Good Ol' Charlie Crist

The biggest election news this year is not in Virginia or even New Jersey.  It's in Florida.  

Former Florida governor and former Republican Charlie Crist announced his candidacy as a Democrat for his old job back in next year's gubernatorial election there.  I'm rooting for him - he's a good guy who's eager to do what's best for the people of the Sunshine State, even if it means . . . working with President Obama, even though working with Obama forced him out of the Republican Party.

The administration of the incumbent governor, noted skinhead Rick Scott, is already attacking Crist as a political straddler who will do anything to revive his once-promising career, and past Democratic attacks on the former governor for some of his less progressive positions are certainly going to come back to haunt his newly adopted party more than they will haunt him.  But Crist didn't leave the Republican Party, it left him.  He hasn't changed all that much; a moderate in line with many of today's Southern Democrats, he still wants to do what he feels is best for Florida and work with whomever is willing to work with him, be it on health care or transportation or anything else. Also, he's now for same-sex marriage after having been against it.  That does not describe any of the Tea Party types who have taken over the GOP, and they are farther to the right than the party overall was in 2006, when Crist was first elected to the governorship of Florida.  And it's sort of telling that the man many Democrats in the state are rallying behind to win them the governorship for the first time since 1994 is an ex-Republican. 

Oh yeah, I want to take one last shot at the failed 2010 Florida Democratic gubernatorial candidacy of Alex Sink.  She was one of the most aggressive and driven Democrats in the entire Sunshine State, and once nominated in 2010, after Scott emerged from a bitter Republican primary, Sink had the perfect opponent - a health care executive who'd been caught fraudulently billing Medicare  and who had hostile attitudes toward poor people and blacks.  And yet she lost the least loseable election for a Democrat in 2010 when finding unloseable elections that year was a difficult task for the Dems nationwide.  There is one good thing that came out of Sink's loss; Florida native Chuck Todd had anointed her as a rising star in national politics.  It's so nice to see Chuck Todd be wrong about anything.

Charlie Crist has two obstacles up ahead.  First, he has an opponent for the Democratic nomination in Nan Rich, a Florida state senator who's more liberal than the moderate Crist.  Second, he can't embrace Obama right now.  No one wants to embrace a President with a 39 percent approval rating.