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Florida Republicans' new day |
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“It’s a new day.” It’s been one of Charlie Crist’s favorite expressions, for the past 51 weeks, and a great many people in Tallahassee have come to see how true it is. Insurance lobbyists who no longer have the governor’s sympathies. Black legislators who now do. With the coming first anniversary of Crist’s inaugural will come the many retrospectives, which will catalogue the four special sessions and the property insurance legislation and the Seminole Indian gambling and the ongoing property tax drama. Easily overlooked among the major and minor policy accomplishments, though, is the far more significant change Crist is undertaking, one which informs most of what he is doing from his corner suite in the Capitol: a fundamental realignment of his own ruling Republican Party. After all, insurance laws change almost every legislative session, and the property tax “crisis” is more a reflection of the affordable housing crisis, driven by forces larger than a governor can hope to control. His efforts to move the GOP, on the other hand, have potentially much bigger implications, both inside Florida and nationally. On everything from gay marriage (he stopped party funding of the marriage “protection” constitutional amendment) to immigration (he opposes the current party effort to demonize illegal aliens), Crist’s GOP represents a dramatic departure from the national party of today and the Florida party of recent years. Part of the contrast, of course, is that Crist is not Jeb Bush, and that some of the changes attributed to Crist would likely have happened regardless of who happened to succeed Bush. This is a point often forgotten, particularly by those new to Florida politics and whose only experience had been with Jeb Bush the sitting governor. As Jeb himself happily told the Hoover Institution recently, he was more conservative than the Florida electorate that twice elected him – in other words, he was not a reflection of the state’s sentiment, but rather more a force of his own. A larger-than-life figure with a national name who would have overwhelmed whatever state he had chosen to dominate when he left his native Texas. It should be remembered that neither Claude Kirk nor Bob Martinez, the two previous Republican governors in Florida’s modern era, were hard-right ideologues like Jeb. In that sense, Crist is more of a return to the mean than a dramatic departure. This is not to diminish Crist’s accomplishment, because it is nonetheless remarkable. Jeb to a large degree, and other Florida Republican leaders to lesser degrees, expected the party label to matter, and for other Republicans to be natural allies and for Democrats to be obvious enemies to be rolled over as a matter of course. Crist quite craftily – almost subversively – took advantage of Republicans’ sense of party identity during the campaign, but immediately upon taking office set out to win over the opposition as well. No one fought harder to eliminate touch-screen voting machines, which Democrats had made public enemy number one. He invoked the teachings of Jesus to make it easier for ex-felons to get their civil rights back, leading some black Democrats to dub him Florida’s first black governor. He hammered on insurance companies, essentially declaring their long-accepted business model to be little more than a scam. And he has been way out in the lead nationally on global warming and alternative fuels. The result after a year is that Crist is almost as popular among Democrats and independents as he is among Republicans. This is seen as a liability in the conventional political worldview, which states that one must at all costs keep “the base” happy, or face dire consequences. Maybe the conventional wisdom is right. On the other hand, maybe it simply doesn’t apply to the most unconventional politician to attain power in Florida this generation. Think about it – here’s a guy who called himself a Jeb Bush Republican on the campaign trail last year, yet counts among his closest friends the Delray Beach Democratic congressman pushing for the impeachment of Dick Cheney. He has co-opted the code phrases of the conservative wing of his party yet has used the very apparatus of that party to redefine what it means to be Republican in Florida. In so doing, he has reconstituted his own “base,” broadening it well beyond ideologically prone Republican primary voters to Floridians as a whole, a decidedly non-ideological group. The bitter resentment of the conservative wing of his party notwithstanding, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where a fellow Republican can successfully take him on in a 2010 primary – he was, after all, already a known quantity when he beat the candidate running as the traditional Republican by a two-to-one margin in the 2006 primary. That assumes, of course, that he is still the sitting governor in 2010. The nature of Florida’s key role in presidential elections nowadays makes him among the most logical choices for the second-highest office in the land, and he has not been shy about the possibility. The would be GOP nominees have made a point to meet with him privately when they’ve been in Florida, and he did his part by tweaking the state’s resign-to-run law earlier this year to give him a risk-free shot as a running mate. If he manages to pull that off, the implications would be staggering: the number two Republican in America, going around telling everyone he’s just as interested in people with brown skin as he is in Southern whites, and more interested in consumers than he is in wealthy CEOs – and acting like he means it. Would such a thing go over across the country as it so far has in Florida? How would Democrats react, if their themes are hijacked? And what about the real “Jeb Bush Republicans?” What would they do? If it plays out at all like it has in Florida, one thing is certain: It will be great fun to watch. |
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December
27, 2007