Former
President Clinton will head to Florida on Friday to campaign for
Florida's Charlie Crist, who is looking to become the Democratic
governor of the state he ran from 2007-2011 as a Republican.
Clinton campaigning for a
Democratic candidate is nothing new, as he is stumping all over the
country this year, particularly in places where President Obama is
unpopular. And Democrats are always desperate to win in Florida, the
fourth-largest state in the country and a key presidential battleground.
But this continues the
complete political reinvention of Crist. Back in 1998, in an
unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate, Crist, then a Republican, said
Clinton had "shattered the confidence and trust" of Americans and should
resign from office.
Sixteen years later, the two will stand together at Miami's Marriott Marquis.
Crist left office in
2011 after a single term and an unsuccessful U.S. Senate run, in which
he left the GOP and became an independent. Democrats recruited Crist to
run for governor under their banner last year, and he officially won the
party's nomination a few weeks ago.
Crist's successor,
Republican Rick Scott, narrowly leads in most polls of the race. And
Clinton's visit is providing him another opportunity to call Crist an
opportunist. "I have a major announcement. Charlie Crist is a slick
politician, a smooth talker, and I'm not," Scott told a crowd of
Republicans yesterday at an event at diner in Coral Springs, just
outside of Miami. "He will tell you anything you want to hear. .... But
nothing will happen. He will get nothing done."
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