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.
