Bill Buckley used to tell a funny story about a heroic attempt to survive a faux pas. A young lieutenant is obliged to attend a social event in a prominent hotel with a general. In the lobby, in an attempt to make conversation, the lieutenant says, “Look there, that’s the ugliest woman I’ve ever seen,” nodding toward two women in conversation on the other side of the lobby.

“That’s my wife,” the general said. In an attempt to recover, the lieutenant says, “Oh, I meant the young woman with her.” The general says, “That’s my daughter.”

The lieutenant, who knows he’s in deep yogurt now, thinks desperately for a second, finally smiles, looks directly at the general and says, “I never said it.”

Charlie Crist, Florida’s RINO governor who badly wants to be a RINO U.S. Senator from Florida, is trying to run this same revisionist scam. He claimed on CNN Wednesday that he never supported President Obama’s $787 billion “stimulus” slush fund, which he clearly did, on tape, over and over. He’s caught so much flak from conservatives for this, and for other un-conservatives acts, that in sheer desperation he’s trying to get Florida voters to believe he “never said it.”

On February 10, when it appeared the Democrats would be able to push through a $787 billion federal spending bill in the name of stimulating the economy, but before it was finally adopted, Crist traveled to Ft. Myers to appear on the same stage with President Obama who was in Florida to whoop up his budget-busting slush fund. On that day and that stage, Crist not only embraced Obama, but he enthusiastically embraced the idea of the federal government spending nearly a trillion dollars the government doesn’t have on the general notion that somehow this would put the ailing economy right.

Here’s what he said, while the crowd, enchanted by Obama’s presence, repeated fortissimo, “Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can!”

Crist: “We’ve had to cut about $7 billion the past two years and we haven’t raised taxes and we’re still in balance. But to be candid, it’s getting harder every day. It’s getting harder every day and we know that it’s important that we pass this stimulus package. It is important that we do so to help education, to help our infrastructure, and to help health care for those who need it the most — the most vulnerable among us. And let me finish by saying, Mr. President, we need to do it in a bipartisan way. This issue is about helping our country. This is not about partisan politics. This is about rising above that, helping America and reigniting our economy.”

A few days later Crist appeared on Chris Matthews’ Hardball, and in answer to Mathews’ question, “Why are you aboard the Obama bailout bandwagon?” Crist said: ” Well, I call it a stimulus for the economy to try to help the people in my state. It’s really that simple, Chris.” Asked by Matthews why he was supporting the stimulus when so many in his party weren’t, Crist said: “Because Florida needs it, frankly. This would mean about $12.2 billion for Florida. It would help us in the areas of education, health care, infrastructure, and that’s where we need the help.”

Over the next short while, Crist made similar comments, available on the Internet for anyone who wants to see and hear them, on CBS, NBC, and Bloomberg. These statements are as clear as spring water. Please adopt President Obama’s “stimulus” plan because it’s good policy and will be good for the country, Crist is saying.

Even the White House thinks Crist was on the stimulus team last February. Asked at Thursday’s White House press briefing whether Crist endorsed the stimulus plan in his joint appearance with Obama, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said, “I would say yes yes.” He said Crist’s unambiguous words speak for themselves.

“I think he was very supportive of the legislation and supportive of the benefits that it would have and has had for the state of Florida in seeing positive economic growth,” Gibbs said.

Well, that was then, when Obama’s approval ratings were at about 110 percent. This is now, when Obama and his policies are less popular. And Crist has been chastened by conservatives — a major part of the Republican base he needs if he is to have any hope of defeating conservative former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio in next August’s Republican Senate primary — for supporting a bill which clearly is stimulating the living hell out of the national debt but little else.

Now here’s an exchange between Crist and Wolf Blitzer on CNN Wednesday:

Blitzer: Let me interrupt for a second, governor. Do you have any regrets about endorsing the economic stimulus package?

Crist: Well, I didn’t endorse it. I — you know, I didn’t even have a vote on the darned thing. But I understood that it was going to pass and I wanted to be able to utilize it for the benefit of my fellow Floridians.

Even for Charlie Crist, who on the campaign trail maintains only the most informal relationship with truth, this in an audacious switcheroo. This is beyond a John Kerry moment. This isn’t just, “I was for it until I was against it.” This is, “I never said it.”

