Running on ‘the Hug’: Inside Charlie Crist’s Risky Strategy to Dethrone Ron DeSantis A group of Hispanic notables gathered last week at a meat market here and practically pleaded for ideas about how to beat Ron DeSantis.
The imperious Florida governor is not only a heavy favorite to get reelected but a dominant Republican figure widely expected to make a run for the White House — and he needs to be stopped, the people on hand implored Charlie Crist, seated at a table scattered with a tray of cut-up Cuban sandwiches and cups of café con leche. DeSantis needs to be confronted, they beseeched, as the autocratic bully they see him to be, pointing in particular to the recent episode in which DeSantis with an audible edge and an indignant sigh told high school students to remove their “ridiculous” “Covid theater” masks. “I don’t care if you’re the governor, or the president, or the pope,” Bob Henriquez, the Hillsborough County property appraiser, told Crist. To speak to kids that way? “How dare you?” he said. Patrick Manteiga, the publisher of the area newspaper La Gaceta, was blunt. “Kick ass,” he said. “You gotta get tough. You gotta get nasty.”
It was as if they all but wanted Crist to throw a punch. He responded with a piece of poetry.
“If people show you who they are, believe ’em,” he said, pausing for a beat before revealing for anybody who somehow wasn’t already aware of the source of the saying. “Maya Angelou.”
This dulcet response to this palpable angst was classic Crist. In all of politics there’s nobody quite like him. With his fit build, his trim suits, his white hair and his tan face, Crist, 65, has been one of the most durable and recognizable characters in Florida politics for parts of the last four decades. Temperamentally soothing and solicitous, he is acknowledged by allies and enemies alike as one of the best retail politicians alive, meshing a ready familiarity with the awesome ease with which he shakes hands and works rooms. He is also in this partisan age something that shouldn’t be possible — a former Republican governor who now is a Democrat in his third term in Congress. Nothing is certain, but based on polling, fundraising and scores of interviews with Florida experts, operatives and elected officials, Crist at least at this point looks like the front runner among the Democrats vying in the primary in August for the right come November to try to topple the colossus of DeSantis, who routinely polls as the most popular GOP presidential candidate not named Donald Trump.
Such a general election matchup would make for an unusually stark contrast, pitting Crist, whose calling card has been nothing if not a velvety public persona, against the relentlessly confrontational DeSantis, nearly universally recognized as charmless but effective. Beyond the high stakes in this cycle, and perhaps the next one, too, this ultra-important race could have yet broader implications. Because the way Crist is running is a bet. That people are exhausted of the nonstop politics of conflict. That what they want really is to dial down the volume and the vitriol. And that almost all Democrats will vote for Crist and almost all Republicans will vote for DeSantis but that enough of the people somewhere in whatever’s left of the middle will vote because of this for Crist. Whereas Nikki Fried, the Florida commissioner of agriculture, the sole statewide elected Democrat and his closest primary foe, has been a much more provocative DeSantis antagonist — calling him “an bleep,” comparing him to Hitler — Crist generally has opted for a more traditional tack, issuing (mostly) lower-key laments and tsk-tsks of DeSantis while trying to focus on kitchen-table fodder more than culture-war kindling................
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/04/01/charlie-crist-florida-governor-campaign-profile-00022016
