Charlie Crist: make your campaign about the sugar billionaires ... by gimleteye

OK, Charlie. You have money in the bank but an awful battle against GOP power players like Jeb Bush: a friend the way Brutus was a friend to Caesar. Your poll numbers stink. It is time to re-tool against your primary opponent, Marco Rubio. You can't win by running against his free spending ways with company credit cards.

Here is a recommendation. You’ll come to this realization sooner or later. Most Florida GOP voters have no idea that the energy fueling the antagonism in the GOP primary battle is not about “conservative values” or taking stimulus money from President Obama. The ones who want to politically bury you are apoplectic that you broke ranks with the sugar billionaires who have run Florida for decades. I could, but won’t, engage in a political taxonomy of sugar. No time for that.

There are a million ways to say it, and you need to find enough of those millions of Floridian GOP voters to understand. You’ve already done the unspeakable in GOP orthodoxy: reached out to save the Everglades by taking sugar lands into public ownership. Now do the rest: take on the billionaire speculators who put the interests of polluting and corporate farming welfare ahead of everything else of value to Florida. (click, 'read more')

Look we all know that the various constituencies that make up “Sugar” in Florida are allied 99 percent of the time in whatever legislation or political candidate surfaces to do their bid-ness. They are for property rights, ie. land speculation, the development of utilities in the historic Everglades, they are against environmentalists and laws to regulate pollution and generally for whatever delays action to protect the Everglades.

The right message frame is not the Everglades but the big money Fanjul billionaires who are intent to destroy your political career. What you did, with your plan to buy out US Sugar (from my POV, why not buy them all)—ran straight against what the Fanjuls believe to be the Number One Principle of Florida Politics: do exactly what they want, when they want it.

Although what you did in proposing the deal and pushing to see it through was historic, your GOP base is largely unaware, unfamiliar, and in the dark about how the real political weight gets thrown around in Florida through campaign contributions from Fanjul related parties: through 527’s, PAC’s, and a host of ways that most voters will never ever see.

You can run against the sugar billionaires all the way to the US Senate.