Any reasonable person reading and hearing Crist’s remarks in February would not conclude that Crist just wanted to assure that his state got as much as possible from a program that was already a fact, a reasonable position, but that he thought it was a good idea to put almost a trillion dollars we don’t have into a slush fund and spend it haphazardly on things Obama and his administration fancied. Crist did endorse the stimulus, and his claim that he didn’t requires a Joe Wilson, or others of his directness, to parse.

Crist’s desperation is understandable. In the spring Crist was more than 30 points ahead of Rubio in the polls and was the prohibitive favorite to win the primary next August. Since then the conservative Rubio has cut Crist’s lead in half, has closed the gap a bit in fund-raising, and is making a race out of what was once thought to be a Crist cake-walk. Rubio has the mo.

This reversal of fortune has caused Crist to say some peculiar things, including trying to claim he’s a fiscal conservative on the basis that he had cut $7 billion out of the Florida budget over the past two years. The truth is the Florida Legislature was obliged to cut the money because the Florida constitution mandates a balanced budget and the bad economy has severely reduced Florida’s incoming revenue. Crist had little or nothing to do with the cuts; in fact he vetoed millions of dollars of them. Much of the Florida media called him on this one.

Crist hasn’t just shaded the truth as in his budget-cutting claims, but he’s backing off of previous liberal positions he’s taken, including such as his call for carbon cap and trade. In fact, Crist is backing off of so many of his previous dodgy positions that he’s had to have one of those back-up beeper signals installed on his campaign car.

We don’t know if the socially maladroit lieutenant above ever made captain. But we can conclude that Crist’s chances of becoming a U.S. Senator will diminish if he makes many more of these fanciful attempts to redefine himself. If he keeps coming up with these laughers, at some point not only will Crist’s lack of a core philosophy be a campaign issue, but also his apparent lack of character.

So here’s some free advice for Crist from a sage old political consultant whose name I’ve forgotten: “Tell the truth — voters like it, and it’s easier to remember.”

Florida, a geological afterthought, was the last portion of what are now the lower 48 states to emerge from the ocean, and it emerged halfheartedly: Its highest point is just 345 feet above sea level. But the fourth-most-populous state will loom over American politics next summer when Republicans select a Senate nominee. Their primary will test whether the party has become so risk-averse that it flinches from interesting choices.

The nominee almost certainly will be either Gov. Charlie Crist or Marco Rubio, former speaker of the Florida House (term limits, which he supports, retired him). Leading national Republicans rushed to endorse Crist. In tennis, such decisions are called unforced errors.

Republican Sen. Mel Martinez was elected in 2004. In 2007 the Republican National Committee, worried about declining GOP strength among Hispanics, made Martinez, who was born in Cuba, chairman of the party, a position for someone with a zest for politics. Last December, however, Martinez said he would not seek reelection to the Senate, and last month he said he would not even wait until 2010 to skedaddle. He resigned.

Not wanting to be a senator is understandable, but it is a nuisance to voters who thought Martinez did want to be, and to Senate Republicans, who number only 40, one short of the total needed to stop a Senate action. In 2010, the GOP and the Democrats each will be defending 19 seats. Because so many companies do business with state governments, governors are fundraising dynamos, so a Crist nomination would not burden the national party, which helps explain why party leaders like him. But that is myopic reasoning.

Crist appeared at a rally with Barack Obama promoting the $787 billion stimulus that got no votes from House Republicans and only three from Republican senators. He is a climate-change worrywart who wants to cap Florida’s carbon emissions. He has chosen his former campaign manager to serve as a placeholder in the Senate during the crucial next 16 months.

And to reduce property insurance costs, especially for Floridians living near the nation’s second-longest coastline, Crist expanded, and vetoed reform of, the state’s reckless version of a property insurance “public option.” It is government-run insurance that, by offering rates lower than rational assessments of risk would dictate, has driven private insurers to limit their business or even stop doing business in the state. When a huge hurricane hits, Florida — and U.S. — taxpayers might have to foot the bill, by which time Crist plans to be in Washington.

