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Crist’s Exceptional Opportunism

Crist will reportedly run as an independent in the Florida Senate race, and he will make the announcement tomorrow. This is unfortunate for Floridians, who seemed to have a chance to be spared from the continuation of Crist’s candidacy had he followed through on the many public statements in which he explicitly rejected an independent […]

Crist will reportedly run as an independent in the Florida Senate race, and he will make the announcement tomorrow. This is unfortunate for Floridians, who seemed to have a chance to be spared from the continuation of Crist’s candidacy had he followed through on the many public statements in which he explicitly rejected an independent run. Before any silly establishment pundits attempt to anoint him as the Nick Clegg of Pinellas County or as some sort of martyr to the glorious cause of “centrism,” what needs to be emphasized is how unusually unreliable and self-serving Crist is as a politician. As a March Salon article on Crist summed it up:

A series of interviews with Florida political observers and GOP insiders tells a different story — one in which Crist’s problems have less to do with his purported moderation than with an ardor for political expediency and opportunism.

“I don’t know whether Charlie is left-of-center or right-of-center,” says Brett Doster, an unaligned GOP strategist in the state. “Charlie is all about Charlie.”

No one has to agree with or even like Marco Rubio to appreciate the one service he has done for Florida, which is to expose how Crist’s desire for personal advancement trumps any and all other considerations. Whatever their reasons for the Republican rank-and-file’s rejection of Crist, there are few candidates more deserving of rejection than Crist because of the sheer opportunism that has marked his career and which he will continue to display this year.

This is significantly different from the somewhat surprising rebellion that threatens to deny Bob Bennett re-nomination in Utah. Republican leaders and activists decided that the stimulus was going to be a litmus test issue, and Crist failed the test. Compared with the admiration heaped on the far more liberal Scott Brown, the conservative activist loathing for Crist has always seemed fairly arbitrary, but even so this political episode is no more evidence of the “closing of the conservative mind” than Lieberman’s primary loss in 2006 represented some unreasonable extremism from the left. Both are cases of horrible, opportunistic politicians who desperately want to be in political office and have no respect for the views of their core constituents. Their respective parties legitimately rejected them and preferred a challenger candidate instead.

The difference between Connecticut in 2006 and Florida now is that there is a serious Democratic contender in the Florida race, so it is not likely that the state’s Democratic voters will be rallying around Crist to deny Rubio the win. It is possible that he will do enough to split the vote with Rubio that Meek ekes out a victory, or Crist might be able to win a three-way race, but either way his political ambitions will never go beyond the Senate now. If he prevents the new Republican folk hero Rubio from winning, he will probably be more hated on the right than Lieberman ever was on the left, and if he delivers a safe Republican seat to the Democrats he can probably forget about running for office in Florida again. Even if Crist pulls off a win this year, his pattern of looking for the next big political job will come to a screeching halt.

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