Moe got up the new television ad. We got it first.

We also got the first interview of Marco Rubio on the new ad. I just got off the phone with him.

The ad is the perfect example of how to do a contrast ad. It is not overtly negative, but it definitely shows real contrasts. Allegedly, Charlie Crist is going to go up hard this coming week with advertising. Rubio beating him to the punch with a positive contrast will probably have to send Crist scrambling.

When I asked Rubio about why he did this as his first ad he said, “This frames what the election is about. Charlie Crist seems to be obsessed with my back, but I’m worried about the trillions of dollars of debt we’re putting on our children’s backs. That’s what worries me.”

“He’s not going to stand up to Barack Obama. I will. Everything in my record shows that I will. Nothing in his record suggests he will.”

I deviated from talking about the ad to ask him about one concern being raised these days. Marco Rubio is becoming a conservative rockstar and everyone wants a piece of him. How exactly is he staying grounded. He said, “Real life keeps me grounded. Yesterday I had to go to the grocery shopping and took out the trash. Today I had to drop my kids off at school. Real life keeps me grounded.”

Lastly, I asked him about the credit card controversy. He said Crist is focused on Marco’s haircuts and Marco is focused on winning and going to Washington to help the country. Marco pointed out that he paid those credit card bills, the state party did not. He said, “It is kind of hypocritical for Charlie to attack me on my credit card purchases when Charlie’s chairman pillaged the party. I think we’re on the right track with new leadership there.”

And Florida is on the right track with Marco Rubio. Let’s send him some coin so he can keep this ad up.

‘Children.’ And we get it first…

Marco Rubio for Senate.

Last night on Fox, Charlie Crist said Marco Rubio’s ~$100.00 bill at a Florida salon could have been for back waxing.

I don’t know if he was trying to make a racial statement, which would be keeping with what his campaign has done all along in trying to make Marco Rubio as hispanic as possible, or if he was gay baiting. I do know straight men know very little, if anything, about back waxing, which makes me wonder why that would come off the top of Charlie Crist’s head.

In any event, it was a ridiculous thing to say. His campaign is free falling in the polling. The only thing he has with which to attack Marco Rubio is a credit card statement Crist’s minions improperly took from the Florida GOP’s headquarters.

So let’s help Charlie out.

Here is some back wax at Amazon.com. Charlie Crist’s address is:

Office of Governor Charlie Crist
State of Florida
The Capitol
400 S. Monroe St.
Tallahassee, FL 32399-0001
(850) 488-7146

Let’s send Charlie some back wax. And if he tries to use the stuff, he’ll at least experience the same pain the voters have been experiencing for the last four years. Full disclosure: this goes to RedState’s Amazon.com store, so we’ll get something for every one you send. But it doesn’t affect your price.

Again.  This time, he’s trying to revise and extend his plans on space policy:

President Barack Obama will outline his administration’s vision for space agency NASA and an eventual trip to Mars during a conference in Florida in April, the White House said on Sunday.

Obama has had to defend his commitment to the space agency in the politically important U.S. state after submitting a budget to Congress that would cancel a program to return U.S. astronauts to the moon.

Glenn Reynolds thinks that the White House wasn’t expecting a pushback; but really, why should they have been? All the President did was break his campaign promise and kill twenty-three thousand jobs in a Congressional District whose Congresswoman had the temerity to vote against the health care bill - which said bill is, of course, infinitely more important to the Democrats than manned space exploration.  There are so many other campaign promises that the President has broken; why should this one be treated any differently?

Moe Lane

PS: Tom Garcia is running in FL-24 as a Republican, and he’s pretty mad about the space thing himself.  He’d also love to hear from you.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

At a time the GOP is pushing the Democrats to scrap their health care plan and start over — a view shared by the majority of Americans — Charlie Crist says he’d keep the Democrats’ plan. Mind you, he can’t think of a part worth saving, but he says he’d keep it anyway and work to “improve” it.

Marco Rubio promptly sent out a press release on this saying:

“Once again, Charlie Crist has shown why Floridians can’t trust him to go to Washington and stand up to the misguided agenda of President Obama and Congressional Democrats. At a time when Americans are pushing back against the government takeover of health care and calling for a complete reset to this flawed bill, Charlie Crist says he would not scrap it. Even more problematic, he claims he would approach health care in the same way he handled the stimulus. Floridians know all too well the soaring debt and expansion of government that resulted from that misguided approach.

“Make no mistake, the current health care proposal is a deeply flawed plan that should be scrapped entirely in favor of a truly bipartisan approach that won’t sacrifice the things that have made our health system the best in the world.”

Good on Marco.

So the blogosphere is simmering with the rumor that Charlie Crist is going to run as an independent if and when he loses to Marco Rubio in the GOP primary. Unlike Joe Lieberman, the best Dem example of this kind of sore loserness, Crist is not running because of any overriding principle, but rather because of an unbridled lust for power, and the desire to save face.

