It has been widely claimed that Charlie Crist said Sarah Palin was more “qualified” to be President than Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign. Unless he made this statement privately no evidence exists of this being said. However, Crist did very publicly and openly endorse John McCain’s VP pick even taking to the national airwaves to support Palin. Obviously Crist can argue he was just being a good Republican soldier at the time, but many  moderate Republicans took to questioning the VP pick, including several prominent intellectuals in the GOP.

And in 2012, George LeMieux, a former protege of Crist’s who eventually choose to be more loyal to the doctrinaire philosophy of the right-wing Republicans than to a man who had given him virtually every break he received on the state level penned a Tampa Bay Times column reminding readers of Crist’s views on Palin. It was a column Pulitzer Prize winning PolitiFact rated “true.”   (My quarrel with LeMieux is not that he remained a Republican and didn’t endorse Crist for US Senate. My quarrel with LeMieux is that the previously moderate Republican who was associated with Crist’s view of governing became a reflexively right-wing attack dog in the days, months and years after Crist left the GOP. It is almost as if he was over compensating for once being associated with Crist.)

Give a look to a Crist CNN interview about Palin: