Since we’re a website on California politics, I am not going to assume that all of our readers know that life-long Republican Charlie Crist, the Governor of Florida and a candidate for United States Senate, in recent days announced his departure from the GOP, choosing to re-register as an independent to guarantee his presence as a candidate for the Senate this November.  Crist, you see, had been the prohibitive front-runner for the GOP nomination – but his strong embrace of President Obama and some of his most liberal policies (most famously the TARP plan) on top of years of embracing his own form of populism that demonstrated a severe lack of defining ideology – made him very unpopular with Florida’s Republican voters.  His former primary opponent, former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio, a strong conservative, had been an underdog against Crist, but then as Rubio’s message spread, and Crist’s embrace of Obama (literally) became well know, Rubio shot way ahead to the point where Crist was sure to lose the GOP nomination – hence his decision to bail on the Republican Party all together.

The nexus to California politics comes into play because it was revealed in an article in the St. Petersberg Times, and brought to the attention of left-coast politics thanks to Anthony York blogging for Capitol Weekly and the Los Angeles Times, that one of the people whom Governor Crist consulted when deciding whether to bail on the Grand Old Party was none other than our own esteeming “post-partisan” Republican Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.  According to the St. Petersburg Times article, Crist says that Schwarzenegger encouraged him to leave the party.

So one has to wonder what that conversation might have been like.  I’m sure Governor Schwarzenegger would be returning a call to Governor Crist…

**There is more – click the link**

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 4th, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.