Rubio, who is 38 and in a decade might look that old, says that Crist will not be there. Crist, says Rubio, “never thought he’d have to run in a Republican primary again.” Probably only about 20 percent of Florida’s 4 million registered Republicans will vote in the closed primary in late August in a nonpresidential year. So, about 450,000 votes might win it. That many can come from Republicans who are attentive to politics even in late summer because they are ideologically driven.

As is Rubio, which is why National Review, the bimonthly encyclical of the church of conservatism, had him on a recent cover and why the Club for Growth, a group that contributes to Republicans friendly to free markets, should support him. Crist has a large lead in name recognition, and hence in polls. But where Rubio and he are both known, they are neck and neck.

A Catholic and father of four, Rubio, whose parents fled Cuba in 1959, says, “It is hard to be apolitical when you are raised by exiles.” He worries that his children’s generation “will be the first to inherit a diminished country.” His preventive medicine includes limited government, tax reform, spending restraint and removal of all impediments to the entrepreneurship that makes America a place “where poor people can put billionaires out of business.”

Florida will not soon be pushed back under the ocean by the weight of its expanding population. For the first time since the Second World War, the state lost population — 58,000 people — in a 12-month period (April 2008 to April 2009). In January 2011, one Floridian will leave for the U.S. Senate. He is unlikely to be a former governor at odds with his party’s nominating electorate, or the probable Democratic nominee, Kendrick Meek, a hyper-liberal congressman. Rubio intends to prove that “in the most important swing state, you can run successfully as a principled conservative.” He probably will.

By Jim Geraghty

Almost every politician who aspires to statewide office brings along a staffer when meeting a group of reporters. Usually it’s the communications director or press secretary, or perhaps the chief of staff. Usually the staffer is there to drive the candidate around, keep him on schedule, monitor how he is doing, and perhaps kick him under the table if, while answering questions on the record, he starts straying off-message in a Bidenesque manner.

When U.S. Senate candidate Marco Rubio dropped by National Review’s Washington office to meet the editors in late July, he arrived alone — in fact, he traveled alone for his entire trip from Florida to the capital. You could take that as a sign of a shoestring campaign; but the more apt conclusion is that Rubio knows who he is and what he wants to say — there’s never a need to kick him under the table.

From one angle, Rubio is involved in a classic David vs. Goliath race: his primary opponent, Florida governor Charlie Crist, has nearly universal name recognition in the state; a large fundraising advantage; the early endorsement of the National Republican Senatorial Committee; the endorsement of departing senator Mel Martinez; and leads of 30 percentage points or more in the early polls. Rubio is a former speaker of the state House, barely known outside of Tallahassee and his hometown of Miami, and is fighting the perception that his campaign is a test run for a 2012 race against Democratic senator Bill Nelson.

But a late-July Mason-Dixon poll found that among those who had heard of both candidates, Crist is favored by only 33 percent to Rubio’s 31 percent. There are other hopeful signs: The NRSC endorsement triggered some grassroots outrage, and Rubio has gotten the endorsement of one of the Senate’s leading conservatives, South Carolina’s Jim DeMint. Prof. Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia isn’t ruling out a Rubio win.

With his political experience entirely in state government, it’s natural to wonder: Why didn’t Rubio run to succeed Crist as governor? The first reason is that there is already a conservative in that race — the state attorney general. “Bill McCollum is someone I agree with,” Rubio says. “There might be a few disagreements here and there, but it’s not enough to justify a challenge.” And there are other reasons to be looking beyond Florida politics: “If we keep going down the path that we’re on in Washington, then what we do in Tallahassee won’t matter. The time to pay the piper is closer than people think it is.”

Over a two-hour conversation, Rubio offers a conservative message on a wide spectrum of issues, often punctuating his points with memorable and witty observations: “We’re getting lectured to by the Chinese on economics”; “On the stimulus, mostly we’re stimulating the debt”; “No start-up guy is going to get any stimulus dollars”; “I like Dick Cheney, but nobody’s perfect — he’s not a very good hunter, apparently”; “Cuban-Americans don’t think of themselves as minorities, because in Miami, they’re the majority”; “There’s a correlation between cigar-smokers and their politics.”

