There is news of some measurable size out of Florida, where former governor and long-running situation comedy Charlie Crist has decided that after serving as the Sunshine State's top official, quitting the Republican Party, losing a Senate race to Marco Rubio, losing a copyright lawsuit to the Talking Heads, apologizing to the Talking Heads, joining a personal injury law firm, joining the Democratic Party, running for his old job as a Democrat, and losing that race too, he's going to give politics one more try.
PoliticoFlorida's Matt Dixon put this information on a website on Friday:
Former Florida governor Charlie Crist is set to announce his bid for Congress during a Tuesday press conference in St. Petersburg.
A release from Kevin Cate, an adviser to Crist's failed 2014 bid for governor, says Crist will make a "major announcement."
Oh, man. Wow. OK.
Some men are born great, some become great, and some have greatness thrust upon them. Crist occupies a fourth category where one achieves ... not "greatness" per se, but at least something like "pretty good-ness," thanks to the vagaries of redistricting law conspiring to make Florida's 13th District very safe for a Democrat (pending a Florida Supreme Court decision). And then, because the district is all of a sudden akin to a slam-dunk for a Democratic candidate, especially one who has "name recognition" -- even if people mainly "recognize" that name as belonging to a painfully awkward electoral failure -- you run for Congress in that district, and BOOM, it's the American Dream.
And then what are the haters going to say? What's David Byrne of the Talking Heads gonna say? What's Marco Rubio gonna -- actually, I guess there's a fairly OK chance Rubio will be president, so forget that.
At any rate, Dixon reports that the bottom line is that "Crist is now returning home to run for a congressional seat that party leaders will almost certainly try to hand him." Which raises the question: Do these "party leaders" just not know that many people in Florida?