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IMP-PAC Applauds Governor Crist's Move to the Center in Florida
Crist aims to steer Florida GOP toward center
By S.V. Dáte
Palm Beach Post Capital Bureau
Saturday, February 10, 2007
TALLAHASSEE — Still three weeks from his first regular legislative session, Gov. Charlie Crist already has put behind him a new law dealing with the top issue of the campaign trail: property insurance.
And as a new governor with a legislature led by his own party, he is almost certain to get quick approval of his personal top issue for the past three years: an "anti-murder" bill to get tough on probation-violators.
Not yet known, though, is whether these successes and even Crist's stellar approval ratings can let him manage what could be his boldest but, so far, his least-publicized challenge: to remake the state Republican Party in his own, more centrist image.
"Clearly a more tolerant party that believes in good law and order, sound financial discipline but ... a true compassion for people and our environment, particularly in a state like Florida, it is the wave of the future," said Crist, who prefers to call himself a "problem-solver" rather than accept a label like "moderate."
Yet on issue after issue - from cracking down on insurance companies to supporting implementation of the class-size amendment to pushing to scrap touch-screen voting machines - Crist has broken with conservative Republican orthodoxy of the past decade. Crist said he is merely trying to get his party back to the principles of founders such as Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.
The strategy seems to be working so far. A recent Quinnipiac University poll showed Crist with a 69 percent approval rating, with only 6 percent disapproving.
"Charlie is hitting Republican politics at exactly the right time to moderate the Republican Party in the state," said former state GOP Chairman Tom Slade, who cites the unpopularity of President Bush and the results of the 2006 congressional elections as proof that Crist is on the right track. "We have scared voters off with some of the hard-right stuff."
"Charlie Crist is doing exactly the right thing," said former GOP New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, who has taken the same message nationally with a book titled It's My Party Too and a political action committee named for it.
She said recent polls show that 60 percent of Americans call themselves political centrists.
"That's where we need to run," she said. "We're sick to death of this hard-edged, narrow-minded image...We've had this attitude over the last few years that if you're not with me, you're against me."
'Room for both sides'
Crist said he is trying to accomplish what he promised on the campaign trail, not actively trying to generate new, more like-minded recruits to the party.
"It may have the unintended additional effect of expanding the base of the party I happen to belong to," Crist said. "I think it may open the eyes of some who may have thought that Republicans necessarily stood against the importation of prescription drugs from Canada, or stood against having a paper trail in our voting system, or stood against fighting for the betterment of our environment. But here we have a Republican governor who's fighting for all of those things, and higher teacher pay, and so maybe it gets a second look as a result."
Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, one the of most outspoken Christian conservatives in the legislature, praised Crist's new direction - provided it does not move away from what he called "core" Republican positions such as opposition to abortion.
Baxley pointed to Crist's proposal to fund stem-cell research - a proposal that disappointed many Democrats and some Republicans because it would exclude most embryonic stem cells - as proof that Crist was willing to accommodate the GOP's base of social conservatives.
"That big tent covers people a little over to the right, too, like me," said Baxley, who for much of last year criticized Crist as too liberal. "Those are not necessarily in conflict. I think there's room for both."
Ending the run to the right
Crist's run as a different sort of Republican began more than a year ago. For decades in Florida, GOP primary politics has been a race to the right. But when Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher pulled out all the stops to lock up the "base" as defined by both President Bush and his brother, former Gov. Jeb Bush, Crist did not follow.
As Gallagher hammered on the importance of opposing gay marriage and abortions, Crist instead hammered insurance companies and electrical utilities. While Gallagher held news conferences with religious conservatives, Crist held one with the daughter of a black slain civil rights leader in Brevard County - and even acknowledged the consternation the move could cause among some GOP voters.
"There may be some that would conclude that it might be detrimental in a Republican primary, but that's not really what matters," Crist said in August, when as state attorney general he named four long-dead Klansmen as the killers in the case.
Crist won the primary by nearly a 2-1 margin, but a bigger statement came on the eve of the general election. President Bush flew to Pensacola, one of the few places in Florida where he was still popular, to campaign for Crist. But when Bush took the stage with Jeb Bush, Crist was in Delray Beach, talking to voters at a bagel shop.
The next day, North Florida voters were relatively cool to Crist. Twenty-eight conservative counties that had given Jeb Bush a 214,000-vote margin in 2002 gave Crist a 187,000-vote margin in 2006, even though voter registration had grown over those four years.
In 2002, those counties gave Bush 54 percent more votes than there were Republican voters. In 2006, the figure for Crist was down to 9 percent.
Crist wound up beating Democrat Jim Davis by 342,000 votes, a margin of 7 percent. It was a closer gap than either of Jeb Bush's victories, leading some conservative Republicans to grumble privately that Crist is giving away the franchise by moving too far to the middle.
Others say comparing Crist's wins to Bush's is the wrong standard, particularly given Bush's national name and his family's popularity in those years.
"The party needs to take a look at what happened in 2006, where you have Republicans who ran as centrists in Florida and in California who bucked the national anti-Republican tidal wave that swept a whole lot of Republicans out of office," said Todd Harris, a former and likely future aide to GOP presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain.
In California, GOP Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger won an easy reelection after adopting a number of traditionally Democratic positions.
"I think some elements of the party need to take a more pragmatic approach to government to ensure that we can have a sustainable majority here in Florida," Harris said.
Close call on party chairman
Not everyone in the party, however, seems ready to acknowledge such a need. At a state party meeting two weeks ago, Crist nearly lost a vote to install his personal choice, Seminole County's Jim Greer, as chairman.
The party voting structure - each county is given three votes, regardless of its population - favors the smaller, more conservative Panhandle and North Florida counties. Some Republicans said the close vote was fomented by Bush supporters, who had hoped to keep in place a party leader loyal to him.
"That was a momentary scare for Charlie," Slade said.
But with that fight in the past, Crist's consolidation of the party apparatus will probably move forward, given the power inherent in the governor's office.
You "want to put your own stamp on the party, and there's also nothing controversial about that," Harris said. "It is the Charlie Crist party. He's the governor. He's the leader of the party."
Baxley said he backed Crist's choice for party chair for that reason. He also cited Theodore Roosevelt as a respectable model for Crist's anti-big business and pro-environmental stands - but laughed when reminded that Roosevelt ultimately felt disgusted by his own Republican Party and sought a return to the presidency as a progressive.
"I hope we don't eventually play that one out," he said.
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