Florida 2010: Charlie Crist, Marco Rubio, Alex Sink and the Law of Unintended Consequences

Rubio quickly clarified his remarks – he specified that he meant illegal immigrants (still a dubious position, given the federal dollars that come with population counts) – and Crist resisted the temptation to grandstand at the president's expense. But these two tales from the 2010 campaign trail underscore the disaffection so many Floridians feel for their government and their politics. This is the Winter of Our Disconnect in America, and nowhere are those feelings more pronounced than in the Sunshine State.

To a visitor, it all feels so incongruous. Here among the palm trees, the beaches, Disney World, and the pageantry of a feel-good Super Bowl, the mood of the citizenry is decidedly more sour than sunny. Floridians have their reasons: Alan Greenspan peers into his economists' charts and pronounces the Great Recession at an end, but to those who are hurting – here and elsewhere – this is precisely the kind of bloodless official-speak that makes Washington the recipient of so much ire. Here are the facts of life in Florida:

The unemployment rate here is 11.8 percent, just a tick under the 11.9 percent recorded in 1975 – the highest since the state began keeping records 40 years ago. And it doesn't appear to have peaked. A legislative analysis has the rate going higher – to 12.3 percent by mid-summer, and staying above 10 percent until late 2012.

Even that depressing snapshot does not count the number of Floridians who are among the 2 million Americans who have simply stopped looking for work. Nor does it count the under-employed – they want full-time work and cannot find it. At more than 18 percent, Florida has one of the five highest underemployment rates in the nation.

Florida's state budget woes continue, too. The legislative analysis predicts a $3.2 billion shortfall this year. That hardly compares to the stunning $1.3 trillion deficit predicted for the federal budget, but Florida is bound to balance its books – and Washington's woes mean help is unlikely.

It was for these reasons that Gov. Crist happily accepted last year's stimulus money from the federal government at a time other politically ambitious Republican governors from Louisiana to Alaska were playing coy. Anybody would have done it – anybody did – but, believe it or not, his problem is that he accepted it too enthusiastically. These are the times we live in. "Everybody knew we'd have to take it," said Chip LaMarca, chairman of the Broward County GOP – and a Crist backer. "Bobby Jindal, Sarah Palin, Mark Sanford all made noises about not accepting it, but they did. Haley Barbour took. Everyone did."

But no Republican governor took the money quite the way Charlie Crist did. Lulled into complacency by his 67 percent job approval rating and perhaps not quite comprehending the current atmosphere, Crist not only embraced the money, but he embraced, literally, the man dispensing it.

Club for Growth, a Washington-based fiscally conservative group that pushes low taxes and lower government spending, ran a negative ad featuring Crist's hug of Obama. And Marco Rubio brings it up, either directly or obliquely, in every interview. In talking with Politics Daily, Rubio is asked what he would say to a generic Republican voter on a rope line who is weighing Rubio's candidacy vs. that of a GOP governor.

"It depends on whether that voter supports the president's agenda," Rubio replied quickly. "Here's the bottom line: Had I been in the U.S. Senate last year I would have spoken against the stimulus package and offered a clear alternative. Had Charlie Crist been in the U.S. Senate, he'd have voted for it – and been one of only three Republican senators to do it."

Rubio has emerged as this year's darling of Florida's Tea Party set, but there is some opportunism at work on both sides. Temperamentally and by life's experience, he is more Pawlenty than Palin. Like Minnesota's Tim Pawlenty, Marco Rubio comes from working-class roots. His parents are Cuban émigrés who moved from Miami to Las Vegas in 1979, when Marco was 8 years old. His father was a bartender at the old Sam's Town Hotel in Vegas and his mother was a housekeeper at the Imperial. The Rubio family moved back to Florida as Marco began high school, settling in West Miami, where Marco was a defensive back on a formidable South Miami High School football team.

After college and law school at the University of Miami, Rubio served in the state legislature for eight years, rising to become speaker of the House, and earning a reputation for effectiveness more than for ideological purity, and often working closely with Crist. They might have made a nice GOP ticket in November, the 39-year-old Latino Senate candidate and the popular and pragmatic incumbent governor. But then the tinkering of the national political parties intruded on the natural order of things. This had the effect of violating what "Star Trek" fans know as "the prime directive" – interfering with the domestic affairs of the locals.

But meddling in the politics of Planet Florida has been something neither party has been able to resist since the infamous presidential recount of 2000. And one question Florida voters will answer in the Aug. 24 primaries and the Nov. 2 general election is which national political party inadvertently did the most harm to its own chances of victory.

It started with the Democrats. Calculating that Crist's maddening popularity made the governorship beyond their grasp, the Democratic Party establishment decided to concentrate its efforts on picking off a Senate seat. The first step was anointing a candidate – under the theory that a hand-picked Democrat could save campaign money and energy for the general election and enter the fall contest not having been bloodied in a primary. This makes sense, as far as it goes, and leading Democrats in and out of Florida, most prominently including former President Bill Clinton, declared their early support for Rep. Kendrick Meek.

