John McCain can go back to playing Maverick on the TeeVee Box, with or without Jim Garner’s help.
Lisa Murkowski up in Alaska, however, may have to chew for a while on Mama Grizzly gristle.
But the big story of Tuesday’s primary elections is down in Florida where the entire Republican Party establishment is waking up this morning with a bad case of the WTF?s.
Despite pre-primary polling indications, Gazillionaire Rick “Skeletor” Scott spent $50 million of his own cheese and grilled long-time Republican Party of Florida darling and sitting Attorney General Bill McCollum for the RPOF nomination for guv’nah.
The Republican Party of Florida establishment and all its interwoven business interests and lobbying kingpins long ago anointed McCollum to succeed current Guv’nah Charlie Crist after Crist was kicked out of the party for being, well, too not-right-wing-crazy-enough.
Now, what’s a party to do?
It was just 10 short years ago, the Republican Party of Florida was handing the presidency of the United States to George W. Bush. They were riding high. So confident were they that Republican leaders of the Florida Legislature were prepared to completely ignore the outcome of any silly presidential ballot recounts and send all 27 Electoral College delegates to vote for Bush anyway…even if the recount had shown Al Gore won Florida.
But that’s a distant memory now.
Faced with a serious and substantive Democratic candidate for guv’nah in Florida’s current Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, Florida Republicans must now confront the mega-rich juggernaut that just bought and paid for the party’s nomination.
Sure, the Sunshine State’s newspapers and teevee stations love the guy for boosting their bottom lines by $50 million in the primary but even the staunchest Republicans question the morality of that kind of spending and display of wealth given the hard economic times everyone else is facing.
Republicans tend not to be comfortable with general election campaigns set as morality plays.
Then, there is Teabagger favorite Marco Rubio who, as expected, won the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by former Sen. Mel Martinez. Rubio is also a RPOF insider, former speaker of the Florida House of Representatives. RPOF insiders don’t like and don’t trust the Gazillionaire who made his fortune on the backs of Medicare payments to his chain of hospitals – and the violations for which his company was forced to pay $1.7 billion in fines for the fraud on taxpayers.
Teabaggers, gazillionaires, indicted former party officials and the disgruntled Charlie Crist fans will make for an uneasy and fractious fall for Florida Republicans.
The Democrats, on the other hand, have the best statewide ticket in Sink for Governor, Kendrick Meek for the Senate and Dan Gelber for Attorney General since Bob Graham and Lawton Chiles were on the ballot.
The Florida Republican leadership must be sitting around, this morning, replaying the final scene of the 1972 Robert Redford movie, “The Candidate,” and asking, “what do we do now?”
This just in: what they WON’T do is, apparently, hold a Unity Rally as they usually do.



