Former U.S. Senator Bob Smith (R-NH) announced Monday, via YouTube, he intends to challenge Governor Charlie Crist and former Florida House of Representatives Speaker Marco Rubio in the Republican primary for Florida’s vacant Senate seat in 2010.

Echoing Rubio’s conservative sentiments, the Florida snowbird said his entry into the already-crowded primary was precipitated by the Republican Party establishment’s unacceptable lurch to the left. “I can’t stand by and watch what is happening to our country – and our Party,” Smith said in his online address.

Smith’s new-found moral compass and concern for the direction of his country and of the Republican Party is awfully amusing, of course, given his opportunistic and decidedly vindictive nature.

After mounting a comically unsuccessful independent bid for President in 2000, Smith lost a bitter primary battle to then-Congressman John Sununu two years and two parties later. But unfortunately Smith’s presence on the national scene didn’t end with his ousting.

Hoping he might reemerge as a key political player, ostensibly as a Democrat after having sampled all competing parties, Smith endorsed Senator John Kerry in his ill-fated campaign for President in 2004, citing Kerry’s “courage and character” forged on the battlefields of Vietnam.

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On December 16, 1773, a group of colonists known as the Sons of Liberty boarded three English ships at Massachusetts’ Griffin Wharf. They pulled over 90,000 lbs of tea from the ships’ cargo holds and threw it into Boston Harbor in a symbolic act of protest history would remember as the Boston Tea Party.

The Tea Party was an key step in the course from resistance to Revolution in the American colonies. Less than a year after the event, the first Continental Congress presented the colonies’ British hegemons with a united American opposition — and, less than a year after that, the Revolutionary War had begun and the second Continental Congress, which would adopt the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, had gone into session.

Fourteen years after Boston, America’s Constitutional Convention met to draft and ratify the document which governs our nation to this very day.

State Rep. Bob Smith (R-Watkinsville) hopes the modern day tea parties held in Atlanta and around the country last Friday in opposition to President Barack Obama’s budget, mortgage bailout, and “stimulus” proposals will help build momentum for a modern Constitutional Convention in a much shorter period of time.

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