Charlie Crist Expects To Win Primary; He's No RINO

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Charlie Crist: I'm No RINO


Florida Gov. Charlie Crist said Thursday that despite being attacked from the right by former state House Speaker Marco Rubio, his rival in the state’s GOP Senate primary, he is no “RINO.”

Asked during an interview with CBS’s “Early Show” for his response to critics who have called him a “Republican in name only” — better known by the acronym RINO — Crist said “if I’m a RINO, then so is Ronald Reagan.”

“I’m a less taxing, less spending, less government, more freedom kind of guy and I just take a pragmatic common sense approach to government,” he said. “And if that’s not what the people want, they’ll let me know. But I’m confident that it is. I really am.”

Crist then seemed to take a shot at the Rubio, a hero of the tea party movement and the new poster boy of conservatives.

The governor said Americans “don’t want bickering and some ideologue on one end or the other to sort of be a standard bearer.”

“They want people who care about them first and foremost and do what it takes to get better education, better schools, you know, better quality of life, protect the environment, reduce the amount of taxes and just use common sense,” he said.

Rubio narrowly leads Crist in a number of recent polls, but the Republican governor said he’s not worried by where things stand now.

“We’re what? 200 days from the race,” Crist said of the August primary.” Let’s see what it is when we get to game day.”


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Sources: MSNBC, Politico, Google Maps