Word: governor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...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 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...
...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; but he's expected to remind them about the two dyed-in-the-wool conservatives...
...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...
...Still, at this point Crist has to be careful that conservative voters don't take his attacks on Rubio as attacks on them. He also has to hope that Jeb Bush, whose work as Governor he professes to admire, doesn't decide to throw his still heavy political weight behind Rubio. In a speech to Republicans in Fort Lauderdale last month, a seemingly frustrated Crist read off a litany of his conservative stances and said, "I don't know what else you're supposed to be, except maybe angry too." And yet, if he's going to right his campaign...