Word: lastly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...voter poll was released a couple of weeks ago that showed Florida Governor Charlie Crist dropping into a tie with former state House speaker Marco Rubio - an underdog Crist had led by more than 20 points last summer - in next year's Republican primary race for the U.S. Senate. But the next day, Crist was still being Crist. Seemingly ignoring the GOP conservatives who've been lambasting him for reversing much of the red-meat legacy of his predecessor, Jeb Bush, Crist enthusiastically signed a bill expanding passenger rail in Florida - including a high-speed train system Bush made...
...Just as big a concern for the tanned "Sunshine Governor," however, is how to get his Senate campaign back on the rails. Ever since a conservative tent revival began sweeping America last summer, sparked by angry misgivings about health care reform and other harbingers of big government, Republican purists have targeted Crist's moderate, bipartisan style. Seizing on his embrace of President Obama's $787 billion economic-stimulus plan, they've treated him as a whipping boy for everything that's wrong with the battered GOP as well as Florida's recession-ravaged economy, whose unemployment rate...
...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...
...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 he doesn't regret what critics derided as his overly effusive welcome to Obama in Florida...
...Eikenberg, who was brought on last month as the Governor's poll numbers kept falling - despite an early endorsement from the National Republican Senatorial Committee - says the campaign will make a stronger grass-roots outreach to a wider swath of Republican voters. "Party activists are tremendously important," he says, "but you also have to tell your story to the Republican voters whose time is consumed by running a small business or getting their kids through school. We think they'll come out in force the more they hear who Charlie Crist is all about...