Word: year
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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 of 11.5% is the state's worst since 1975. Along the way they've anointed Rubio, a 38-year-old Cuban American, as the right wing's new boy wonder, a genuinely conservative David who can slay Crist's Goliath RINO (Republican in Name Only) in the primary next August. (See pictures of GOP memorabilia...
...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 Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, that many thought the GOP should adopt after last year's disastrous election losses - he has to reckon first with the Bush brand. "He has to spend 2010 hammering home the message, much more strongly than he has up to now, that he is a fundamentally conservative candidate," says Jewett. He still believes Crist is the favorite; but if Crist ends...
...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 dominate Florida's closed primary election. (Read "Florida's Senate Seat: The [Premature] Martinez Opening...
...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; but he's expected to remind them about the two dyed-in-the-wool conservatives he appointed before that. They've wailed about his efforts to restore voting rights to released felons; but Crist's "Chain Gang Charlie" nickname, which he got for co-sponsoring a law that revived...
...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 last...