Word: crist
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...poll has Crist and Rubio even at 43 points, a 10-point swing for both men since last August. It's a sign, says Aubrey Jewett, a Florida politics expert at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, that "political gravity has caught up with Crist," who until last summer had had approval ratings near 70%, but to many Floridians now seems at a loss about how to jump-start jobs. And it's just the latest warning that if Crist hopes to take his less strident and more inclusive brand of Republicanism to Washington - an approach, shared by California...
...interviews with TIME, Crist and his new campaign manager, former chief of staff Eric Eikenberg, described a counterattack for 2010 that will emphasize Crist's conservative bona fides while casting doubt on those of Rubio - who recently conceded to a Florida television station that he too would have taken Obama's stimulus money. At the same time, Crist will try to avoid giving the impression - as he did often this year, especially as he acrobatically tried to distance himself from the stimulus - that he's cynically apologizing for his moderate principles in order to win conservative voters who may well...
...matter of consistency," Crist admits. "I'm a pro-gun, pro-life, fiscal conservative, but I'm also a pragmatic conservative who thinks it's important to remember what a real conservative like Jack Kemp once said, that the Republican Party should be a big tent...
...first he has to win back some of the smaller tent, where he's been losing a number of local straw polls of Florida's conservative GOP base. Crist has let Republican fundamentalists hammer him on the stimulus - and the now famous picture of him and Obama sharing an onstage hug - but his campaign is poised now to hammer back with reminders that as Governor he led a crusade to tamp down Florida's runaway property taxes and insurance premiums. Conservatives are still apoplectic about his appointment of an African-American Democrat to the Florida Supreme Court this year...
...alienating the less impassioned Republicans who don't come out for straw polls - especially in a state with Florida's centrist and independent streak - is also risky. Crist knows they vote in primaries. They helped give him a landslide victory in the 2006 gubernatorial primary against a more conservative candidate. They also lifted John McCain, the more moderate Republican Crist backed for the presidential nomination last year, to a key Florida primary victory. (They also know, according to polls, that Crist has a better chance of defeating a Democratic candidate next fall than Rubio does.) As a result, Crist insists...