On immigration, Rubio disagrees a bit with his mentor, Jeb Bush, and another former governor, George W. He prefers a tougher line on illegal immigration, but he understands the immigrant dream. His grandfather was a poor Cuban who fought off polio and became the only one out of 18 children who learned how to read and write. He emigrated to America, moved to Las Vegas, and prospered — spending his senior years smoking cigars in a full suit in the Nevada heat. “The ability to leave your kids better off is what drives people to come to this country,” Rubio says, stressing that he empathizes with the dreams of illegal immigrants even if he can’t excuse their actions. “In a lot of cases, they come here to get away from the kind of government ideas we’re talking about today, having the government run almost all the aspects of the economy.”

Rubio calls the Obama administration’s response to Honduras’s power struggle “outrageous,” and when discussing the Iranian protests, laments that the loudest voice for freedom and liberty on the world stage belongs to French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Rubio wonders aloud how President Obama can claim he doesn’t want to interfere with Iran’s political upheaval when it took him “all of seven minutes to intervene in Honduras.” He says he expects Latin America to be a “flashpoint” in the coming decade.
Is there anything for a conservative to dislike about Marco Rubio? Those skeptical of Mike Huckabee or the Fair Tax might furrow their brows a bit, as Rubio is sympathetic to the former Arkansas governor and his economic policies. It will be fascinating to see the broader public reaction to the baby-faced Rubio as the race heats up — he is 38 years old but looks to be in his 20s. (He married a Miami Dolphins cheerleader twelve years ago, and they have four children; he expresses complete confidence in current Dolphins quarterback Chad Pennington — as long as the offensive line protects him.)

Patrick Ruffini recently wrote, “Ask presidential nominees Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney how far early, high dollar bundler support got them. Or Virginia Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe how much a 10-to-1 cash advantage is worth. Underfunded candidates like Rubio don’t need more money now. They need an argument. A bulletproof argument from a plausible candidate is worth tens of millions of dollars in any primary, overwhelming a financial advantage of any magnitude.”

Asked what his message is, Rubio offers one that is clear — but not necessarily specific to this race: “There are few things more unjust than the possibility that my kids are going to inherit a weaker nation than the one I inherited from my parents. . . . Things don’t have to be the way they are. You can lose your country. America will not become Marxist, but it will lose what makes it unique unless we act.”

But there’s room for an argument that’s a bit sharper — even if Rubio says he wants to win the primary without tearing down Crist. Put simply: If the best the Florida Republican party can do in a Senate race against weak Democratic opponents is to nominate a man who held a rally for Obama’s stimulus, the party might as well close up shop and go home.

Recognizing that fact, Rubio isn’t worried about his disadvantage in fundraising: “No amount of money will convince Florida Republicans that the stimulus and cap-and-trade are good ideas.”

Observers of Florida politics have long assumed that, at some point, a top-tier Democrat would express interest in Mel Martinez’s old Senate seat — but so far, the party’s options are laughable: Kendrick Meek, a Democratic member of the U.S. House who represents a district so liberal he has never faced even a token Republican opponent; Kevin Burns, the largely unknown mayor of North Miami; and black congresswoman Corrine Brown, best known for calling a Hispanic Bush appointee a white man and then explaining that they “all look alike to me.” Could there be a greater liability in Florida politics than to tell whites and Hispanics they are indistinguishable?

As time passes, the 2010 Florida Senate race is looking more and more like a GOP gimme. And if that’s the case, why pick the stimulus-backing, cap-and-trade-backing, Obama-embracing, kinda-sorta-maybe conservative Crist over a Cuban-American with nine years in elected office who is pledging that he won’t sell out his principles?

A lot can change between now and the Republican primary in August 2010, but if the country’s mood then is similar to what it is right now, the smart money might be on Rubio. Day by day, Obama proves himself to be precisely the liberal that he claimed he wasn’t. Crist bet that he could embrace Obama early — literally — and survive a Republican primary in a state where John McCain carried 48 percent of the vote while being outspent two to one.

In a closed primary with a million or so eligible voters, Rubio needs to persuade about 600,000 Republicans that he’s the better choice. Hardly mission impossible.

When the Gipper left office in January of 1989, the Republican establishment remembered these vital lessons. For about an hour and a half.

