Florida Governor Charlie Crist didn't have as bad a week as Dede Scozzafava, the up-state New York RINO who pulled out of the congressional race there because of increasing pressure from the conservative independent candidate and his supporters. But things are steadily unraveling for Crist, the Florida RINO who wants to run for the U.S. Senate in 2010 against conservative former Florida House speaker Marco Rubio.Crist's problems aren't confined to polls, though a new Miami Herald/St. Petersburg Times/Bay News 9 poll indicates Floridians rate Crist's performance as governor at the lowest level in the 34 months he's been in office. Just 42 percent of 600 respondents in a telephone poll conducted Oct. 25-28 rated Crist's performance as good to excellent, while 51 percent rated Crist fair to poor. Not terrible, but for much of Crist's first two years in office he enjoyed approval ratings in the sixties.
Even these mostly less-than-enthusiastic Floridians have a more charitable take on Crist than Reihan Salam, a political columnist for Forbes magazine who suggested last week that Crist may be "America's worst governor."
| Worse than Patrick, Patterson, Corzine and Blagojevich? Oh come on ... |
Salam gigs Crist for various forms of "free-lunchism," but especially for being so wildly enthusiastic about president Obama's stimulus slush fund. He quotes the giddy way Crist spoke to the Miami Herald about Obama's deficit-ballooning scam just a few months ago: "I think it's fantastic. Are you kidding me? We don't have to raise taxes.... We might be able to cut property taxes some more. We have more money for education, so we can increase per-student spending. We can spend more money on our roads and infrastructure. We can provide health care for our people. I mean it's remarkable."
Those comments are indeed remarkable. How many conservative Republicans are nearly so enthusiastic about the absolute healing powers of "free" money from Washington? No one but Obama fundamentalists believes the comically-specific reports, coming out of Washington and Tallahassee, on how many jobs the stimulus slush fund has supposedly created or saved.
Salam points out that Crist wanted the Florida Legislature to rely on non-recurring federal slush funds for about 12 percent of Florida's budget. When the legislature passed a budget containing some unpopular spending cuts, Crist vetoed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of them. The final result was a budget containing $2.2 billion in new state taxes and fees. After all this Crist has tried to paint himself in speeches and political ads as a fiscal conservative, a move that has gotten the horse-laugh it deserves in Florida political circles and from much of the Florida media.