Is Charlie Crist on John McCain’s VP short list? In the past few weeks, the popular Florida governor has announced his change of heart on offshore oil drilling, thereby providing McCain cover in the Sunshine State to do the same; cut a deal widely hailed by environmentalists to buy up land from Big Sugar to help revive the Everglades; and announced that he’s getting married. Roger Stone thinks those are three more reasons why Crist should be McCain’s running mate. Jim Ash of the Tallahassee Democrat disagrees. Ash reasons that if McCain picks Crist to give him a boost in Florida it will mean he’s written off Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan (and therefore given up on winning the election). That’s sound analysis, but it doesn’t take into account McCain’s deep desire to pick as his running mate someone he actually likes and admires. Crist fits that description. Mitt Romney — currently being described as McCain’s likely pick — most definitely does not.
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The Phony War: Obama and Romney Are Debating Character, Not Policy
More than five months from Election Day, the back-and-forth about Mitt Romney’s record at Bain already feels played out. Unfortunately, there’s good reason to expect the campaign continues in this vein indefinitely. Neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney are terribly interested in dwelling on policy platforms. Romney’s plan to slash spending and keep taxes low on the wealthy isn’t especially popular, at least not at any level of detail beyond a blithe promise to shrink the deficit. Meanwhile, Obama’s signature first-term achievements, like health care, the stimulus and Wall Street reform, are all unpopular or tricky to sell. (The Dodd-Frank bill is the most popular of these, but hyping it means offending wealthy donors.) So what we’re getting instead is a superficial duel about character–and, worse, one that’s based on the largely false premise that the better man can better “manage” the economy back to health.
