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January 10, 2010
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The First Senator From the Tea Party?
By MARK LEIBOVICH
Charlie Crist’s perma-tanned face bears none of the strain you would expect from the archetype of the embattled Republican. Politicians are supposed to keep up appearances, but Crist is especially convincing, one of the more earnest politicians you will see, whether or not he means it.
“Are you kidding? It would be an honor,” the governor of Florida tells a guy wearing a kilt who had asked for a photo.
“Thank you for coming to Pensacola, Governor,” a woman says.
“Call me Charlie,” he insists. “Please! Just call me Charlie. It would be an honor.”
Many things are an honor to Crist — if they are not a “pleasure” or a “privilege.” On a chilly-for-Florida Thursday night in early December, Crist was addressing the annual Lincoln Day Dinner for the local Republican Party in the northwestern outpost of Escambia County in the Florida Panhandle — nearly as close to Cincinnati as it is to Miami.
“God bless you here in the Panhandle, for your values,” Crist tells the crowd.
Crist, who is 53, is a compact and sunbaked raisin of a man with a shock of white hair, a beak nose and dark Mediterranean eyes. His grandfather, a Greek immigrant, shined shoes for $5 a day in Altoona, Pa., after leaving Cyprus at age 14; his father, a family doctor, shortened the last name from Christodoulos and settled in St. Petersburg when Charlie was 4. If the Crist family owned a Greek diner, Charlie would be the maître d’ who delivers you to your favorite table, asks about your mother and tells you to not miss the rice pudding.
The people of the Panhandle are “the greatest people I have ever met,” he says. He likes people, no doubt — “the people’s governor” is always reminding “people” how driven he is to help “the people” of Florida, in accordance with the “will of the people” who gave him “the pleasure, the privilege and the honor” to be their governor so he can “help the people.” As recently as last spring, Crist’s standing in Florida and with Republicans nationally was as golden as his skin. But these days not all of the people are happy with Charlie Crist. And a lot of them are in his party.
To many Republicans, the governor’s biggest sin was his support for the Obama administration’s $787 billion economic-stimulus package. That’s what comes up the most, although a fair number of conservatives also blame Crist for his seemingly decisive endorsement of John McCain three days before the Florida primary in the 2008 presidential campaign, effectively handing the state to an eventual nominee for whom many conservatives had little use. They see Crist’s career as pockmarked with instances of consensus-seeking, deal-making and bipartisanship — three particularly vulgar notions to a simmering Tea Party movement on the right. Conservatives have tagged Crist as being part of that pariah breed of Republican today: a “moderate.” Or worse.
“One of the most liberal politicians in the Republican firmament,” National Review said of him. Crist’s support for the stimulus bill came to embody what many on the right view as his RINO (Republican in name only) inclinations — in, among other areas, environmental policy, judicial appointments, spending and small-government orthodoxy. That critique has blared constantly as Crist navigates a treacherous Senate race that nine months ago looked like a beach stroll.
Crist wants to fill the seat vacated in September by Mel Martinez, also a Republican. His Democratic opponent in the fall would likely be Representative Kendrick Meek. But first Crist must survive a civil war: a Republican primary fight against Marco Rubio, the 38-year-old former speaker of the Florida House who has become a cause célèbre of the national conservative movement and drew even with Crist last month in a Rasmussen poll (after trailing the governor by almost 30 percentage points over the summer). Crist has become a conservative scourge, for reasons he seems at a loss to understand and that in some ways have nothing to do with him.
It is not uncommon for a party out of power to undergo an identity crisis and an internal bloodletting, and it is Crist’s bad luck that his race in 2010 fits the frame of a philosophical debate that has been fulminating in the Republican Party for several months. The race, and the national debate, pits the governing pragmatists against the ideological purists. The purists say that a Republican revival depends on hewing to conservative ideas, resisting compromise and generally taking a dim view of government. Tea Party rallies are filled with such purists, whose populist icons — Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News’s Glenn Beck — tend to be unburdened by the pressures of governing through a recession.