George H.W. Bush ran in 1988 on a pledge to be Reagan III. But he soon reverted to his own form. We all remember what then happened to “Read my lips, no new taxes.” And the Federal Register under George the First soon regained the elephantine heft it sported before Reagan put the brakes on federal regulation. Since then Republican poobahs and money-men have supported countless RINOs (often against solid conservative candidates), careerists with no philosophy or soul, and other me-toos who gave us a Republican president and a Republican Congress better at spending than even the Democrats and no detectable progress on any conservative social issue. This was the lot that was routed in ’06 and again in ’08.

Democrats decry to every open mike they can find how conservative the Republican Party has become. If only it were so.

Considering recent history, it should come as no surprise that with what promises to become an exciting 2010 Senate primary race shaping up in Florida between a substance-free, moderate-to-liberal governor and a conservative former speaker of the Florida House, the Republican establishment has lined up to give the liberal governor a big, wet tongue kiss, and has not so subtly tried to elbow the conservative aside. These guys clearly miss Arlen Specter already, and are searching for his replacement.

They think they’ve found him in moderate-to-liberal Florida governor, Charlie Crist, who campaigned in his own state for our rookie president’s bank-busting goodie package, aka the stimulus bill. Crist has tried to get the Florida Legislature to adopt a carbon cap and trade program and to force Florida utilities into generating an unreasonable percentage of their electricity using “renewable fuels,” the kind that excite environmentalists’ erogenous zones but exist in but trifling amounts and are bloody expensive. He also wants California-like auto emissions standards that would cost a packet but provide a negligible improvement in Florida’s air.

You’ll never hear an encouraging word from Crist on any conservative social issue. He’s pro-abortion and thinks marriage-like legal arrangements between homosexuals are fine. He recently put a liberal Democrat on the Florida Supreme Court.

In Crist’s speeches, conservatives will wait in vain to hear any of their principles promoted. What they hear are endless lullabies about “bipartisanship,” “diversity,” and other warm-sounding, non-sequiturs from the Democratic hymn book. These are just the most actionable of Crist’s sins against conservative principles.

No matter. Less than an hour after Crist threw his hat in the ring last week, Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Republican Senatorial Campaign head John Cornyn of Texas both endorsed him. In Florida, Republican Party Chairman Jim Greer endorsed Crist. These quick endorsements came in spite of the fact that national Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele has said Republicans who’ve supported the president’s stimulus plan shouldn’t themselves be supported, and in spite of the fact that there’s another very solid Republican candidate in the Florida race. Steele said Sunday that in spite of McConnell’s and Cornyn’s premature coronation of Crist, the RNC would stay out of the Florida race until after the primary.

The “other guy” clueless Republican leaders would like to ignore is Cuban-American attorney Marco Rubio of Miami. In eight years in the Florida House he compiled a conservative voting record and has been a frequent speaker across the state on issues such as holding the line on taxes, limited government, and the importance of the family. He hit these themes and others Friday afternoon at a meet-and-greet at Crabby Bill’s seafood restaurant in Tampa.

“We’re scheduled for the largest deficit in the history of the world,” Rubio said of the stimulus package Crist fancies. Rubio was critical of the recent automaker bailouts, saying, “The jobs will be gone and we’ll still owe the money. Washington should just get out of the way.” On Obama-Care, “We shouldn’t put the government between patients and their doctors, or do anything to increase costs. There are free market solutions to health care.”

Rubio was critical of politics by poll and focus group, and critical of the Republican Party’s recent melancholy record on limited government and spending.

“America hasn’t solved a major problem in 20 years. That’s because politics now isn’t about solving problems, it’s about getting elected. Leadership and popularity are not the same thing.”

Rubio not only has a message, but he’s enthusiastic and deft in putting that message across. He gives every appearance of a conviction politician who knows what he wants to accomplish in office. His remarks went over well with the 120 or so who gathered during working hours to hear the candidate the McConnells and Greers of the world would as soon Republicans ignore. Many on hand were members of Central Florida Republican executive committees where there is considerable resentment about Greer’s attempt to announce an end to the Republican senatorial race before it starts.

