The Count Of...Moose Lady?

Mark Leibovich's piece in the NY Times Magazine on Charlie Crist and Marco Rubio is up, but the most interesting part of the piece is how it relates to Sarah Palin, especially this section (emphasis mine):

It is not uncommon for a party out of power to undergo an identity crisis and an internal bloodletting, and it is Crist’s bad luck that his race in 2010 fits the frame of a philosophical debate that has been fulminating in the Republican Party for several months. The race, and the national debate, pits the governing pragmatists against the ideological purists. The purists say that a Republican revival depends on hewing to conservative ideas, resisting compromise and generally taking a dim view of government. Tea Party rallies are filled with such purists, whose populist icons — Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News’s Glenn Beck — tend to be unburdened by the pressures of governing through a recession.

How quickly we forget Sarah Palin was Governor of West Canada.  But that ideological purity part does describe the tea party wing of the GOP, alright.  That's the part that never makes sense to me, running around saying "We hate government and we're going to do everything we can to effectively cripple it, so vote for me to be in government!"  It's just trading one set of masters for another.

Not long ago, Jim DeMint, a Republican senator from South Carolina, summed up the purity side this way: “I would rather have 30 Republicans in the Senate who really believe in principles of limited government, free markets, free people, than to have 60 that don’t have a set of beliefs.” And when I asked Rubio recently which current senator he most admires, he said DeMint.

DeMint may get his wish.

Crist represents the governing pragmatist who was once seen as a winner who could reclaim the political center for Republicans. He was a popular governor with crossover appeal among Democrats and independents. For a time, Arnold Schwarzenegger fit this mold in California. So did, to a degree, Mitt Romney, when he was the governor of Massachusetts, and Mike Huckabee in Arkansas, though each worked to present himself as ideologically pure in his presidential run.

Pragmatists are stupid.  The Teabaggers want to be led by screaming, gut-check types. Presidents don't think, they do!

In recent decades, both parties have looked to governors with moderate appeal to deliver them from rough patches (see Bill Clinton for the Democrats in 1992 or George W. Bush for the Republicans in 2000). But especially when the economy goes south, governors can be sunk by their can-do bona fides and their executive distaste for ideological zeal. It is almost impossible to scour the record of a governor presiding in a weak economy without finding some nod to pragmatism.

Unless you're Sarah Palin, in which case the Village happily forgets you were the Governor of the state with the most handouts per capita in the country.  Teabaggers also have short memories, too.

But seriously, Charlie Crist is doomed because he's a governor, and Sarah Palin is a winner because she gave up on being one and quit.  Palin is considered a serious Republican star.  Crist's career is all but over.  I don't think the problem is with Crist here, but with the GOP.