With six weeks to go until the election, the Florida gubernatorial contest is turning toward fighting over advertisements and exchanging accusations over who swindled the Sunshine State.
Last week, allies of former Gov. Charlie Crist, the Democratic candidate challenging Gov. Rick Scott in November, called out an ad from the governor which featured a man talking about how he was swindled by Scott Rothstein, linking that convicted con man to Crist. Despite being appointed to his current post by Scott, Pasco County Tax Collector Mike Fasano, who served the better part of two decades in the Legislature as a Republican, attacked the ad at a media event in Tallahassee on Thursday, calling it dishonest and saying enough of Rick Scott.
The Republicans turned to retiring Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford, R-Wesley Chapel, to hit back at Fasano.
Charlie Crist swindled Republican voters and the state of Florida alike, said Weatherford on Thursday. He promised to fight for Florida but did nothing to help the 832,000 Floridians who lost their job while he was governor. He campaigned as a pro-life, Ronald Reagan Republican we can trust and then abandoned the Republican Party when it was clear he was going to lose the primary against Marco Rubio. and has become one of the most liberal Democrats in the country. And when asked what he would do with the money Republicans contributed to his 2010 campaign, he (Crist) said with a wink, Im going to keep it. By any definition of the word, Charlie Crist swindled Florida and the Republicans who supported him throughout his career. Its sad to see Mike Fasano has fallen so far as to endorse a serial swindler with no principles except personal ambition.
The battle over the ad spilled across the weekend and into this week. On Friday, liberal PAC American Bridge released a Web video hitting Scott for running the ad, calling it incredibly misleading.
The truth is that the man was a wealthy investor who recovered his $8 million from Rothstein, and the lawsuit had nothing to do with Charlie Crist, American Bridge insisted. This blatant dishonesty from Rick Scott, who still stands by the slimy ad, has been rebuked by everyone from the media to lifelong Republican and former state Sen. Mike Fasano.
The Republican Party of Florida (RPOF) fired back on Monday with a Web video of its own taking aim at Crist. The new ad accuses Crist of having swindled Florida.
The ad features Crists inconsistencies and position shifts as he moved from being a conservative Republican for most of his political career to running for the U.S. Senate in 2010 with no party affiliation and now running as a Democrat.
Reach Kevin Derby at kderby@sunshinestatenews.com or follow him on Twitter: @KevinDerbySSN
