Charlie Crist Happier after Listening to Joe Lieberman
Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who abandoned his bid for the GOP Senate nomination last week in favor of running as an independent, said another independent -- Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman -- helped him come to his decision.
"[Lieberman] told me that [going independent] is the most liberating thing," Crist told the National Review Online. "He was right. I'm much happier now, to be perfectly candid."
Lieberman left the Democratic party in 2006 after losing the Democratic Senate primary to challenger Ned Lamont, but he managed to defeat Lamont and a Republican opponent in the general election that year.
Lieberman continues to caucus with the Democratic party and has held onto his important chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security Committee under their leadership. Crist, by comparison, told NRO he will "caucus with anyone who helps Florida. There will be different issues on different days and I will stand with anybody who will help my state." He still, however, calls himself a fiscal conservative.
Like other Republicans from Florida, he is taking a harsher stance than most other Republicans against Arizona's new, controversial immigration law.
"What Arizona did is wrong," Crist said. "I'm the grandson of a Greek immigrant. The notion that you pull over 'suspect' people and demand their papers is not American. That's strange. That's not what America is supposed to be about."
And while most Republicans in Washington have yet to speak out about offshore drilling in the wake of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Crist said plainly, "We can't drill," the NRO reports.
