Tony Fabrizio, the pollster and strategist who interrupted Florida’s gubernatorial primary in 2010 to introduce Rick Scott to presumptive nominee Bill McCollum, is back. And he’s hungry.
At a speaking engagement in Miami-Dade yesterday week, Fabrizio was in usual effluvial form, practically begging Charlie Crist to enter the race and insinuating that the party-changing former governor may not make it past his new party’s primary.
Please.
By a show of hands, who thinks that Nan Rich — even with the help of what Fabrizio called “outside intervention” — can overtake Charlie?
That’s what I thought.
Fabrizio jabbed at Crist’s record of tax hiking and ‘betrayals’, sarcastically adding that the upcoming publication of Crist’s memoir will at least secure him a bright future as a “the number one fiction writer.”
If anyone qualifies as an experienced political fiction writer, it is Fabrizio. I mean, the man engineered Rick Scott’s rewrite from being a CEO forced to take the 5th a few dozen times in Medicare fraud depositions, to being a self-appointed anti-waste governor.
No doubt, that took balls (and a fair amount of self-delusion, to wit), but it worked. Crist and Fabrizio are well-matched, in that department.
“You know who is happy about him?” Fabrizio asked of Charlie’s forseen candidacy, “The Democratic power brokers who want power, but the average rank and file voter, they want to beat Rick Scott, but they’re not sure they want to sell their souls to beat Rick Scott.”
Clearly, Fabrizio knows a thing or two about soul selling.
