Come Home to Meek!

Florida Democrats, unlike voters in some parties, cannot be won over by flashy yachts, glitzy ad campaigns and an self-funded onslaught of distortion. That was proven Tuesday evening when the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate went handily to U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek. It has yet to be proven, though, whether the slick pseudo-independent message of Gov. Charlie Crist can sway the well-informed but highly pragmatic voters in the Sunshine State.

I hope the larger message about Meek that comes from the primary is that Meek is a winner. Admittedly a young and untested politician, the South Florida Democrat showed he can endure a well-financed and vicious campaign. He showed that more than a half-million voters can be inspired to come out in August and throw their support to progressive, fresh face.

Meek's 58-35 victory of billionaire Jeff Greene shows on its face a resounding endorsement. A deeper look at the numbers reveals Meek won big in those parts of Florida which will be most important to Democrats this fall. He didn't take all counties. Far from it. But the places where Greene played well, in Southwest Florida and the Panhandle, are places notorious for large Dixiecrat voters poisoning the progressive pool.

I've often said I trust a Dixiecrat less than a conservative Republican. After all, the Republican is honest about his or her ideals, however wrong-headed, and will boost the party platform closest to those ideals. A Dixiecrat often votes against the party, particularly in federal races, angry at the way national Democrats in the past 40 years have embraced blacks and started hugging trees. Back in the Strom Thurmond days, Southern Democrats had their own plans about blacks and trees.

So let's just say those Panhandle voters saw something with Jeff Greene that they could relate too which had little to do with ideology. Or perhaps they were even attempting to sabotage the primary and elect the Democrat with the least general election appeal. Either way, I'm not so concerned to see Kendrick lose in Okaloosa County, or in rural parts of the peninsula like Glades and Hendry counties. I'm not even too upset to see Greene take Lee and Collier counties. All of those places are going to be the Republicans fighting ground come November. And with any luck, GOP nominee Marco Rubio and Crist will be fighting it out in those places.

I suspect Crist will try and shore up those areas where he has won before. While he has philosophically tacked left since first toying with independence, he has yet to win a race as anything but a Republican.

And there is a growing consensus that Meek's presence on the ballot makes Crist a weaker candidate. Die-hard Cristies have even argued with me on liberal blogs that Meek is going to "split the Democratic vote." That's like saying Al Gore siphoned off too many votes from Ralph Nader in 2000. Democratic votes that go to Crist will be ones lost to Meek, not the other way around.

I can't lie and say a Meek victory will anything but a tough row. But starting today, I think this will shift more toward being a Meek-Rubio race. That is hard enough with out Crist's orange glow interfering with the political landscape. Rubio, in primary with no serious opposition, got more than 1 million votes last night. Certainly, more voters came to the polls for the tight gubernatorial race, but Rubio was the clear choice of nearly 85 percent of Republicans even when Rick Scott and Bill McCollum were creating a rift in their party. By comparison, Alex Sink took less than 76 percent of the Democratic vote against token opposition the gubernatorial primary.

Public Policy Polling put out a highly-pubicized poll Tuesday (yeah, I'm talking about polls again) which showed Rubio at 40 percent going into the general election campaign. But I think that's all the support he will ever see. Unfortunately, in a three-man race that is enough if Meek and Crist split the vote. But that is why Democrats need to rally around the real Democrat in the race.

Meek will caucus with the Democrats. Crist won't say, likely because he knows many of his supporters still want him to go to Washington in effect a Republican. But even if Crist does caucus with Dems, he will never be a progressive. We will have our own Joe Liberman, at best! With Meek, we get the most progressive politician to represent Florida in the Senate since Claude Pepper.

There are 10 weeks to decide, but in choosing, don't write off Meek as a candidate who can't win. Indeed, he is the only candidate running to have a won a contested race in this Senate campaign. Remember that.