Not long ago, Jim DeMint, a Republican senator from South Carolina, summed up the purity side this way: “I would rather have 30 Republicans in the Senate who really believe in principles of limited government, free markets, free people, than to have 60 that don’t have a set of beliefs.” And when I asked Rubio recently which current senator he most admires, he said DeMint.
Crist represents the governing pragmatist who was once seen as a winner who could reclaim the political center for Republicans. He was a popular governor with crossover appeal among Democrats and independents. For a time, Arnold Schwarzenegger fit this mold in California. So did, to a degree, Mitt Romney, when he was the governor of Massachusetts, and Mike Huckabee in Arkansas, though each worked to present himself as ideologically pure in his presidential run.
In recent decades, both parties have looked to governors with moderate appeal to deliver them from rough patches (see Bill Clinton for the Democrats in 1992 or George W. Bush for the Republicans in 2000). But especially when the economy goes south, governors can be sunk by their can-do bona fides and their executive distaste for ideological zeal. It is almost impossible to scour the record of a governor presiding in a weak economy without finding some nod to pragmatism.
Yet the presumed purity of Republican primary voters dictates that candidates emphasize their ideological fitness. “I am the true conservative in this race,” Crist has been doggedly reminding people. He says he is a pro-gun, anti-abortion, small-government conservative who worships Ronald Reagan. He says he is against gay marriage, frugal (he pays off his single credit card every month) and despised by criminals (he once proposed that chain gangs be reinstituted, earning him the nickname Chain Gang Charlie).
None of this has made Crist any less of a target to conservatives who view him as a coveted Florida marlin to reel in. (Or if you prefer hunting analogies, the prized RINO.) Nor has it thwarted Rubio’s growing conservative cachet. Rubio, who has been dominating straw polls of conservative advocates across Florida while pulling even in real ones, is Hispanic, uses Twitter and listens to Snoop Dogg — not your grandmother’s Republican, in other words.
“There are people who believe the way to be more successful as Republicans is to be more like Democrats,” Rubio told me early last month, essentially distilling his case against Crist, whom he keeps describing backhandedly as “a really nice, pleasant guy.” “And the people who believe we need to be more like Democrats will vote for Charlie Crist.” There is also the more stylistic question of whether Crist’s conciliatory approach fits with the basic tenor of an impatient opposition party. He may not be angry enough to win a Republican primary this year.
In November, on Veterans Day, I went to watch Crist at the swearing-in ceremony for Miami’s new mayor, Tomás Regalado. I found myself trapped outside an overcrowded City Hall in a sporadic downpour with a desperate crush of about 200 people — many of them well-dressed Hispanics claiming to be Regalado’s relatives. They kept pressing invitations into the face of a single beleaguered police officer who was guarding the front entrance (he kept saying no and blaming the fire marshal). Eventually everyone calmed down and settled for a closed-circuit TV feed of the ceremony.
“Let our beautiful city be a beacon of light,” an archbishop prayed to begin the ceremony. It felt more like a beacon of chaos. At one point I turned around and saw two people standing quietly in the parking lot holding up big placards of Crist’s face, captioned “Sellout.”
Protesters have been mocking Crist at Tea Party rallies across the state. His opponents play (and replay) video of “The Hug,” a killer clip from last February in which the governor, while introducing President Obama in Fort Myers, happened to engage in a quickie man-embrace with the new commander-in-chief on the podium (Stephen Colbert called the episode a “terrorist nipple bump”). Every time someone mentioned “The Hug,” I thought of “The Kiss” from Connecticut’s bitter 2006 Democratic Senate primary. Supporters of challenger Ned Lamont, who wound up defeating Senator Joe Lieberman, made great hay of a millisecond clip in which President Bush appeared to peck Lieberman’s right cheek after his 2005 State of the Union address. (Lieberman went on to win re-election as a third-party candidate but only after scores of “Kiss” buttons, signs and other memorabilia nourished the Connecticut economy.) When I mentioned “The Hug” to Crist, it was as close as I came to seeing him annoyed.
