Should Republicans Be Rooting For Charlie Crist?

Charlie Crist, the Republican governor of Florida, will apparently announce today that he’s running for the open Senate seat in 2010.  Crist is best described as a moderate Republican who was lukewarm about McCain (perhaps because he didn’t get selected as the VP nominee) and has since supported President Obama’s stimulus plan at the same time every other Republican in the world was screaming no.  He’s what Democrats should consider a best-case worse case for Florida, and he’s popular enough that he’ll enter the race as the front-runner.  Recent polling shows him at 54 percent, if the GOP primary were held today; his next-closest competitors get eight percent each.

So… Senator Crist?  How should Democrats feel about that?  Nate Silver has an excellent breakdown of Charlie Crist by the issues, under the headline “Should Democrats Be Rooting for Charlie Crist?”  His answer is that Crist would make a Snowe-like Senator.  From there it’s self-evident that Democrats should favor a Crist v. Democrat race, because either way that goes, the party gets at least a part-time ally out of the deal.

The interesting question here, just as it is in Pennsylvania, is who should the GOP prefer?  The National Republican Senatorial Committee has to make an important choice: Will they support Crist?  He’d win more easily, freeing up funds to spend in other battleground states, like Missouri or Kentucky, but he’d also represent a victory for the Colin Powell wing of the party that Leader Emeritus Cheney hates so much.  Or will they support conservative Marco Rubio, the former Speaker of the florida House (check him out on YouTube)?  Rubio is everything the GOP wants going forward: young, conservative, and a protégé of the Bush clan.  Newt Gingrich called Rubio “very attractive and very intelligent… a major contender” when he visited Florida earlier this month, though he stopped short of saying anything negative about Crist.

So what will it be, Florida?  A new GOP that looks like — well, like the Bush-Cheney GOP?  Or Candidate Crist?

Ridge Out, Gerlach In — More PA Primary Fun

Yesterday’s news was that Tom Ridge had said clearly and officially that he won’t be running for the Senate in Pennsylvania in 2010, as earlier rumored.  The stories I’ve read about this since then have sounded mostly the same notes: this means Pat Toomey’s the candidate.

That misses the most interesting part of the early Ridge rumors — that Ridge was recruited by more moderate Republicans and urged to run.  Pat Toomey, the Club for Growth sweetheart whose conservative politics scared Arlen Specter out of the primary, isn’t the ideal GOP candidate in Pennsylvania (though strangely, he seems like exactly the guy they’d want to have in office now).  Polls from this week showed Ridge defeating Toomey statewide by nearly 40 percent in a Republican primary.  Even taking into account Ridge’s past popularity and higher name recognition, that seems to show there actually is a hunger among Pennsylvania Republicans for someone who’s closer to the center than Toomey.  They just don’t want that guy to be Arlen Specter.

The question we should be asking now isn’t whether Specter can beat Toomey in a general election, because he can.  Nearly any Democrat can.  The question we should be asking is whether the Republicans will let that race– a race with Pat Toomey as the Big R candidate — happen.  Orrin Hatch, co-chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has said he doesn’t there is anybody in the world who believes he can get elected senator there.”  He’s also said the NRSC probably won’t support Toomey, though he backed off that statement a little bit later.

^{Image by: America2050/Flickr}

In fact, the NRSC seems to be looking pretty seriously at Jim Gerlach, the 6th-district Republican House member who’s been making some noises about entering the race.  Jon Cornyn, Hatch’s co-chair, apparently spoke with Gerlach this week about getting into the race.  Gerlach isn’t Ridge: he’s won his races only narrowly the last three times and doesn’t enjoy the statewide fondness that Ridge does (even if Ridge is now a resident of Maryland).  On the issues… it’s hard to say whether he’s a conservative masquerading as moderate or the other way around.  Gerlach voted against the president’s budget and the stimulus (but so did every other House Republican), but for SCHIP expansion, against the federal act defining marriage as one man/one woman and for prohibiting job discrimination based on sexual orientation, for embyonic stem cell research but against nearly everything else NARAL supports, and with a mixed record on environmental and energy issues.  His fundraising is run-of-the-mill Republican (with a few fun exceptions: he got $1,021 in 2008 from the Poker Players Alliance): $890,000 from business PAC sources in his 2008 campaign; $83,000 from labor PACs, most of whom had an interest in his seat on the Transportation and Infastructure Committee.

Is he a viable statewide candidate?  Not today.  But if the NRSC throws some money at him, in six months he could be — and since the primary is still a year away, that should have Pat Toomey worried.  Gerlach is Specter-esque — a waffling maybe-conservative — without the high-profile defection of the Stimulus to make him distasteful to the party.  Those Republicans that want to see the party shift away from moderate views should be worried.

Trumka: Unions May Not Support Specter

Back during the campaign, I used to do Sunday Video Wrap-ups.  One video in particular got a response both here and from anyone I sent it to separately (and it was viewed on YouTube over a half-million times).  This video features AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka speaking some hard truths about why labor voters might not elect an African-American president:

The full text of his speech is here, and the part featured in the video starts about 2/3 down the page (with “There’s only one really bad reason to vote against him: because he’s not white.”)  Trumka effectively and quite movingly ties the cause of racial equality to the labor movement, calling labor the “most integrated institution in American life.”  And then there’s this:

And after he’s elected we are going to hit the ground running so that, years from now, we’re going to be able to tell our grandchildren that 2008 was the year this country finally turned its back on men like George Bush and Dick Cheney and John McCain.

