Ever since the Florida Supreme Court ordered lawmakers to get their entitled heads out of their asses and draw the state's Congressional districts in ways that comply with the law, it's been basically a foregone conclusion that former Governor Charlie Crist would run for Congress in Pinellas.
Tuesday morning at south St. Petersburg's Childs Park, flanked by supporters as well as his storied fan, he made it official. Democratic elected leaders and party officials stood behind him as he spoke.
“I am thankful to God for this day, and I am thankful to the Florida Supreme Court for having the wisdom to do the right thing and have fair districts again,” he said.
He cited the dysfunction in D.C., as everyone who wants to be in Congress does, as part of his reason for wanting to go be a Congressman.
“We have a problem in Washington. There's no question about it,” he said. “All they do is argue all day long. They can't even pick a House Speaker right now. It is a dysfunctional body, unfortunately. And we need to change.”
He's running for the state's 13th Congressional District seat, which as currently drawn slightly favors the GOP (its boundary excludes predominantly African-American south St. Pete and hugs north county's more, shall we say, ecru reaches).
New (though not technically official yet) maps, inspired by a lawsuit over state lawmakers' ignoring of a voter-approved fair districts amendment (shocking!), show an overwhelmingly Democratic advantage there. The departure of the seat's incumbent, Republican David Jolly, who's pursuing Marco Rubio's U.S. Senate seat, made the race even more attractive to Crist, especially after two statewide losses in five years.
In his brief speech Tuesday morning, he outlined a platform that included stronger environmental protections, honoring a woman's right to choose and better treatment of teachers.
Crist has been heavily criticized for his party switches — he went from Republican to Independent to Democrat in those same five years — and his detractors say the beliefs he espouses come not from a change of heart but are out of political ambition.
But he often says it was the party that left him — that the GOP morphing its platform into something only an actual vampire version of Barry Goldwater could love drove Crist away.
The many Democrats there seemed to believe Crist's side of the story.
“This is time to move away from the shutdown caucus mentality that exists right now in Washington, and Charlie Crist has proven that he is a man of the people and will move us forward as a nation,” said County Commissioner Ken Welch.
Commissioner Janet Long said Crist is less interested in being sorta famous while climbing the political ladder than he is in actually helping people out, and said she knew that years ago when he was in the Florida Senate and she was Deputy Insurance Commissioner.
“That was when I learned that he was very interested in helping people," she said. "There's no question in my mind that Charlie Crist has a service heart. He's one of those folks who understands that public service is a calling.”
Absent from the activity, obviously, was Eric Lynn, the Democrat who has been campaigning for the D-13 gig for more than six months, since well before Jolly's designs on a Senate seat were well known. Lynn has repeatedly said he won't stop running just because the incredibly well-known (and more or less well-liked) Crist was running.
But, weirdly, it was Jolly who showed up and was waiting on the outskirts of the event ready to talk shit.
"I'm going to do anything I can to make sure it's somebody other than Charlie,” he said.
Ouch.
“Because I care deeply about who is going to represent me in Congress," he said. "I am a constituent. And in Charlie Crist I believe we would have the worst member of Congress we would ever see serve, a person who is in this out of political convenience rather than political conviction, a huckster and a fraud who will say anything he wants just to get elected.”
He said if it came down to it, he'd support Eric Lynn or nearly any other Democrat in challenging Crist for the seat, though he'd prefer it if a Republican ran. Former St. Pete Mayor Rick Baker recently told the Tampa Bay Times' Adam Smith he is weighing a run, though word on the street is he's actually gearing up to run for mayor in 2017.
(We should find out whether Baker will opt to slash homeless people's tents literally as mayor or figuratively as a Republican member of Congress early next year, according to Smith's report.)
“I would be proud to support my friend Rick Baker if he were to decide to run," Jolly said. "If not, if it's a contest among Democrats, Charlie Crist is the one person I hope goes down in defeat.”
During his press conference and subsequent brief media availability, Crist admitted he isn't perfect, and stressed that the views he espouses (as well as a few well-documented changes of heart) reflect what he gleans from constituents, and not opportunism on his part.
“Public service is in my heart. I can't help it. I guess that's fairly obvious," he said. “I've run a fair amount of races and I've won some, I've lost some. What I have learned is that you have to listen as hard as you can, and go out and talk to people as much as you possibly can. They're the boss and that's what I'm going to do in this campaign.”
This article appears in Oct 15-21, 2015.