“Obviously some people focus on it,” Crist said as we rode in the back of his S.U.V. after a Veterans Day event in Pembroke Pines.
You can’t help wondering if Charlie Crist really needs this migraine, especially for a jump — from the governor’s office to the Senate — that could easily be viewed as lateral. Critics suggest that Crist wanted to be a senator because it looked like an easy victory and would give him more national exposure if he decided to run for president. Some friends admit to being slightly puzzled by why Crist, who is not seeking re-election as governor, would want to leave a high-prestige office that seems to suit him.
Crist is a master of the small gestures through which savvy governors accrue easy good will — say, changing the date of a special election in a heavily Jewish district of South Florida so it would not fall on Passover. He is animated in discussing how much he likes his current job. “Thanks to the people, I have this beautiful home in Tallahassee,” he says, placing his hand over his heart. “You know, there is a state jet and 24/7 protection, and all that goes away if I have the honor of getting elected to the U.S. Senate.”
Crist says he wants to be a senator because Washington has become the nation’s financial, as well as political, capital. It is the place where a public official can have the most influence. “It seems to me that we need a little bit of Florida common sense in Washington,” Crist says.
But is he not slightly regretful about quitting after one term? “Being governor is a great job, don’t misunderstand me,” says Crist, who recently beamed through a photo opportunity in which a 278-pound sea turtle named Margarita was returned to the sea after a lengthy stay at a turtle hospital in the Florida Keys. “I am honored to be the governor of Florida. It’s something I never would have dreamed would happen. I pinch myself every day.”
Of course, “Florida common sense” has never exactly caught on as a national selling point, at least not in politics. “Florida circus” is more like it, this swamp of Elián Gonzáles, Terri Schiavo, Mark Foley, Katherine Harris, William Kennedy Smith, confused Jews voting for Pat Buchanan in Palm Beach County, the National Enquirer (based here), Rush Limbaugh (lives here) and Tiger Woods (crashed here). The fourth-most-populous state has acquired an outsize cachet in the nation’s political mythology. It is also a hothouse for many issues of national urgency: health care is a chief concern for the state’s elderly population; tensions over immigration have boiled here for years; environmental fights have raged (over offshore drilling, global warming, the Everglades); and unemployment has jumped to its highest levels in more than three decades (11.5 percent).
Crist is hardly the only governor in the country whose fortunes have plummeted with the economy (Exhibit A for Arnold). But Florida has been particularly hard hit by the housing crisis. Almost half of the state’s mortgages are underwater, and foreclosure rates are among the nation’s highest. The state could be one bad hurricane away from a budgetary crisis on the order of California’s. Most striking, the state is losing population for the first time in more than 60 years. “And we’re starting to lose people to places where the weather and golf courses aren’t as good,” Rubio says.
Beyond Florida’s borders, the Crist-Rubio battle involves the fate of the Republican “big tent,” once championed by Ronald Reagan to promote an inclusive party open to a range of viewpoints. Crist is a “big-tent” guy. “If the party narrows the focus too much,” he told me, “there’s great risk in terms of not being successful in elections.”
This used to be a noncontroversial view in the party, and national Republican leaders like Michael Steele, the party chairman, and John Boehner, the House Republican leader, still say the “big tent” is good for the party’s health. But “big tent” has also become a point of some disdain among a segment of the right. “For a lot of people,” Mike Huckabee told me, “this race has become a real classic encounter between whether the party is going to be a let’s-be-all-things-to-all-people party or whether we’re going to be a principled conservative party that espouses things out of genuine conviction.” Huckabee recently said that the instinct to “accommodate every view” would “kill the conservative movement.” He is supporting Rubio.
Read ON
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10florida-t.html?src=twt&twt=nytimes
Magazine Preview
The First Senator From the Tea Party?
