party will dominate. However JD Hayworth as others have mentioned has a real chance of winning so I suggest people will reminded of the saying "Be careful what you wish for".

Um, did you read the other comments? He has NO chance of winning none Mc Cain is going to easily win Re-Election... Well perhaps not "Easily" but it is a very very slime chance of JD winning. As far as wishing for extremes, that really doesn't happen on the left side, there is no teaparty for democrats, no push for extreme Liberals or "Purging" of the moderates like in the GOP

[General Mung Beans]

Um, did you read the other comments? He has NO chance of winning none Mc Cain is going to easily win Re-Election... Well perhaps not "Easily" but it is a very very slime chance of JD winning.

I know but you're hoping for the extremnists to win.

As far as wishing for extremes, that really doesn't happen on the left side, there is no teaparty for democrats, no push for extreme Liberals or "Purging" of the moderates like in the GOP

It did happen though back in '72 when the Democrats nominated George McGovern as Nixon had hoped it would be.

[CarsonPalmer]

It did happen though back in '72 when the Democrats nominated George McGovern as Nixon had hoped it would be.

1. Nixon was actively manipulating events to ensure the nomination of McGovern, so the situation is a little bit more complicated than you're portraying it as.

2. 1972 was a very long time ago. McGovern himself is the only major contender from the Democratic Party from that election who is even alive anymore.

3. What is so extremist about McGovern? He was the most dovish on Vietnam of any of the Democratic candidates, but other than that...

[Temujin]

Regarding Arizona, what are the chances regardless of who actually wins the Republican primary, of the losing party continuing to run as an independent or third party candidate?

Would McCain put his ego aside and retire if he lost, and would Hayworth step aside and support McCain if he lost?

[eion]

Would McCain put his ego aside and retire if he lost, and would Hayworth step aside and support McCain if he lost?

The chances of Hayworth running as a third-party Tea-Party candidate are a lot higher than McCain doing so.

1) He can tap into the large resentment amongst the Tea-Party and count on their support in a mid-term low-turnout election.
2) He's younger. He can recover from being tossed out of the party. No matter how this ends, this is probably McCain's last election.
3) He has a lot more money he can tap into. McCain has spent $5 million+ on his re-election campaign so far, Hayworth, while he's only raised a little more than $1 million, can still tap tea-party sources for funding following the primary, McCain would have nowhere to really go for money if he lost the Republican Party's support.

The ideal scenario for the Democrats is for McCain to lose the primary and for Hayworth to go on to the general. He's polling neck-and-neck with the leading Democrats, and not being an incumbent really hurts him. Democrats are going to be able to mobilize high Hispanic turnouts because of the "papers please" law and will easily paint Hayworth as a teabagger and anti-immigrant. He'll probably lose.

McCain will fare a lot better against a Democrat in the general, in fact it is probably no contest, which is what makes all this look really stupid to an outside observer. The Republicans seem determined to purge the party of any "liberal" influences, even if it keeps them from winning the general elections. It's politically short-sighted and foolish.

[Temujin]

The Republicans seem determined to purge the party of any "liberal" influences, even if it keeps them from winning the general elections. It's politically short-sighted and foolish.

If it ultimately minimizes their detrimental impact on American politics, and hence America, than I'm all for it.

[Einzige]

It did happen though back in '72 when the Democrats nominated George McGovern as Nixon had hoped it would be.

This notion that McGovern was somehow a radical leftist is both ignorant and dishonest. From The American Conservative magazine:

... But perhaps, as George McGovern ages gracefully while his country does not, it is time to stop looking at McGovern through the lenses of Scoop Jackson and those neoconservative publicists who so often trace their disenchantment with the Democratic Party to the 1972 campaign....

This other George McGovern was a bomber pilot who flew 35 B-24 missions in the Dakota Queen, named after his wife, Eleanor Stegeberg of Woonsocket, South Dakota, whom he had courted at the Mitchell Roller Rink. He grew up in and remains a congregant of the First United Methodist Church of Mitchell; he knows by heart the “old hymns” and sings them aloud “with the gusto of those devout congregations that shaped my life so many years ago.” This other George McGovern is a lifelong St. Louis Cardinals fan and member in good standing of the Stan Musial Society. He lives most of the year in Mitchell, his hometown, and says, “There is a wholesomeness about life in a rural state that is a meaningful factor. It doesn’t guarantee you are going to be a good guy simply because you grow up in an agricultural area, but I think the chances of it are better, because of the sense of well-being, the confidence in the decency of life that comes with working not only with the land but also with the kinds of people who live on the land. Life tends to be more authentic and less artificial than in urban areas. You have a sense of belonging to a community. You’re closer to nature and you see the changing seasons.”

This George McGovern, dyed deeply in the American grain, is a hell of a lot more interesting than the burlesque that was framed by his neocon critics...

