No, Charlie Crist didn't -- as rumored last week -- turn Democrat in a Sunday Tampa Bay Times guest column. But on the eve of the Republican National Convention, he did the next closest thing. He publicly, officially, endorsed Barack Obama for president.

Read "Former Gov. Charlie Crist: Here's why I am backing Barack Obama" in this morning's Times.

Charlie says he's "confident that President Barack Obama is the right leader for our state and the nation."

Right for our state? Let's start with that.

I wish I could see how dismantling Florida's NASA presence and spreading it around to lobbying interests in a dozen other states was good for Florida.

Between 10,000 and 20,000 Florida jobs have evaporated because we're no longer looking to set up science labs on the Moon, we're going to Mars. That was Obama's doing, straight-out. As the president said in 2009, "Everybody wants a piece of the action."

Charlie Crist was the governor of this state in 2009. Why didn't we hear him saying, "Who cares what anybody else wants, it took Florida more than five decades to build this network of aeronautical and space know-how." He didn't get in the president's face then, he adds insult to injury in his column now.

And Charlie does a lot of talking in his Sunday piece about the wisdom of the president's "investments" to get the American economy moving again and his "realistic path to prosperity" -- which includes trillions of dollars in stimulus money on education, infrastructure and entitlement programs.

What Charlie doesn't do is fess up to the ineffectiveness of Obama's economic get-well measures compared to the crushing debt he leaves the nation perhaps for generations.

Realistically, how much weight do you think an endorsement by Mr. Insincerity will have on the president's chances in Florida? Maybe very little. But rest assured, Charlie wrote what he wrote hoping to kiss up to the Democrats; above all, hoping to find a pony for himself in all that caca.