Skip to main content

The Old Switcheroo

By


I guess it depends which side of the political aisle you are on as to whether Charlie Crist's new book is good or bad.  Few like a turncoat, unless of course he is Ronald Reagan, so it is no surprise the Republicans have come to hate Crist with a passion almost as much as their hatred toward Obama.  Not surprisingly, this is the subject Crist tackles in his book, The Party's Over, noting how the GOP has degenerated to the point it no longer holds any respect for the Commander-in-Chief if he comes from the other party.

Crist describes a situation where Obama addressed the National Governors Association after his historic election victory.  Like most GOP governors, Crist was doubtful of the new President, but became very upset with the tone of some of his fellow GOP governors who took the opportunity to "lecture" the President, not offering him a shred of respect. Crist chose to scold these governors, noting their hypocrisy in taking stimulus money only to decry it in public.

The former Florida governor also describes the infamous hug that made him persona-non-grata in the GOP.  For Crist it was just a matter of respect, but for the new GOP it was embracing the enemy, the equivalent of Nixon hugging Brezhnev or shaking hands with Mao.  Crist charts the road toward this rhetorically-charged party that he no longer could square himself with, forced to run as an independent in the Florida Senate race, after having been teabagged in the 2010 primaries.

Now Crist runs for governor as a Democrat, having only served one term before.  He currently holds a 7-point lead in the polls, as Scott is one of the most unpopular governors in Florida history.  He no longer worries about his relationship with Obama, although he remains skeptical of the ACA.  He has embraced the expansion of Medicaid though, and has made that one of his campaign issues.

You get the sense Crist is a reluctant Democrat.  He is a man who wants to remain in politics and the only way to do so is to embrace a party.  Obviously, the Republican Party will have nothing to do with him, and I imagine a lot of Democrats don't feel entirely comfortable with Crist.  His switch is seen more as a repudiation of the Republican Party than it is an embrace of Democratic values.  However, it is hard to define what those values are these days other than an acceptance of mainstream opinion, and in that sense Crist is much like Obama.

Here is an excerpt from the book.

Comments

  1. James FergusonFebruary 13, 2014 at 4:46 PM

    I watched Crist on Colbert and hate to say he isn't very telegenic,

    http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/433016/february-11-2014/charlie-crist

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order

By
A quarter of a century, however, is time enough to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the crisis of the early Thirties and the emergence of the New Deal. There is, for example, the myth that world conditions rather than domestic errors and extravagances were entirely responsible for the depression. There is the myth that the depression was already over, as a consequence of the ministrations of the Hoover Administration, and that it was the loss of confidence resulting from the election of Roosevelt that gave it new life. There is the myth that the roots of what was good in the New Deal were in the Hoover Administration - that Hoover had actually inaugurated the era of government responsibility for the health of the economy and the society. There is the contrasting myth (for myths do not require inner consistency) that the New Deal was alien in origins and in philosophy; that - as Mr. Hoover put it - its philosophy was "the same philosophy of government which...
170 comments
Read more