TAMPA — During one of his characteristic name-dropping riffs in Monday night’s GOP debate, Newt Gingrich said he “went to a Goldwater organizing session in 1964,” first met Ronald Reagan in 1974 and worked with supply side icons Jack Kemp and Art Laffer in the late 1970s.

The reference to Barry Goldwater‘s 1964 campaign is an important one for conservatives. Though Goldwater was buried by LBJ in a general election landslide that year, Goldwater’s campaign contributed to the rise of Reagan (his “Time for Choosing” speech was made on Goldwater’s behalf) and is regarded as the moment when the GOP began embracing conservatism rather than the more liberal brand of Republicanism symbolized at the time by New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.

Note that Gingrich merely said he went to a Goldwater meeting. The Drudge Report this morning has unearthed a 1988 clip of Gingrich saying he was “a Rockefeller state chairman in the South.”

MIAMI — There were several mentions of Ronald Reagan this morning when Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney held a town hall-style meeting with about 80 people at a hotel ballroom.

Gipper references are common in GOP primary settings. Not so common are approving mentions of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the New Deal architect who plays a heavy in Republican frontrunner Rick Perry‘s book Fed Up.

Romney managed both while taking a swipe at Perry’s Social Security stance.

“Ronald Reagan… was a believer in Social Security,” Romney said. “I believe in Social Security. There are tens of millions of Americans who rely upon Social Security to meet their needs. I want to protect it. I want to save it. I want to make sure that it’s there for coming generations. I think it’s a good thing. I don’t think everything that comes out of Democrats is good. But this came out of FDR, I think it’s pretty darn good. And I’m going to make sure, like Ronald Reagan, we keep it.”

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who was 9 years old when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, reflected on growing up in “Ronald Reagan’s America” and offered a Reaganesque take on free enterprise and the role of government and in a Tuesday speech at the Reagan Library in California that further boosted Rubio’s soaring national profile.

Rubio, who regularly deflects suggestion he’d make an ideal 2012 Republican vice presidential nominee, echoed former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in saying the GOP should ease up on bashing President Obama.

“I know that it is popular in my party to blame the President, the current President. But the truth is the only thing this President has done is accelerate policies that were already in place and were doomed to fail. All he is doing through his policies is making the day of reckoning come faster, but it was coming nonetheless,” Rubio said.

Read the full text of Rubio’s speech after the jump….

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Gov. Charlie Crist appeared on MSNBC’s Hardball this evening after attending the startup “No Labels” nonpartisan political group meeting in D.C. today.

Crist responded to Republican House Speaker John Boehner’s flat-out rejection of compromise (“I reject the word”) on 60 Minutes.

“It’s unbelievable,” Crist, an independent, told Hardball host Chris Matthews.

“To have common sense means that you have to compromise, trying to do what’s right for the people instead of the party. I think what you see is evidence of the fact that there are certain segments of both parties that view compromise as a dirty word. And if you say you’re willing to compromise, in other words use common sense, try to do what’s right for the people instead of the party, then you may get shunned by your political party,” said Crist, who was indeed shunned by Florida Republican leaders after dumping the party and running as an independent for U.S. Senate. Crist lost to Republican Marco Rubio.

Matthews called Crist an Eisenhower Republican, prompting Crist to identify himself with other moderate Republicans, including Ronald Reagan.

Matthews interrupted him.

“No, no you’re not a Reagan Republican. No you’re not,” Matthews insisted.

Crist pointed out that Reagan and then-U.S. House Speaker Tip O’Neill, a Democrat, worked together despite their ideological and political differences.

“They had the common sense and the civility to be able to get together after hours, a couple of Irishmen, and have a cold one,” Crist said. “We have to get back to that point where there can be personal relationships where some people in one party and those in another party are really treated as traitors if they dare to break bread with somebody else. Especially in this season, that’s just not the right thing to do. We need to come together for the country and put the country ahead of the party in order for the people to be victorious in the end.”
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Democratic Senate hopeful Jeff Greene says he still doesn’t remember whether he voted for Republican icon Ronald Reagan in 1980, but reminded a Democratic retiree crowd today that the U.S. was “in a mess” at the time and “Ronald Reagan didn’t get elected just by Republicans.”

Palm Beach billionaire Greene campaigned at Century Village of Boca Raton, where Democratic club president Marvin Manning — speaking personally and not in his official role — told the crowd of about 150 that Greene is the “strongest candidate to represent our party in November.”

