Once upon a time, I was a Charlie Crist believer. I say this not just as a keenly interested voter/observer, but as someone who wrote a column for the Tampa Tribune for nearly 20 years (until the paper’s closing in May 2016), and who often had reason to write about Crist and his effects on Florida politics.
Back in the day, Crist said all the right stuff (and by “right,” I mean “conservative”), took all the right stands, advanced all the right policies, initiated all the right proposals. Listen: Sunshine State pews were full of us.
Crist was gently center-right at a time when Florida was drifting through the Crayola political spectrum from blue to purple to violet-red to red-violet.
With his reputation as a law-and-order state senator established — sponsorship of a bill that put prison laborers in shackles earned him the “Chain Gang Charlie” nickname from which he did not shirk — Crist breezed up the ranks of Florida’s statewide offices, from education secretary to attorney general to governor in three election cycles (2000-2006) as the model of conservative sobriety.
He endorsed higher teacher salaries at the same time he pushed charter schools. He advertised himself as pro-life but declared he was more interested in “changing hearts” than changing laws.
“I’m a live-and-let-live kind of guy,” he’d say. And we nodded. Weren’t we all?
Crist was handsome, athletic (a two-year walk-on quarterback hopeful at Wake Forest), charismatic, charming, and enchanting on the stump. Everyone in the room thought he was talking to them alone — especially when he’d make eye contact, and call you by name. “Isn’t that right, Tom?” The man could spin a tight political spiral.
Then came 2010. An open seat in the U.S. Senate persuaded Crist not to seek re-election to the governor’s mansion (he’d appointed an acolyte to fill the term resigned by Orlando lawyer/lobbyist Mel Martinez), and early on he was the prohibitive GOP favorite. Then Marco Rubio, recently Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, started telling his story to Republican clubs around the state.
That story, which formed the framework of his autobiography, set the GOP grassroots aflame. By late winter, polling had Rubio eking into the lead, producing garment-rending among establishment Republicans.
It was about that time a top elected leader in the state invited me to an off-the-record breakfast. Over omelets, local strawberries, and fresh-brewed coffee, the leader expressed concern about the enthusiasm for Rubio he detected in my column.
This is what I recollect of his argument in support of Crist:
Marco’s candidacy was splitting the party. A prolonged campaign would gobble up lots of resources better spent keeping the governorship. Marco is young; he’ll have other chances, and soon. If you put the same 10 bills in front of them, Charlie and Marco will vote the same way nine times.
None of the leader’s points had the desired effect. I was a columnist paid by the paper and expected by readers to call things as I saw them. It wasn’t my job to save state establishment Republicans from inconvenient competition.
But it’s the leader’s last argument that has stuck with me over the years, and through the subsequent Crist iterations. If Rubio had stepped back for the Crist coronation, Floridians barely would have noticed a difference.
Subsequent events indicate why that would have been: Charlie Crist became someone who wants to be, not do. (His failure ever to run for re-election to statewide offices was a clue.) As long as he could win elections as a Republican, Crist would act, speak, and vote like one. He would have been content to stay bought.
Then Rubio came along, speaking of convictions learned and earned. He shined with a sincerity that didn’t fade when the cameras went off — an insight revealed to me one night after a political dinner when he agreed to allow a journalist to shuttle him, alone in his car, to a private airport nearly an hour’s drive distant.
Now Charlie Crist is in the stretch run of his race to return to the office he unceremoniously dumped in a paroxysm of hubris, grabbing impatiently for the next gold ring, believing, above all, only in himself.
That much, at least, remains true. From Republican to independent to down-the-line Democrat, this political changeling has demonstrated all the conviction of a weather vane. With one exception: Charlie Crist always has been about Charlie Crist.
Isn’t that right, Tom?
You betcha, Charlie.
Tom Jackson’s award-winning 40-year newspaper career tour, launched in Tampa, Fla., included stops in Washington D.C. and Sacramento, Calif., and a return to Tampa, where, for nearly 20 years, he was a center-right columnist bringing conservative sensibilities to all that is quirky, fascinating, compelling and confounding about West Central Florida.
