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?

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!