McGovern is, as you might guess, an opponent of the Iraq War and the Bush administration, which he finds appallingly un-conservative. “I like conservatives,” he says, citing Bob Dole and Barry Goldwater. “Bob Taft I always admired.” He grins. “But I don’t like these neoconservatives worth a damn! They have this view that we are so much more powerful than any other country in the world that we need to run the world—none of this business of coexistence. I think that’s just terrible. It’s not conservatism, and it’s not liberalism, either. It’s a new doctrine that I find frightening. If Iraq hadn’t gone sour, there was a whole string of countries they were gonna knock off. That’s not conservatism to me.”

I ask if Iraq is yet in Vietnam’s class as a foreign-policy disaster. “The casualty rate isn’t nearly as high,” he responds, “but the assumptions are just as misguided. Vietnam was a logical expression of the Cold War ideology that we operated under for half a century. If you accepted the view that we had to confront communism wherever it raised its head, Vietnam became perfectly logical.” (McGovern quotes approvingly his pheasant-hunting friend, University of South Dakota history professor Herbert Schell, who told a reporter in 1972, “He is the only nominee of either major party since World War II who has not accepted the assumptions of the Cold War.” Bob Taft would have been on the list, too, had he been the GOP nominee in 1948 or ‘52.)

What advice does McGovern, one of the first Democrats to dissent from a Democratic war in the 1960s, have for antiwar Republicans? “Make a little more noise,” he says. He points to the House Republicans who voted against the Iraq War. “They’re the kind of Republicans I’ve always admired. They’re close to where my father would have been. He was a lifelong Republican. My dad was a big admirer of old Bob La Follette and voted for him when he ran for president. It’s an honorable tradition to be a dissenting Republican.” (One of McGovern’s early enthusiasms as a senator was a war-profits tax, which came straight out of the La Follette tradition.)

With the Oregon Republican and neo-Taftie Mark Hatfield, McGovern sponsored the 1970 McGovern-Hatfield “Amendment to End the War,” which called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam and “an end to all U.S. military operations in or over Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos no later than December 31, 1971.”...

As for acid, amnesty, and abortion, McGovern’s positions now seem positively temperate: he favored decriminalizing marijuana; he argued against “the intrusion of the federal government” into abortion law, which should be left to the states; and, as he told me, “I could not favor amnesty as long as the war was in progress, but once it was over, I’d grant amnesty both to those who planned the war and those who refused to participate. I think that’s a somewhat conservative position.”

In the home stretch of the ’72 campaign, McGovern was groping toward truths that exist far beyond the cattle pens of Left and Right. “Government has become so vast and impersonal that its interests diverge more and more from the interests of ordinary citizens,” he said two days before the election. “For a generation and more, the government has sought to meet our needs by multiplying its bureaucracy. Washington has taken too much in taxes from Main Street, and Main Street has received too little in return. It is not necessary to centralize power in order to solve our problems.” Charging that Nixon “uncritically clings to bloated bureaucracies, both civilian and military,” McGovern promised to “decentralize our system.”

Boy, McGovern doesn't sound very radical at all, does he? In fact, he sounds almost -- almost libertarian.

(Sorry for the tangent; I'm well-aware this may need a split.)

[Gil Hamilton]

The other side hoping an extremist on the other side winning so they have an easy challenge is old in American politics. Take, for example, Lester Maddox, who was a Governor of Georgia (the one directly before Jimmy Carter). He was a good ole boy who owned a resturant during the Civil Rights Movement and made a name for himself defying the Civil Rights Act by actively refusing to serve black people and even once pulled a hand gun on black people attempting to enter his premises, leading his employees and some customers with weapons to defend the premises with weapons. He eventually sold his resturant to his employees rather than be forced by the state to not descriminate and went into Georgia politics.

So eventually after two unsuccessful mayoral runs, he turned out for the Governorship of the state as a Democrat (unrecognizable by todays standards, Zell Miller being the last of that breed), back when winning the Democratic primary meant winning the election due to Democrat dominance of the state politics. However, the rules of the state were that any party was allowed to vote in any parties primary, so all the Republicans voted for Lester Maddox, hoping that he'd win so that their guy would have a chance, due to the fact that he was seen as far too extremist. During the vote and the run-off vote, Lester Maddox actually ended up winning.

So he ran against the Republican guy and the Republican won a plurality. However, due to Georgian governorship rules, it then goes to the state legislature to select between the two candidates with the highest votes. The legislature was overwhelmingly Democratic and also had loyalty oaths to the party, selected Maddox.

And thus, because the Republicans tried to poison the well and support the extremist so they'd have an easy win, they got exactly what they asked for*. This happened in the 60s.

*Actually, though my understanding is that once Maddox actually won an election for once in his life, he ended up mellowing out a little on the race issue. He still supported the Wallace/LeMay "Wee! Segregation!" Presidental Ticket and had that thing over Martin Luther King Jr's body though.