In recent Republican executive committee meetings in Hillsborough (Tampa), Pinellas (St. Petersburg-Clearwater), and nearby Pasco and Hernando counties, Rubio’s campaign has generated interest, including lots of folks volunteering to volunteer. The Hillsborough committee passed a resolution objecting to Greer’s attempts to get the state party behind Crist. There have been similar rumblings in Republican groups across the state.

The Republican muftis doubtless like Crist because he has the appearance of a winner. After two years in office Crist still has approval ratings in the sixties. He’s about as popular among Democrats and independents as among Republicans, largely because he often sounds like a Democrat. This is the reason Crist gets better press treatment than most Republicans. If the election were next week, Charlie would likely beat Rubio and any of the Democrats likely to seek that party’s nomination. Of course, the race isn’t next week.

Charlie is a charming fellow who knows how to work a room, and has floated from one Florida office to another on an engaging smile, a few populist bromides, a great tan, and the ability to convince voters he has their best interests at heart and knows how to make their lives better. He is in fact empty political calories. He’s accomplished next to nothing in the many Florida offices he’s held, none of them for long before he was seeking the next office. The only thing he’s worked hard at, or seems really committed to, is keeping himself in office.

But populists often fall quickly when voters finally discover there’s no there, there. This may happen with Charlie. Florida has serious problems about which Crist has done little in his two years as governor. So the muftis’ sure thing of today could be problematic a year from now. And a candidate with real conservative principles could look pretty appealing in a state that has traditionally supported conservative candidates, the deliriums of the recent presidential race notwithstanding.

During the war Dwight Eisenhower said that De Gaulle, supposedly on the same team, caused him more trouble than Mussolini did. Right now Republican “leaders” are causing Rubio more trouble than the Democrats. Looking at his record through the post-war years, le Grand Charlie never did figure out what team he was on. Perhaps Jim Greer still can.

Listen up Jim, this isn’t complicated. The sequence goes in this wise: primary first — then close behind a candidate. Not the other way around.

TAMPA — Conservatives can be excused for enjoying it a little too much as Arlen Specter learns, to his deep regret, that Democrats will almost certainly treat him worse than Republicans have.

If Republicans wish to be a party with a purpose, one that seriously opposes the leftward rush of our rookie president and his merry band, Mitch McConnell will not be quick to say, “Come on back, all is forgiven.”

Now there’s at least a chance that Florida will not be replacing Arlen with another Senate RINO after the 2010 election. Last Wednesday, Marco Rubio, a 37-year-old, Cuban-American lawyer from Miami and a former speaker of the Florida House, declared he will be running for the U.S. Senate seat that Republican Mel Martinez will relinquish when his term ends next year.

Rubio will almost certainly face the current Florida governor, Charlie Crist, in the Republican primary. (Crist is expected to announce for the Senate this week. If he doesn’t, lots of Florida Republican consultants and other politically savvy prognosticator types will be wiping major egg from their faces. No one in the political biz in Florida thinks Charlie will run for re-election as governor.)

Crist, who has held one office or another in Florida politics since 1992 and who won the governorship in 2006, is more often referred to as a moderate or a populist than as a conservative. His favorable ratings in polls remain in the sixties and seventies, even though he’s promised much and delivered little on two issues — property tax relief and high property insurance rates — that Floridians anguish over. Lots of Democrats and independents like him because he sounds a lot like them.

Crist is popular among rank and file Republicans, but he’s cheesed off the conservative wing of the Republican Party by taking extreme environmental positions, including supporting a carbon cap and trade system and attempting to get the Florida Legislature to force Florida utilities to use an unrealistically high percentage of “renewable fuels” to generate electricity. He also spent a good deal of time whooping up President Obama’s “stimulus” package (actually appearing on the same stage with Obama in Ft. Myers in February to coo about it) and recently appointed a liberal jurist to the Florida Supreme Court.

Crist further annoys conservatives by spending more time prattling on in a vacuous, Kumbaya way about the healing properties of “bipartisanship” and “diversity” (as though Florida weren’t diverse) than in speaking about or supporting conservative principles. He’s not had a positive thing to say about social conservatives or their causes. He’s pro-abortion and cool with same-sex civil unions. He supported John McCain’s “We Don’t Need No Stinking Borders Act of 2007.” He’s said he wants to restore voting rights to felons after they’ve completed their sentences. He’s filled the state’s top regularity agency posts with people environmentalists find simpatico. He’s whooped up tougher, California-like emissions standards for Florida automobiles that would be costly to implement but would provide questionable environmental benefits.

