Word: republicanize
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...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...
...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...
...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...