We’re going to be able to say that 2008 was the year we started ending the war in Iraq so we could use that money to create new jobs building wind generators, solar collectors, clean coal technology and retrofitting millions of buildings all across this country

We’re going to be able to look back and say that 2008 was the year the tide began to turn against the Rush Limbaughs, the Bill O’Reillys, the Ann Coulters and the right wing hate machine

Brothers and sisters, we’ll be able to say that 2008 was the year we took our country back from the corporations and had a government that believed in unions again!

The emphasis is mine, though Trumka was yelling by that point.

Today, he did some yelling of another kind — right into Arlen Specter’s ear — when he appeared on ABC’s Webcast “Top Line” this morning and said that labor in Pennsylvania won’t support Specter if he doesn’t support labor:

Trumka said the Democratic Party establishment won’t prevent labor leaders from making their own decision on Specter, even though President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and Gov. Ed Rendell, D-Pa., have all pledged to support Specter.

“We have a lot of members that are elected into that establishment, and our members generally do what’s right by workers, and we don’t care who’s lined up against us,” Trumka said. “If a candidate isn’t good for workers, we won’t be there. If they are good for workers, we will be there regardless of their party. I mean, we supported Arlen Specter — and he was a Republican — because he was good for what was happening.  He was good for our members at that time.”

Is labor going to have more of a spine about Specter’s positions than the Democratic Party?  Color me… OK, not surprised at all.  It’s getting pretty ugly out there for Specter.  And this was supposed to be the path of least resistence? 

Battleground Pennsylvania: Ridge v. Specter?

Just yesterday, it was early 2009 and there was no need to start worrying our pretty little heads about 2010 elections yet, right?  That’s just for Nate Silver to worry about.

Then, suddenly, this weekend, Pennsylvania kind of exploded.

This is all the aftermath of Specter switching parties, of course — but it seems like a move meant to make things calmer for his election bid has done exactly the opposite.

For one, it sounds like Tom Ridge is considering jumping into the Pennsylvania 2010 Senate race.  Roll Call reported this weekend that someone close to Ridge is saying he’s going to get involved, and also that moderate GOP forces are leaning on him to do so.

Ridge was governor from 1995-2001, when he joined the Bush administration’s Homeland Security Office.  When it was elevated to a cabinet-level agency, he became its first secretary, serving there from 2003-2005.  He has since been on the board at Home Depot and a tech firm that was sold to Lockheed Martin, and runs Ridge Global LLC, a firm that seems to specialize in security planning — think big events and college campus plans.  He’s usually considered a “moderate” Republican, where you could easily replace “moderate” with “pro-choice.”  Of more interest in this contest might be that Ridge has been publicly calling waterboarding torture since January 2008.

In short, he hasn’t kept his nose spotless since leaving office — the major pay he earned helping make a company tasty for Lockheed might look ugly upon closer inspection — but he’s probably well-positioned to be a serious contender in this fight.  Ridge was a popular governor (he had a 63 percent approval rating when he left office), and if he positions himself as a moderate alternative to Pat Toomey, the guy who scared Arlen Specter out of the party, he might do well with precisely the coalition that Specter has depended upon in past races.

It’s not even a sure thing that Specter will be the Democratic nominee.  President Obama has said he’ll support Specter, but you’ve gotta wonder how enthusiastic that support will be if Specter continues voting down the President’s preferred legislation and nominees.  His continued and, I think, non-sensical opposition of EFCA in particular is enraging the left — and that led to what I see as the Lighting of the 2010 Penn Fuse this weekend, when Representative Joe Sestak (D-Penn.) appeared on John King’s “State of the Union.”  There’s pretty much only one reason Sestak would appear on a Sunday talk show: to warn Specter, and the party, that he’s coming for them.  And he delivered:

SESTAK: What I need to know is, what is he running for? And second, how will he use his leadership, which didn’t seem to work in the Republican Party, to better shape us? If he has the right answer, so be it. We move on.

But I hate to tell you, we’re in a very critical moment, John. Health care for everyone in an affordable, accessible way. Overseas, we are in a real challenge with Pakistan and Afghanistan as we redeploy from Iraq. Where is he on that?

Energy, education, is Pennsylvania — it is such an elder state, how do we retain the youth there so we can be all we can be? That’s what I have to hear. What are you running for? And that’s what I got in for after I left the military three years ago.

Sestak isn’t the only Democrat considering the race; Jack Wagner, the current state auditor general, is said to be considering a run — and his campaign Web site is kind enough to point out (again, and again, and again) that he won more Pennsylvania votes than Barack Obama — and any other candidate — in the 2008 election.  Auditor General might sound obscure to many non-Pennsylvanians, but the AG before Jack Wagner was a guy who now goes by U.S. Senator Bob Casey.

It seems to early to guess what the race will center on issues-wise, but just the fact that the GOP is looking for a more moderate candidate while the Dems — with Sestak — are seeking someone further to the left says this promises to be a race that says a lot about where the parties want to go (and whether they’re going to get there) in 2010 and beyond.

Remember just yesterday, when it was too early to even think about this stuff? 

Me either.  Keystone State 2010: Game on!