MSNBC graciously broadcasted Republican exile and former Governor of Florida Charlie Crist’s address to the Democratic Convention during their Thursday night coverage. However, that courtesy was not given to Democrat turned Republican former Congressman Artur Davis during the Republican Convention last week.
As my colleague Ken Shepherd noted on August 29, Maddow tore into Davis during what was to be only the post speech commentary and portrayed Davis as “bitter” – thus the event that precipitated his departure from the Republican Party:
RACHEL MADDOW: I should mention, in terms to [former McCain advisor Steve Schmidt's] point about persuadable people, one person who is speaking tonight, a lower profile speaker, because nobody's ever heard of him, is Artur Davis, who was a low profile Democratic congressman who was a big supporter of Barack Obama in 2008. He seconded his nomination. is speaking tonight at the Republican national convention as a converted republican who is making the case for why he left the Democratic Party and became a Republican.
Personally, in terms of his own story, it was after he got absolutely destroyed in the Democratic primary when he was running, trying to become the governor of Alabama in that state. That's when he left the party.
However, was Maddow watching the 2010 Florida Senate race? Crist dropped out of the GOP primary, became an independent, and got pummeled by nineteen points in the general. Suffice to say, he would have endured similar results if he stayed in to frivolously duke it out with Marco Rubio.
(Real Clear Politics)
Yet, for Crist, it’s ok to empathize with him because he left the radical Republican Party.
Chris Matthews said that Crist represented the “victimhood of people like him in the Republican Party… people who were basically left behind by a party – that’s almost been replaced by a new political party – a right wing party.”