By MARK LEIBOVICH
Charlie Crist’s perma-tanned face bears none of the strain you would expect from the archetype of the embattled Republican. Politicians are supposed to keep up appearances, but Crist is especially convincing, one of the more earnest politicians you will see, whether or not he means it.
“Are you kidding? It would be an honor,” the governor of Florida tells a guy wearing a kilt who had asked for a photo.
“Thank you for coming to Pensacola, Governor,” a woman says.
“Call me Charlie,” he insists. “Please! Just call me Charlie. It would be an honor.”
Many things are an honor to Crist — if they are not a “pleasure” or a “privilege.” On a chilly-for-Florida Thursday night in early December, Crist was addressing the annual Lincoln Day Dinner for the local Republican Party in the northwestern outpost of Escambia County in the Florida Panhandle — nearly as close to Cincinnati as it is to Miami.
“God bless you here in the Panhandle, for your values,” Crist tells the crowd.
Crist, who is 53, is a compact and sunbaked raisin of a man with a shock of white hair, a beak nose and dark Mediterranean eyes. His grandfather, a Greek immigrant, shined shoes for $5 a day in Altoona, Pa., after leaving Cyprus at age 14; his father, a family doctor, shortened the last name from Christodoulos and settled in St. Petersburg when Charlie was 4. If the Crist family owned a Greek diner, Charlie would be the maître d’ who delivers you to your favorite table, asks about your mother and tells you to not miss the rice pudding.
The people of the Panhandle are “the greatest people I have ever met,” he says. He likes people, no doubt — “the people’s governor” is always reminding “people” how driven he is to help “the people” of Florida, in accordance with the “will of the people” who gave him “the pleasure, the privilege and the honor” to be their governor so he can “help the people.” As recently as last spring, Crist’s standing in Florida and with Republicans nationally was as golden as his skin. But these days not all of the people are happy with Charlie Crist. And a lot of them are in his party.
To many Republicans, the governor’s biggest sin was his support for the Obama administration’s $787 billion economic-stimulus package. That’s what comes up the most, although a fair number of conservatives also blame Crist for his seemingly decisive endorsement of John McCain three days before the Florida primary in the 2008 presidential campaign, effectively handing the state to an eventual nominee for whom many conservatives had little use. They see Crist’s career as pockmarked with instances of consensus-seeking, deal-making and bipartisanship — three particularly vulgar notions to a simmering Tea Party movement on the right. Conservatives have tagged Crist as being part of that pariah breed of Republican today: a “moderate.” Or worse.
“One of the most liberal politicians in the Republican firmament,” National Review said of him. Crist’s support for the stimulus bill came to embody what many on the right view as his RINO (Republican in name only) inclinations — in, among other areas, environmental policy, judicial appointments, spending and small-government orthodoxy. That critique has blared constantly as Crist navigates a treacherous Senate race that nine months ago looked like a beach stroll.
Crist wants to fill the seat vacated in September by Mel Martinez, also a Republican. His Democratic opponent in the fall would likely be Representative Kendrick Meek. But first Crist must survive a civil war: a Republican primary fight against Marco Rubio, the 38-year-old former speaker of the Florida House who has become a cause célèbre of the national conservative movement and drew even with Crist last month in a Rasmussen poll (after trailing the governor by almost 30 percentage points over the summer). Crist has become a conservative scourge, for reasons he seems at a loss to understand and that in some ways have nothing to do with him.
It is not uncommon for a party out of power to undergo an identity crisis and an internal bloodletting, and it is Crist’s bad luck that his race in 2010 fits the frame of a philosophical debate that has been fulminating in the Republican Party for several months. The race, and the national debate, pits the governing pragmatists against the ideological purists. The purists say that a Republican revival depends on hewing to conservative ideas, resisting compromise and generally taking a dim view of government. Tea Party rallies are filled with such purists, whose populist icons — Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News’s Glenn Beck — tend to be unburdened by the pressures of governing through a recession.
