How did Charlie Crist get accepted into the national "No Labels" movement? He lost a high-profile election, that's how.
Until then, the well-traveled Florida governor, who spent the last 18 years burrowing like a prairie dog into one public office after another, didn't mind what people called him -- as long as they pulled the lever for Charlie Crist on voting day.
If labels were beads, Charlie would look like a balcony on Bourbon Street the morning after Mardi Gras.
Some of the labels came to him honestly -- pinned on by admirers and detractors he ran into on five completely different campaign trails. But most of those tags he gave to himself, or tried to.
To wit:
Im as conservative as any governor. Im chain gang Charlie. Im pro-gun. Im pro-life, he told Jason Steele of the Brevard County Republican Executive Committee in 2009.
"I am moderate, just as the vast majority of Floridians are," he said during a 2010 TV debate.
"I don't think it's bad to call myself a Reagan Republican," a not-Republican-anymore Charlie told MSNBC's Chris Matthews during the "No Labels" conference earlier this month.
"I am a Jeb Bush Republican," he repeated on the campaign trail in 2006.
"I am the energy governor," he told a Daily Mail of London reporter in 2008.
"I am a thinker, a doer, a promise keeper," he told a group of Fort Pierce teachers on May 20, 2001.
Somebody at "No Labels" should issue Charlie a restraining order. The man has no credentials. He shouldn't be allowed within 5 miles of the conference center.
Of course you're a centrist, a moderate, a middle-of-the-roader when, like Charlie, you're naturally devoid of convictions or principles. But that is precisely why our state-senator-education-commissioner-attorney-general-governor-wannabe-U.S.-senator has spent his entire political career looking for a label that might fit -- or a label he can convince voters applies to him and to nobody else.
After wearing as many labels as he can find, here's Charlie finishing up a most bizarre political journey, pretending he's above them.
As far as I'm concerned, the only label that always fit him -- yesterday, today and, sadly, tomorrow -- is the one he keeps trying to disprove -- empty suit.
It's the reason his career is over. He stands for nothing.
Reach Nancy Smith at nancybutlersmith@yahoo.com, or (850) 727-0859.
