Shame on the Republican Party for cratering to the blinkered old farts of the "tea party," driving Gov. Charlie Crist out of the GOP primary in Florida and into an independent candidacy for the U.S. Senate in November.
Long a popular, moderate governor, Crist had no chance in the Republican primary after the GOP establishment raced after tea partyers in embracing the opportunistically conservative young Marco Rubio. Now it will be Crist and Rubio battling probable Democratic nominee Kendrick Meeks, a U.S. House member, for the seat vacated early by Republican Sen. Mel Martinez.
Crist will lack money and organization but with his high name recognition and pragmatic record of accomplishment could win a close three-way race, as Joe Lieberman won as an independent in Connecticut in 2008 after Democrats turned against him. At the least, Crist could split Republican votes and deliver the election to Meeks, just as Teddy Roosevelt's principled, third-party Bull Moose candidacy in 1912 hurt Republican William Howard Taft and made the Democrat Woodrow Wilson president.
If Rubio loses, it will serve the Republican Party and the tea party right. Today's development provides yet more evidence that the GOP has been entirely taken over by hot-eyed extremists with a narrow agenda, blathering about loss of "freedom" at the slightest show of increased government spending -- which is necessary to help lift the United States out of recession.The price of purity may be election losses, but the tea party doesn't care, and like lemmings even longtime Republican officials are following the trail of purity to the possible demise of their party as it heads ever rightward and away from the center, where most votes are. Independents already turned off by the Hezbollah religiosity of today's GOP now have yet another reason to recoil in disgust.
Charlie Crist is a good guy and doesn't deserve this banishment from a party he has served so well. Let intelligent, educated Floridians mark this day and resolve to send a message in November rejecting the overzealous, the intolerant and the rigidly ideological.
