Word: stimulus
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...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 of 11.5% is the state's worst since 1975. Along the way they've anointed Rubio, a 38-year-old Cuban...
...TIME, Crist and his new campaign manager, former chief of staff Eric Eikenberg, described a counterattack for 2010 that 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...
...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...
...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 February. "I think the stimulus has been helpful to Florida, so if you believe in your heart that you're doing what's best for your state, you should stand up and say it," says Crist. "I don't have the luxury of scoring political points with conservatives or anyone else during the worst economic...
...deepest recession since the 1930s cast a shadow over the year, as the U.S. economy hemorrhaged jobs, manufacturing continued to erode, and housing prices failed to recover from the previous year's crash. Unemployment rose to 10.2%--the highest rate in 26 years--despite the Obama Administration's stimulus efforts, which pumped billions into the economy. Detroit was hit especially hard: Ford saw a steep drop in sales, Chrysler was taken over by Italian firm Fiat, and GM briefly entered bankruptcy. One bright spot was Wall Street, where stocks reversed much of 2008's decline. The economy showed encouraging growth...