James Call
My publisher thinks Charlie Crist’s announcement that he will not be a candidate in 2016 signals the end of the Crist era.
I hope he’s wrong. My boss is a political insider. I’m an unemployed steelworker who hangs around the Capitol like others do a tavern, pool hall or barbershop. My sense is that the Crist brand represents something more important than Charlie’s career.
The Florida Democratic Party is a mess, a complete mess. It and not Charlie Crist is why Marco Rubio is a U.S. Senator and Gov. Rick Scott has a bright future.
It doesn’t know how to talk to people.
Recently the House Democratic Caucus handed out a flier with two graphs: One showed a reduction in Corrections employees, another showed an increase in inmate deaths.
When asked whether there’s a correlation state Rep. Daryl Rouson talked about “affecting policy” through the budget. Democratic Leader Mark Pafford said things have “deteriorated” and “people are dying.” After the event, the communications director said no. But he then added, Rep. Rouson had answered the question.
Guys, people already don’t know what the Democrats stand for as it is: You don’t need a consultant to tell you stunts like that don’t help.
Compared with Democrats in the Legislature, Charlie Crist is a straight talker.
In 1997 I referred to Crist as a show poodle and an empty suit when I saw what I considered pandering to at a bird-watching conference. A decade later he was governor and I listened to his words and waited for his actions to contradict what he was saying.
I waited. And became intrigued. Then I set out to understand who were these “people” Crist was always talking about.
If his critics are correct and it’s all an act, then it’s a pretty good one and Crist has fooled a lot of people, including retired Florida State University Communications professor Gerry Gilmer.
I gathered a series of recordings of Crist talking with reporters in 2009 and asked Gilmer to explain what the governor was up to with his “people” talk.
Gilmer, now retired in Texas, said Crist “adds a human voice” to the political process, that Crist’s “voice” was “one with the public.”
The radio story is here and you can hear the language Crist uses and Gilmer’s analysis. Or you can just check the record and see that time and time again, as governor, Crist sided with people, on tenure for teachers, restoration of civil rights, insurance rates, access to voting and other issues.
The “human voice” and “one with the public” comment is intriguing because they echo to Crist’s American roots.
When Crist’s grandfather staked his family’s claim to the American dream in an Appalachia coalfield, James Connolly was a labor organizer among the immigrants working in the Pennsylvania mines, steel mills and rail yards.
I like to joke that Crist and I were born in the same congressional district: He was in the mountains while I was in the foothills, but we were among the same group of people.
Connolly was also a newspaper editor who when he returned to Ireland became the defacto commander-in-chief of the 1916 Easter Rising. Wounded in a Dublin ambush, the British executed him as a leader of the Irish Republic revolutionary army.
When word of his death reached Pennsylvania the New Castle News, the rival to Connolly’s Free Press, remembered him as a “very brilliant, well-educated man of an aggressive character … it is only natural he should be chosen as one of the leaders … in the interest of the common people and (the) endeavor to secure for them better conditions.”
Connolly was a lecturer and organizer who gave a voice to the common people or as we say today: “the people.”
The Democrats don’t have a brilliant aggressive character. They have a gentleman from St. Petersburg and an aggressive lady from Tallahassee as their only two planks.
The House Republicans produced a “Tant Rant” video for the annual press skits this month, further evidence of the sorry state of the Democratic Party.
The joke went on too long — long enough for a reasonable person to conclude that Allison Tant, the Florida Democratic Party chairwoman speaks with a blue-collar honesty.
She is direct. There is no doubt what her position is. She is willing to call a spade a spade. That she had to tell people who are on a generation-long losing streak to stop whining, put on their big girl pants and get to work said more about the people she has to work with then it does about Tant.
I don’t know where she’s going with her deep dive into 2014 data; check out her comments in this Q&A
But everyone knows about Charlie and “the people.”
It’s an American ideal to balance the interest of capital with the interest of people and, given the times, extremely relevant. We have one party arguing on behalf of capital — making Florida the most business-friendly state in the nation — and we have nothing from the other party.
The biggest problem that Charlie Crist had in 2010 and 2014 was the Democratic establishment: the gaggle of activists and bureaucrats, people who make money raising money, and people who make money telling candidates how to spend money.
They may be interested in issues, but their interest in people is suspect. They might see a working person when they order a hamburger, and notice they exist when they see their office has been vacuumed or when the garbage man makes too much noise. Otherwise, though, those people are invisible.
The thing about invisible people is they have no reason to vote.
Here’s one 30-year Florida resident and Rust Belt refugee’s opinion on how the Democrats blew it in 2014:
I was on the Crist campaign bus in August for a swing through Central Florida. It was late at night, and the candidate and I were talking about how the next governor would get to appoint members to the Constitution Revision Commission, which meets once every 10 years.
Things began to become interesting and, not sure of protocol, I asked whether we could go on the record. The ever-gracious Crist explained the conversation was never off the record.
“I can quote you on what you just said then?” I asked.
“Why not? People are important. Working people deserved to be treated fairly,” Crist said.
We were talking about the Right to Work provision in the Florida Constitution and I thought that the governor’s race was about to get real interesting real quickly.
Crist was talking like Harry S. Truman: Unfortunately, Democrats didn’t respond.
In a state where wage theft is prevalent, workers can be fired because of a lack of sick leave, and someone who gives 20 or 30 years to a company can be dismissed on a whim, do you recall any discussion of workers’ rights to effectively organize for the common good?
Who’s fault is that? The candidate put it on the table, and the response from the AFL-CIO, AFSCME and other members of the Democratic coalition was deafening, wasn’t it?
Charlie Crist, who rode into battle with a bunch of limousine liberals in a clown car, still managed to raise $40 million and came within 65,000 votes of winning.
Charlie Crist is not a James Connolly. He’s too much of a gentleman to be an aggressive agitator. His roots, though, are in the soil Connelly worked on behalf of his grandfather and father. While he contemplates his next move, here’s hoping he keeps two things in mind: One, for the foreseeable future he’s the only hope working people have and two, Allison Tant is aggressive enough for the job at hand.
