PolitFact hands Marco Rubio ad material and helps shove Charlie Crist over the political cliff with this:
Republicans banking on hopes that Gov. Charlie Crist would return donations they made when he was the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate were in for a rude awakening on May 12, 2010, when Crist made it clear he is keeping their money. … The decision to hold on to nearly $10 million in campaign donations prompted cries that Crist was flip-flopping. …
After laboriously tracing all of Crist’s statements, PolitFact concludes: “So in less than three weeks, Crist went from telling reporters he had yet to make a decision on running for independent, to running as an independent and ‘probably’ giving the money back, to ‘officially’ declaring he would keep the money.” This earns Crist the verdict of “Full Flop.”
But it’s more than that. It is confirmation of Crist’s abject lack of principles and his disdain for the voters. He is, in a very real sense, the Arlen Specter of the Florida race. He does an about-face and scoffs at those who expected him to keep his word. In a year during which voters are looking for conviction and for candidates who don’t seem like run-of-the-mill slippery politicians, Crist is precisely the wrong sort of candidate, entirely unsuited to the political moment.