Not long ago, Jim DeMint, a Republican senator from South Carolina, summed up the purity side this way: “I would rather have 30 Republicans in the Senate who really believe in principles of limited government, free markets, free people, than to have 60 that don’t have a set of beliefs.” And when I asked Rubio recently which current senator he most admires, he said DeMint.
Crist represents the governing pragmatist who was once seen as a winner who could reclaim the political center for Republicans. He was a popular governor with crossover appeal among Democrats and independents. For a time, Arnold Schwarzenegger fit this mold in California. So did, to a degree, Mitt Romney, when he was the governor of Massachusetts, and Mike Huckabee in Arkansas, though each worked to present himself as ideologically pure in his presidential run.
In recent decades, both parties have looked to governors with moderate appeal to deliver them from rough patches (see Bill Clinton for the Democrats in 1992 or George W. Bush for the Republicans in 2000). But especially when the economy goes south, governors can be sunk by their can-do bona fides and their executive distaste for ideological zeal. It is almost impossible to scour the record of a governor presiding in a weak economy without finding some nod to pragmatism.
Yet the presumed purity of Republican primary voters dictates that candidates emphasize their ideological fitness. “I am the true conservative in this race,” Crist has been doggedly reminding people. He says he is a pro-gun, anti-abortion, small-government conservative who worships Ronald Reagan. He says he is against gay marriage, frugal (he pays off his single credit card every month) and despised by criminals (he once proposed that chain gangs be reinstituted, earning him the nickname Chain Gang Charlie).
None of this has made Crist any less of a target to conservatives who view him as a coveted Florida marlin to reel in. (Or if you prefer hunting analogies, the prized RINO.) Nor has it thwarted Rubio’s growing conservative cachet. Rubio, who has been dominating straw polls of conservative advocates across Florida while pulling even in real ones, is Hispanic, uses Twitter and listens to Snoop Dogg — not your grandmother’s Republican, in other words.
“There are people who believe the way to be more successful as Republicans is to be more like Democrats,” Rubio told me early last month, essentially distilling his case against Crist, whom he keeps describing backhandedly as “a really nice, pleasant guy.” “And the people who believe we need to be more like Democrats will vote for Charlie Crist.” There is also the more stylistic question of whether Crist’s conciliatory approach fits with the basic tenor of an impatient opposition party. He may not be angry enough to win a Republican primary this year.
In November, on Veterans Day, I went to watch Crist at the swearing-in ceremony for Miami’s new mayor, Tomás Regalado. I found myself trapped outside an overcrowded City Hall in a sporadic downpour with a desperate crush of about 200 people — many of them well-dressed Hispanics claiming to be Regalado’s relatives. They kept pressing invitations into the face of a single beleaguered police officer who was guarding the front entrance (he kept saying no and blaming the fire marshal). Eventually everyone calmed down and settled for a closed-circuit TV feed of the ceremony.
“Let our beautiful city be a beacon of light,” an archbishop prayed to begin the ceremony. It felt more like a beacon of chaos. At one point I turned around and saw two people standing quietly in the parking lot holding up big placards of Crist’s face, captioned “Sellout.”
Protesters have been mocking Crist at Tea Party rallies across the state. His opponents play (and replay) video of “The Hug,” a killer clip from last February in which the governor, while introducing President Obama in Fort Myers, happened to engage in a quickie man-embrace with the new commander-in-chief on the podium (Stephen Colbert called the episode a “terrorist nipple bump”). Every time someone mentioned “The Hug,” I thought of “The Kiss” from Connecticut’s bitter 2006 Democratic Senate primary. Supporters of challenger Ned Lamont, who wound up defeating Senator Joe Lieberman, made great hay of a millisecond clip in which President Bush appeared to peck Lieberman’s right cheek after his 2005 State of the Union address. (Lieberman went on to win re-election as a third-party candidate but only after scores of “Kiss” buttons, signs and other memorabilia nourished the Connecticut economy.) When I mentioned “The Hug” to Crist, it was as close as I came to seeing him annoyed.