Well, I’m feeling generous today so I’m going to suggest a great win win solution for Mr. Crist.

Gov. Crist:

Drop out. Now. Drop out of the Senate race, realize you’ve lost it and just run for re-election as governor. The deadline hasn’t past, all indications are that you would win, so just do it. Don’t ruin the party that got you where you are by creating an unwinnable 3 way race which will only serve to elect Kendrick Meeks. You probably won’t win that one anyway. Just take for more years as governor, it’ll be easier to work on that tan in Tallahassee anyway. Marco beat you, now save some face and don’t look like a sore loser by throwing a wrench in the system. You are not going to be the junior senator from Florida no matter what, Just cut your losses now and file the papers for governor.

Sincerely,

The 2fek

The speculation is building that Charlie Crist is going to leave the GOP.

Two highly placed and independent sources, speaking strictly on background, tell me that Gov. Charlie Crist is preparing to leave the Republican Party and run as an independent in the race for the U.S. Senate.

With Crist trailing Marco Rubio by 18 points in the latest polls, the Crist campaign has been in panic mode, launching attack after attack on the conservative Rubio.

Yesterday, the attacks reached a crescendo with the Crist campaign, and/or his disgraced Republican Party of Florida thug bootlickers, leaking Rubio’s credit card expenses from his time as speaker of the Florida House.

According to published reports, the former RPOF chair, the bovine bully-boy buffoon Jim Greer, spent more in a month than Rubio did in his entire two years as state House speaker. If all the Crist campaign has on Rubio is $53.49 at Winn-Dixie in Miami for “food” and a couple of plane tickets for his wife, then it’s game, set and match, as far as the Republican primary for Senate is concerned.

Here’s what will happen if Charlie Crist leaves the GOP. The DC-GOP Establishment crowd will attack RedState, Jim DeMint, and Marco Rubio for shrinking the GOP. Instead of pointing out that moderate Republicans are sore loser who don’t play well with conservatives, conservatives will be attacked for chasing Crist out of the party.

Crist might like a three-way primary with Meeks and Rubio, but he still has no path to victory. In fact, he’ll be wrestling with Meeks over the same voter pool as independents drift right toward Rubio.

There is growing speculation that Charlie Crist is going to run as a independent candidate in Florida as he continues sinking in the polls. Just a few weeks ago, Crist and Vice President Biden were caught having a private meal together in Miami. In addition, Crist has returned to embracing the Obama stimulus fraud. Either he’s going Democrat or he’s going independent.

Before he goes, however, Crist is determined to do everything possible to run a scorched earth campaign against Marco Rubio. The latest is beyond the pale. Crist has taken the private credit card records of the Republican Party of Florida and leaked them to the press.

The only records leaked, of course, were those of Marco Rubio. As the Speaker of the House in Florida, Rubio had a credit card with the Florida GOP. He used it to help get Republicans elected, though some of the charges were personal. Rubio reimbursed the Florida GOP for the personal expenses.

That hasn’t stopped Charlie Crist from misappropriating the records to smear Rubio. But for perspective, Charlie Crist’s hand picked Director of the GOP in Florida charged in one month what Rubio charged in two years.

Make a donation to Marco Rubio right now and teach Charlie Crist that the more he tries to smear Rubio, the more Rubio’s war chest will grow to combat the smears.

Remember, the NRSC threw its weight behind Crist because he was ahead in the polls and the NRSC did not want to have to spend a bunch of money. If Crist runs a scorched earth policy against Rubio, throwing every possible smear and lie at Rubio, the NRSC is going to have different arithmetic in Florida.

More details here.

Via Hot Air, check out the racial sensitivity of MSNBC/CNBC talking head Donnie Deutsch:

‘Coconut,’ for those lucky enough to have missed it up to this point, is a derogatory racial epithet hurled against dark-skinned individuals deemed insufficiently ‘authentic.’ It suggests that the individual in question is ‘brown on the outside, white on the inside.’ When used by someone of the same ethnic identity as the slurred individual, it takes on the additional connotation of ‘race traitor;’ when used by someone of Caucasian ancestry, it typically represents an opportunity to express racial hatreds in a socially acceptable manner. The Other Side has, shall we say, a history of such things; and if we ever have that full and frank discussion of race that’s been promised the first question that I plan to ask is going to be about precisely why this is acceptable behavior among them.

About the only thing mitigating this exercise in public racism is that it appeared on the Joy Behar show, which means that almost nobody saw it anyway.

Moe Lane

PS: Don’t get mad.  Get even.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

This is the last of the CPAC candidate interviews: I have a few more of non-candidates. Allen West’s website is here.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.