Former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio released this Web video today as part of his U.S. Senate Republican primary campaign against Gov. Charlie Crist. It’s largely a series of clips showing Crist’s support for President Obama and the stimulus package.

But the video claims Crist is “suddenly attacking Marco Rubio because he’s desperate to cover up his own record.” This doesn’t appear to be true.

The claim is a response to the Web site, TruthAboutRubio, created Tuesday to mine Rubio’s background for potential embarrassments. Crist’s campaign says they have nothing to do with the site and there’s no evidence to the contrary. Crist’s campaign would have to disclose if they created or paid for the site, whose author is anonymous.

The meat of the video is simply a series of clips showing Crist’s support for the stimulus. Obama’s poll ratings among Republicans have tumbled since he took office and the stimulus package has been a lightening rod for the party’s most conservative voters. Rubio is hoping this issue will help him deliver the first primary defeat of a sitting governor in modern Florida politics.

But the video leaves out some important facts about the stimulus money. While its obvious that Crist supported the stimulus, it was the Republican-led legislature that agreed to use nearly all of the stimulus money available to them to plug a $5.3 billion hole in a state budget riddled with tax shortfalls. And while that money hasn’t driven down unemployment, one prominent economist says it has helped the state’s economy from getting worse.

Unlike Crist, most Republican governors initially voiced their opposition to the stimulus package. But nearly all of them spent virtually every penny available to them.

But Crist has not embraced his attempt at bipartisanship and is instead trying to distance himself from Obama and the stimulus package. He released a radio ad earlier this month telling Obama that, “Enough is enough” and decided not to visit with Obama when the president was in the state on Monday and Tuesday. Crist said Tuesday that he was unaware where Obama was on Monday.

UPDATE: Well, sounds like Crist might not be clear and free with the Rubio site - the RedState blog found a file on the site that indicated a potential connection to one of Crist’s top political consultants.

Meanwhile, the Rubio campaign insists they are are not leaving anything out of the ad. Says Rubio’s spokesman Alex Burgos: “The intention of the video is to point out Charlie Crist’s history of supporting the stimulus. The focus is not the stimulus’ effectiveness. But we’ll get into that. This is to remind people that Crist’s support of this is very public and he can’t run away from his own words.”

Tags: Charlie Crist, fact check, Marco Rubio

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 1:09 pm and is filed under 2010 campaigns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.