Who knows, perhaps this state’s Republican Senate primary will come down to a hug-off. Obama-Crist vs. Sansom-Rubio. Picture that.
The Charlie Crist campaign, having been bludgeoned with footage of the governor embracing more than the president’s stimulus help for Florida, is now circulating a payback photo of Marco Rubio hugging Ray Sansom, the sleazy, former House Speaker. Take that, conservative, pin-up lad. More image damaging than a subsidized back wax.
Actually, if this primary descends into Hug-gate, the advantage should be Crist’s. The governor may be an empty ideology suit, and this may be a ploy born of desperation — but he has a pragmatic case. He hugged for a helping hand during the worst recession in memory.
He need apologize to no one for stimulus money that, in effect, bailed out state government. More than $2.5 billion alone went to Medicaid. He certainly need not apologize to the thousands of teachers who would have been laid off or the 1 million residents with expanded unemployment benefits.
The federal government estimates some 112,000 statewide jobs were saved or created by the stimulus help. Locally, the stimulus-jumpstarted I-4 Connector project, now underway, is worth thousands of projected jobs – from construction to Port of Tampa-related business.
Florida figures indicate more than $6 billion has already been spent – with another $17 billion still in the stimulus pipeline. Crist did the right practical thing by embracing the stimulus help; the wrong strategic thing by hugging the stimulator in advance of a Tea Party-skewed primary fight for his political life.
As for the Sansom-Rubio snuggle up, it would be political mud-slinging as usual if not for the uproar over the Obama-Crist hug. Now it’s all unfair game.
While the context is clichéd photo op, the connotation that comes with a Sansom hug is hardly helpful. It’s unsavory. The disgraced, indicted Sansom recently quit the House – to pre-empt an ethics trial.
And Rubio, while Speaker, did work closely with Sansom – even making him his budget chief in the 2007-08 legislative sessions.
And it’s a not so subtle, if cheap-shot, reminder that Sansom isn’t the only legislator to score a higher-ed job at a university that he had helped steer money to. It’s neither illegal nor uncommon. Merely business as usual in Tallahassee. Typically that’s no big deal unless, of course, you’re trying to portray yourself as pristinely principled and primed for conservative canonization.
For Crist, the Sansom-Rubio hug is an opportunity – after long ignoring Rubio’s rapidly ascendant candidacy – to re-define his opponent as something much less than an attractively packaged, GOP luminary-in-the-making.
For supporters of Rubio, who is still outpolling Crist, the mantra remains “Tea Party on.” For supporters of Crist, who needs a game changer, it looks like “huggery helps.”