“Obviously some people focus on it,” Crist said as we rode in the back of his S.U.V. after a Veterans Day event in Pembroke Pines.
You can’t help wondering if Charlie Crist really needs this migraine, especially for a jump — from the governor’s office to the Senate — that could easily be viewed as lateral. Critics suggest that Crist wanted to be a senator because it looked like an easy victory and would give him more national exposure if he decided to run for president. Some friends admit to being slightly puzzled by why Crist, who is not seeking re-election as governor, would want to leave a high-prestige office that seems to suit him.
Crist is a master of the small gestures through which savvy governors accrue easy good will — say, changing the date of a special election in a heavily Jewish district of South Florida so it would not fall on Passover. He is animated in discussing how much he likes his current job. “Thanks to the people, I have this beautiful home in Tallahassee,” he says, placing his hand over his heart. “You know, there is a state jet and 24/7 protection, and all that goes away if I have the honor of getting elected to the U.S. Senate.”
Crist says he wants to be a senator because Washington has become the nation’s financial, as well as political, capital. It is the place where a public official can have the most influence. “It seems to me that we need a little bit of Florida common sense in Washington,” Crist says.
But is he not slightly regretful about quitting after one term? “Being governor is a great job, don’t misunderstand me,” says Crist, who recently beamed through a photo opportunity in which a 278-pound sea turtle named Margarita was returned to the sea after a lengthy stay at a turtle hospital in the Florida Keys. “I am honored to be the governor of Florida. It’s something I never would have dreamed would happen. I pinch myself every day.”
Of course, “Florida common sense” has never exactly caught on as a national selling point, at least not in politics. “Florida circus” is more like it, this swamp of Elián Gonzáles, Terri Schiavo, Mark Foley, Katherine Harris, William Kennedy Smith, confused Jews voting for Pat Buchanan in Palm Beach County, the National Enquirer (based here), Rush Limbaugh (lives here) and Tiger Woods (crashed here). The fourth-most-populous state has acquired an outsize cachet in the nation’s political mythology. It is also a hothouse for many issues of national urgency: health care is a chief concern for the state’s elderly population; tensions over immigration have boiled here for years; environmental fights have raged (over offshore drilling, global warming, the Everglades); and unemployment has jumped to its highest levels in more than three decades (11.5 percent).
Crist is hardly the only governor in the country whose fortunes have plummeted with the economy (Exhibit A for Arnold). But Florida has been particularly hard hit by the housing crisis. Almost half of the state’s mortgages are underwater, and foreclosure rates are among the nation’s highest. The state could be one bad hurricane away from a budgetary crisis on the order of California’s. Most striking, the state is losing population for the first time in more than 60 years. “And we’re starting to lose people to places where the weather and golf courses aren’t as good,” Rubio says.
Beyond Florida’s borders, the Crist-Rubio battle involves the fate of the Republican “big tent,” once championed by Ronald Reagan to promote an inclusive party open to a range of viewpoints. Crist is a “big-tent” guy. “If the party narrows the focus too much,” he told me, “there’s great risk in terms of not being successful in elections.”
This used to be a noncontroversial view in the party, and national Republican leaders like Michael Steele, the party chairman, and John Boehner, the House Republican leader, still say the “big tent” is good for the party’s health. But “big tent” has also become a point of some disdain among a segment of the right. “For a lot of people,” Mike Huckabee told me, “this race has become a real classic encounter between whether the party is going to be a let’s-be-all-things-to-all-people party or whether we’re going to be a principled conservative party that espouses things out of genuine conviction.” Huckabee recently said that the instinct to “accommodate every view” would “kill the conservative movement.” He is supporting Rubio.
Read ON
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10florida-t.html?src=twt&twt=nytimes