Crist is infatuated with big, expensive commuter rail systems. And has declared he’s in favor of new major-league ball yards on the public dime (such a one as the Tampa Bay Rays ownership wants).

Considering the above, RINO is the nicest thing conservatives call Crist in private conversation. The words “empty suit” come up a lot. So do some other words, over which we need not linger.

RUBIO IS FRESH FROM EIGHT YEARS in the Florida House of Representatives, the last two as speaker, where he compiled a conservative voting record. He’s smart, energetic, ambitious, and to all appearances sincere in his conservatism. He’s an enthusiastic if not always eloquent speaker. When he speaks it’s usually on conservative themes such as limited government, the superiority of the private sector over the public (the entrepreneur over the bureaucrat), the centrality of the family (he’s married with four children), judges who interpret rather than make law, and a vigorous foreign policy.

Rubio rarely mentions Crist by name in his comments, but any Floridian who doesn’t know who Rubio is referring to is just back from an extended vacation on Mars. A few samples from my conversation with Rubio last week:

“Elections are about choice, and I’m going to present a clear alternative,” Rubio said. “The first job is to nominate a Republican. And we have a choice about what we want a Republican to be.”

Rubio went on to lament Republicans who “just want to survive. Their message seems to be if you can’t beat them, join them. If we go in this direction Republicans become just another branch of the Democrats.” Then he excoriated Republicans who “think we should be grateful for Obama’s stimulus package.”

Rubio has criticized Crist’s big-government energy policies in the past, and did so again in our conversation. Rubio said that while he is not prepared to challenge the claims of the global warmers, he says even if they are right there is no need to destroy the economy, as a cap and trade system would, in order to protect us.

“American innovators will solve the energy crisis for us,” Rubio said. “We don’t need big government mandates.” 
If the race indeed shapes up to be Crist vs. Rubio, Republican voters will certainly be faced with, to coin a cliché, a choice not an echo. One of the savviest people on the subject of Florida politics is University of South Florida professor Susan McManus. She told me a Crist/Rubio race would be “a battle for the ideological heart and soul of the Florida Republican Party.”

Rubio will certainly have an uphill battle in taking on Crist. If the election were held this week he would lose big. But the race isn’t this week. It’s 15 months from now. Plenty of time for both Rubio and Florida Democrats to knock some bloom off the Crist rose.

“There’s no reason for Crist’s popularity to stay high,” McManus said. “The Democrats will be painting a more partisan face on him.”

The 2010 Florida Senate race will be instructive in more ways than just deciding what Republican means in Florida. We’ll also see if those tens of thousands of new Democrats the Obama campaign managed to register really plan to make Florida a blue state or were just infatuated with Obama.

While Florida was going for Obama in 2008, Democrats picked up only one seat in Florida’s 160-seat legislature. And Floridians voted the conservative line on a plateful of constitutional amendments. But between 2004 and 2008, Florida Democrats picked up a net gain of more than 288,000 voters and lead Republicans in registration 4.7 million to 4.2 million. Party registration numbers in Florida are always tricky due to the left-over conservative Democrats who are registered with a D but haven’t voted for a Democrat since JFK. There are, of course, fewer and fewer of these as the years go by.

McManus said South Florida, three-term Congressman Kendrick Meek, now the likely front-runner on the Democratic side, “can be counted on to try to replicate the Obama model.” It’s far too soon to predict if change will still charm two years after our rookie president was sworn in, if Obama’s Florida organization can be brought back to life, or if Meek is as slick and glib as Obama.

Rubio is just shy of 38 years old. He can sometimes come across as a brash graduate student. If the Florida Republican bench were deeper he might still be refining his game in AA ball. But the Republican bench isn’t deep. So if Florida conservatives want a voice in the U.S. Senate any time soon, young Rubio has about a year to learn to hit big league pitching.

This one should be worth watching. And considering the current Republican/Democrat lineup in the U.S. Senate, the race will enjoy a national audience. Perhaps even serious national contributors. Stay tuned.