Charlie Crist is now running in the Florida Senate election as an independent candidate against a weak Democratic candidate, and against Republican Marco Rubio, who beat Crist in the earlier GOP primary, and who now enjoys a solid lead in most polls.
However, there might be one small, slim opportunity for Crist to pull off an upset. As Crist is the current Florida Governor, he is the target of a drive to posthumously pardon Jim Morrison, the deceased lead singer of the sixties rock group The Doors. Sometime in 1969 Morrison was charged, tried, and convicted of an obscenity charge-specifically, indecent exposure. Morrison was also accused of trying to foment a riot at the same concert where the obscenity charge originated, at a Dade County auditorium.
Although Crist has expressed some sympathy for the effort on the part of some obscure memorabilia vendors and sixties-era music buffs, who insist Morrison did not get a fair trial, he has thus far avoided involving himself in the effort, lately avoiding the subject.
If his poll numbers don't improve significantly, I expect this to change. In fact, I expect him to issue a posthumous pardon for the late rock singer anywhere from one to two weeks prior to the election, while simultaneously making a last ditch effort to appeal to younger Florida voters, including college/university students. In doing so, he will lurch significantly to the left, as he would be unlikely to draw much support from politically active college students-to say nothing of drug-addled nineteen sixties era stoners-by keeping to the center, even the center left. Look for him to become a staunch advocate of Cap And Trade, of improving the current ObamaCare fiasco by inclusion of a public option, ostensibly to bring down costs, and by advocating yet another version of the McCain-Kennedy Immigration Reform Bill.
In doing so, he will insist that, to paraphrase Reagan, he has not left the Republican Party, the Republican Party has left him, has abandoned its core moderate principles and has been hi-jacked by right-wing extremists (for example, Rubio, whom the vast majority of mainstream GOP voters chose over Crist).
Crist is likely to do all this in the face of certain and overwhelming defeat, as an act of desperation, and because he has no shame. Sadly, under the right combination of circumstances, it could work.
