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Crist backers Mack and Martinez discount “moderate” accusation

Posted Mar 11, 2010 by William March

Updated Mar 11, 2010 at 03:09 PM

Seeking to defuse the ideological battle with Marco Rubio in which Charlie Crist been cast as a moderate or liberal, two of Crist’s best-known backers, former Sens. Mel Martinez and Connie Mack III, say Crist is just as conservative.

“When people tell me Charlie Crist isn’t conservative enough, I have to laugh,” said a recent campaign fundraising letter by Mack, Crist’s campaign chairman.

Mack, Crist’s mentor and first patron in politics, was a conservative icon in Florida when he won a previously Democratic Senate seat in 1988, helping begin the GOP takeover of Florida in the 1990s. In today’s Republican Party, however, Mack might not count as so conservative—he supports embryonic stem cell research, for example.

Martinez discounted the ideological differences in an MSNBC interview today.

Asked if it’s an ideological battle, he said, “I think it’s high unemployment, I think it’s a tough, tough time to be governor ... There is an ideological component to it, but Marco Rubio’s record is not one of an arch-conservative. I don’t know [that] he’s a moderate, but he has certainly been on a number of sides of a lot of issues, so I wouldn’t categorize him as a total hard-edged conservative.”

Martinez is another traditional conservative who has run afoul of the GOP’s new tea party-style conservatism. He’s an ardent supporter of anti-abortion and other social conservative causes, and like Rubio, son of a Cuban refugee family. But he was vilified by the GOP base for supporting the McCain immigration reform plan stigmatized as amnesty.

Martinez, like national Republican leaders, endorsed Crist immediately after he announced, long before it appeared Rubio had a chance in the race.

“I told the governor I would be for him and I’m not going to change that,” he said. “The fact is that I would still say nice things about Marco Rubio.”