* A number of the usual Republican suspects were at last week’s NRA convention in Indianapolis for some ritualistic pandering–from Marco Rubio to Rick Santorum and Bobby Jindal. Ted Cruz and Scott Walker couldn’t make it but sent serious courtship videos. Interesting who neither attended nor sent a video: Jeb Bush and Chris Christie.
* Those early Rick Scott ads are bashing Charlie Crist for the bad economic times that pretty much overlapped with his gubernatorial tenure. Of course, they’re cheap shots. Crist had nothing to do with Florida being broad-sided by the great national recession. Moreover, Scott has taken credit for Florida’s improved economy, which is a function of national recovery. That’s politics.
But what isn’t a classic attack ad, the kind that trashes truth and context, is Scott’s assertion that Crist “ran away” from the Sunshine State when it needed him most–in order to run for the Senate. He did, indeed, do just that.
And that, maybe more than flip-flopping and “flop-flipping,” is what is most problematic for Crist in ginning up the get-out-the-Democratic-vote that he must have to defeat even an eminently vulnerable incumbent.
* Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is an increasingly high-profile fast-tracker with a book out. The memoir, A Fighting Chance, gets her on TV a lot and on a tour of cherry-picked places. This, of course, gets the attention of the national media, which keep asking her if she’s going to run for president, and is more than noted by the Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party.
It all makes for gratuitous speculation and eyebrow-arching, even though the senator hasn’t been to either Iowa or New Hampshire. While she keeps denying interest in a presidential run, those asking regard denials as pro forma protocol.
They’re hoping she might fuel some speculation flames by showing up, at least, in Nevada or South Carolina, the other early primary states. Absent that, they’re also on “makeover watch.” Any departure from the prim Eleanor Roosevelt look could mean serious handlers are on the case.
Or it could just mean she wanted to look better.