Undoing Jeb Bush in Florida

By Tim Padgett / TALLAHASSEE

As if the state had not caused enough trouble in 2000, Florida now wants to assert its primacy as a presidential kingmaker by jumping to the head of the line to hold its primary ahead of Super Tuesday. If Florida commits to Jan. 29, that would mean a line of candidates forming in Tallahassee to seek the blessing of the state's remarkably popular new Republican Governor, Charlie Crist. Another election, another Florida chief executive on the spot.

But Crist is no Jeb Bush. In fact, his record so far is undoing much of what the younger Bush son started. In his first 100 days, Crist announced efforts to provide hurricane-insurance relief, ditch controversial touch-screen voting machines for ones with a paper trail, create a "children's cabinet" to fix Florida's dysfunctional child-welfare services, increase teacher pay by $300 million and reduce the state's overcrowded classrooms, convene a summit on global warming, promote stem-cell research and restore voting rights to felons who complete their sentences (which he did last month). At one point during Crist's State of the State address in March, delighted African-American legislators broke into call-and-response chants with the Governor, as if they were in a black church.

That across-the-aisle lovefest couldn't be further removed from the proudly partisan crusade of Crist's predecessor, who fought hard against many of those initiatives. Crist's amiable tack is even more surprising since Bush, who was limited to two terms, left office in January with approval ratings about 60% and the G.O.P. still in control of Florida's legislature. But while Crist calls Bush "America's greatest Governor," he's also aware that another famous G.O.P. statehouse occupant, California's Arnold Schwarzenegger, is prospering by trying to cut deals with Democrats. "I've got two ears and one mouth, and I try to respect that ratio," Crist told TIME.

Like Schwarzenegger, Crist wasn't always known as an ideological moderate. As a state senator in the 1990s, he was called "Chain Gang Charlie" for co-sponsoring a law that revived prison labor in leg irons. But Crist says his hard line on criminals is simply part of what also drove him to renew ex-convicts' voter rights. Instead of ideology, "fundamental fairness was always spoken about in our home," says Crist, 50, sitting in shirtsleeves in his office, beneath a painting of his Greek immigrant grandfather when he was a shoe-shine boy. He speaks daily on the phone with his father Charles, who in the 1960s was the only white physician in Crist's hometown of St. Petersburg to volunteer to help sports teams at segregated, all-black high schools--and who advised his son during the Terri Schiavo spectacle in 2005, when Crist was Florida's elected attorney general. "I told Charlie, 'Look, I've seen the brain scans on that girl,'" says the elder Crist, also a Republican."'There's nothing there anymore.'" Crist backed off helping Bush in his bid to keep Schiavo on life support.

Still, Crist is learning that when you try to build bipartisan bridges, you can just as easily burn them. His $20 million stem-cell-research proposal, which he hoped would appease Democrats (by finally getting the effort moving in Florida) and conservative Republicans (by limiting embryonic-stem-cell research to the existing lines approved by President George W. Bush in 2001), has instead irked both. On other matters, such as Crist's support of gay civil unions, conservatives like his 2006 primary opponent, former state chief financial officer Tom Gallagher, have blasted him for "taking every opportunity to disagree with the mainstream of the party."

But that, Crist suggests, is precisely the point--pulling the G.O.P. mainstream back to "the more inclusive roots of the party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. It's important that our party grow," he says, noting that he won more of Florida's black vote (almost 20%) than any other Republican gubernatorial candidate in recent history. So far the Crist approach is working: his approval rating is at 73%. That's one more reason the presidential candidates from both parties will soon be showing up at Crist's door, where they will find a new power broker both parties can talk to.

With reporting by WITH REPORTING BY Michael Peltier / TALLAHASSEE