Greene’s main primary rival, U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek of Miami, released an Internet video today calling himself the only “real Democrat” in the race. Meek has repeatedly noted that Greene ran for Congress in California as a Republican in 1982 and, after years of being registered with no party affiliation, didn’t register as a Democrat until 2008.

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Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum takes a break from the Iowa-New Hampshire-South Carolina presidential exploratory grind to speak to the Boca Raton Republican Club Wednesday night. He says the GOP should embrace Reaganism and not Goldwaterism. Read about it here.

Is Charlie Crist a Harry Reid Democrat? A Ronald Reagan Republican? Depends on who’s labeling him.

Republican Senate hopeful Marco Rubio’s campaign is making much of this Wall Street Journal report that Democratic Senate Leader Harry Reid phoned Republican-turned-indie Gov. Charlie Crist last week in a possible “sign of cooperation” between Crist and Dems.

Democratic Senate candidate Kendrick Meek’s campaign, meanwhile, pointed to this three-month old NewsMax.com article in which Crist, then competing for the GOP primary nomination, called himself “anti-tax, pro-life, pro-gun Republican” and invoked Ronald Reagan a couple times.

Expect a lot more of this in the months to come. Rubio’s camp wants Crist to divide the Democratic vote. Meek’s team wants Crist to split Republicans.

STUART — Here’s something you seldom hear in a Republican primary: a candidate taking issue with Ronald Reagan.

It happened this afternoon when former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio, who’s running in the GOP Senate primary against Gov. Charlie Crist, answered a question on immigration at a Martin County Republican Womens Federated meeting that drew more than 100 attendees.

Rubio delivered a six-minute discourse on immigration policy in which he brought up The Gipper’s support for the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which granted amnesty to most undocumented workers who could prove they had been in the country continuously for the previous five years.

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Whether they’re running for president or a state House seat, Republicans in need of campaign cash often find their way to Bill Diamond’s Palm Beach home.

Florida Attorney General and 2010 governor candidate Bill McCollum will be the latest GOP office-seeker to belly up to Diamond’s political ATM when he attends a fund-raising lunch there Wednesday.

A veteran of New York City Republican politics, the 73-year-old Diamond co-owns a real estate business and was elected to the Palm Beach town council this year.

He was a regional administrator for the U.S. General Services Administration under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, then was former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s commissioner of administrative services from 1994 to 2001.

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The partisan dustup over President Obama’s planned nationwide address to schoolchildren next week has inspired some speculation about what would happen if the shoe were on the other foot:

What if this were a Republican president, perhaps one named Bush, trying to drum up support for one of his programs? Would liberal school administrators even allow the kids to watch it? Would Democratic parents pull their children from the classroom that day?

Well, maybe we don’t have to guess. It turns out that then-President George H.W. Bush made a nationally televised speech to students on Oct. 1, 1991, from Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington, D.C., urging them to “make it your mission to get a good education” and to “block out the kids who think it’s not cool to be smart.” (The president’s sound bite of the day was apparently, “I can’t understand for the life of me what’s so great about being stupid.”)

Update: As a Palm Beach Post reader has helpfully pointed out, then-President Ronald Reagan spoke live to students nationwide in May 1986. And it seems that the first President Bush also made a 15-minute televised speech in 1989 urging students not to use drugs.

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The Republican scramble for the Palm Beach-Broward seat of Senate President Jeff Atwater, R-North Palm Beach, puts GOP heavyweights and business partners Scott Rothstein and Roger Stone in rival camps.

Attorney Rothstein – who’s raised money for the likes of Charlie Crist, John McCain and George W. Bush – is backing state Rep. Ellyn Bogdanoff, R-Fort Lauderdale, in the Senate District 25 race.
Legendarily dapper bad boy and unabashed Nixon admirer Stone, a partner with Rothstein in a Fort Lauderdale-based consulting biz, is behind Delray Beach businessman Nick Loeb.

Stone said he’s friends with Bogdanoff but has an “antecedent” relationship with Loeb’s family, going back to the days when he and Loeb’s father were early Ronald Reagan supporters. Though he’s known as a creative hitman, Stone says that, in this race, “I’m not here to engage in negative politics.”

Bogdanoff, Loeb and state Rep. Carl Domino, R-Jupiter, are in the GOP primary to replace Atwater, who’s running for chief financial officer