TOM KLUDT – MAY 6, 2014, 5:15 PM EDT
Charlie Crist said once again Tuesday that racism motivates many of President Obama's most hostile GOP adversaries.

It was partly for that reason that Crist, the former Republican governor of Florida who's now trying to reclaim his old job as a Democrat, broke with his former party.

“I couldn’t be consistent with myself and my core beliefs, and stay with a party that was so unfriendly toward the African-American president, I’ll just go there,” Crist told Fusion's Jorge Ramos. “I was a Republican and I saw the activists and what they were doing, it was intolerable to me.”

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“I think another part of it was that he was a Democrat, but not just a Democrat, an African-American,” Crist, who's challenging Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R), said during an appearance on “The Colbert Report.”

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/charlie-crist-racism-republicans-obama

During his campaign for the Florida governorship last fall, Charlie Crist frequently expressed deep moral opposition to the state’s practice of permanently prohibiting convicted felons from exercising their right to vote. But Crist is a Republican, and his promise to fix Florida’s notorious felon-voting ban sometimes sounded like nothing more than campaign puffery. Felon disenfranchisement has long given Republicans a considerable boost at the polls in Florida; if the state’s ex-cons had been allowed to vote in 2000, George W. Bush would now be the commissioner of baseball. Was Charlie Crist really going to kill this political golden goose?

On Thursday, he did just that. Crist, who became governor after handily defeating Democrat Jim Davis in November, ushered in a proposal that will quickly restore the voting rights of most of Florida’s felons as soon as they are released from prison. The plan looks sure to alter the political landscape in the nation’s most populous — and electoral-vote-rich — swing state.

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http://www.salon.com/2007/04/06/crist_10/