Meek, who inherited his House seat from his mother, Carrie Meek, is an attractive and skilled African-American congressman from Miami who is known for his hard work and fundraising ability. In this campaign, Bill Clinton has already hosted half-a-dozen fundraisers for him. The national Democrats backing Meek are consciously emulating the model used in 2008 by another African-American candidate, Barack Obama, who raised unheard-of sums of money and who carried the Sunshine State by 240,000 votes while winning the presidency. Last spring, Meek retained the services of Steve Hildebrand, a deputy campaign manager of the Obama campaign, and a field operative with a track record of positioning his candidates to appeal to centrists and independents.

To win, Meek will need bundles of such voters; but attracting them will be no easy feat. Since Obama's 2008 victory, moderates have deserted the Democrats in Virginia, New Jersey, and even Massachusetts. And Meek is someone who has never run outside his overwhelmingly minority district, who is a classic liberal in a right-center "purple" state, and whose only known deviation from his party's left flank is that he refuses, out of deference to South Florida politics, to smoke Cuban cigars.

"Congressman Meek has done a good job in Congress, and he's done a good job locking up the support of key Democrats in this state and elsewhere," says veteran Tallahassee Democratic operative Todd Wilder. "But if he's the nominee, I think the politics of this state are going to catch up with his campaign." Wilder is advising a long-shot challenger to Meek, 74-year-old Maurice A. Ferre, a former mayor of Miami. "Look, we've got to catch lightning in a bottle, no doubt, to get the nomination, but in a general election I think the congressman is tapped out at 35 percent of the vote."

Ferre, not surprisingly, concurs with this analysis. He responds to a request for an interview – he apparently doesn't get too many – immediately and phones from a car in San Juan, where he's gone to raise money. (He's asked how the fundraising is going. "Bad!" he replies. "That's my major problem, raising money. It's why I'm in Puerto Rico. I haven't done well in Florida, so we'll see how it goes here.")

This kind of candor endears Ferre to journalists; whether it will work with voters is another question. He certainly has a case to make that, despite his advanced age, he's a better fit statewide in Florida than his fellow Miamian Kendrick Meek. "I've no scientific proof, but I'm pretty certain that Meek cannot get elected in a primary, let alone a general election."

Speaking off the cuff, Ferre breaks Florida down into five regions, gives the percentage of the Democratic vote in each one during the last few elections and explains how and why he thinks the Democrats' 236,000 margin from 2008 has evaporated – and why Florida's electorate today isn't a whole lot different ideologically, anyway, from the way it was when he ran the state for centrist Democrat Scoop Jackson back in 1976. "I think our party's establishment made a major mistake in trying to anoint Kendrick Meek," he said. "The Democratic Party doesn't recognize the threat – just the way they didn't in Massachusetts."

The same criticism can be made of the Republican Party establishment.

Determined not to lose yet another Senate seat, national GOP leaders countered with a bold gambit of their own: They'd talk Charlie Crist into giving up the governor's mansion for a perch in Washington, where they envisioned him as U.S. Senator – and one of his party's saviors. As it happens, Crist didn't require a whole lot of arm-twisting, but Sen. John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, tipped the establishment's hand by publicly endorsing Crist just a week after he said he'd remain neutral until after the August primary.

There was a problem with this play, and it had a name: Marco Rubio.

By the time Crist made Cornyn's day, Rubio had already left the legislature, announced his candidacy, and set up a campaign operation. Which unleashed all manner of counter-reactions, starting with a grassroots backlash against Crist and a torrent of new support for the attractive and well-qualified young conservative already in the race. The backlash rippled out nationally. If conservatives outside of Florida hadn't heard the name Marco Rubio before, they've heard it now. And those who might never have cared one way or another about The Hug learned all about it, too.

One upshot is that ten days from now, Rubio is slated to be the keynote speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, a prestigious slot that has gone to Republican icons such as Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney the last couple of years. In the meantime, Rubio has caught a nice wave. In late January, he pulled slightly ahead of Crist in a public opinion poll. To counter the flurry of pro-Rubio news coverage, Crist released his fundraising numbers early, which showed he'd collected nearly $2 million that quarter – only to watch as Rubio's camp released it's own numbers the following day: $1.7 million.

"Watch what happens next," says Javier Manjarres, a Florida activist who operates the Conservative Republican Alliance political action committee. "Crist is not only going to agree to a debate – he has to if he's behind – but he'll go after Marco hard with negative attacks."

Rubio supporters have already gone after Crist. Manjarres says in an interview that the governor has appointed "activist liberal judges," while "embracing a socialist agenda," and he refers to the brief embrace of the president as a "man-hug of Obama."

Perhaps none of this intramural conflict will, in the end, hurt the Republicans' chances – polls show either Crist or Rubio defeating Kendrick Meek – but one thing seems certain: The GOP machinations have put the governor's mansion in play. The most likely Republican nominee appears to be former congressman and current Attorney General Bill McCollum. His Democratic opponent in November is probably going to be Alex Sink.

Remember that name, along with Marco Rubio's: Neither Alex Sink nor Bill McCollum would probably have run against Crist. Now one of them is most likely going to be governor – and a well-connected Washington political observer I know told me on my way to Florida: "Check out Alex Sink. If she wins, the Democrats are going to begin talking about her for president."