A Democrat, and Independent and a Republican walk into a bar. The bartender says, “What’ll you have, Charlie Crist?”
— A joke making the rounds in Florida
The ambulatory dildo who is the current Florida governor, Rick Scott, has launched an ad blitz featuring TV as well as Internet spots. I had to quit TPM last week because I couldn’t read the site without accidentally launching a video in which Scott pops out from behind a newspaper and pretends to be a human being who cares about college tuition, droning on in an adenoidal voice about that and other alleged human concerns.
Scott is a cartoonish villain with sub-chlamydia popularity numbers, so it was widely believed that anyone who could fog a mirror would beat him when he stands for reelection this year, despite his Scrooge McDuck-like cash vault full of stolen Medicare loot. Scott’s election was a bit of a fluke in the first place: He won in the teaturd wave election year of 2010 when the ever-moribund FL Democratic Party was dumb enough to run a former Bank of America executive.
Crist was our widely popular, moderate Republican governor who left office to run for an open US Senate seat as a Republican. He got beat in the primary by ambulatory haircut Marco Rubio and then ran as an Independent. The haircut won and is currently our Senate embarrassment. Now Crist is running for his old job again, this time as a Democrat.
Some of us FL Dems originally wanted to seize the opportunity of Scott’s massive unpopularity to run an actual Democrat for governor. Others felt that Crist’s popularity and name recognition gave us the best chance to put Scott away, and he is acceptable to most Dems since he’s not a bad guy, just an opportunist. And at first, that latter position seemed to be borne out as poll after poll showed Crist crushing Scott.
Now, Crist and Scott are pretty much even [WARNING: HUFFPO LINK]. That could be just the effect of the money Scott is pouring into the race. Or it could be Crist’s announcement that he wants to end the embargo against Cuba (yay!) and would be visiting the island this summer, which caused hard feelings in Miami. Now Crist has reversed himself on that, saying he won’t be sipping rum and smoking cigars in Havana this summer after all, a move that is being characterized as another flip-flop.
Crist will almost certainly crush Nan Rich, the Democrat who will oppose him in the primary this summer, unless he convinces Florida Dems that he’s even more of a weathercock than we imagined. I’m lukewarm on Crist, but I hate Scott with the radiant intensity of 10,000 supernovae. So don’t fuck this up, Crist.