In the end, Charlie Crist was too clever for his own good.

The consummate politician who deftly tacked right and left to win a series of elective offices failed in his second bid for U.S. Senate when voters soured on his spinning act.

By losing to Republican Marco Rubio Tuesday, Crist capped one of the steepest falls from grace in Florida electoral history.

Rated as one of the state's most popular governors, enjoying widespread name recognition and the adulation of the Tallahassee press corps, Crist was the odds-on favorite to win the Senate seat a year ago. He had filled that seat with his hand-picked placeholder, George LeMieux. He had the apparatus of the state and national Republican parties behind him.

"The People's Governor" couldn't be beat.

Political insiders and media pundits questioned the wisdom, if not the sanity, of Marco Rubio for jumping into the race. Opening as a 38-point underdog, the former Florida House speaker looked quixotic, at best. 

But Crist's early institutional advantages became his unraveling. His close ties to former state Republican Party Chairman Jim Greer cast a shadow over the governor's office. His mild, ever-flexible political posture that had proved so successful turned out to be seriously out of alignment with an increasingly angry electorate.

Meantime, the rise of the tea party movement worked in Rubio's favor and demolished Crist's base, which, for all his years in office (state senator, education commissioner, attorney general), proved to be a mile wide, but only inches deep. 

The seeds of Crist's destruction may well have been sown by his predecessor. While Crist won the governorship in 2006, claiming to be the rightful heir to Jeb Bush's political legacy, Crist's leftward tilt in office did not sit well.

Unlike Bush, a hands-on executive who cared deeply about policy, Crist struck top Republicans as a dilettante driven more by polls than principle. Failing to provide leadership on the state's worsening economy, Crist's political base began crumbling.

"Frankly, he's been a disappointment. It's all about Charlie, all the time" said a longtime Tallahassee lobbyist, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The governor's last-minute endorsement of John McCain before the state's 2008 GOP primary proved pyrrhic. Crist's tryout for vice president, his peripatetic preening for the national stage, and McCain's own poor performance against Barack Obama raised more suspicion about the governor.

Crist's literal embrace of Obama during a meeting in Fort Myers was the straw that broke the elephant's back.

By early 2010, the Grand Old Party was over for Crist. Greer's ouster and subsequent arrest on fraud and money-laundering charges tainted the governor's self-styled image as an avatar of clean politics and open government. Crist's bona fides on that front had already been undermined by his closed-door gambling pact with the Seminole tribe and his secret U.S. Sugar Corp. deal on the Everglades.

By now, even the once-docile press corps was beginning to challenge Crist on his mounting pile of contradictory positions. He would reply with increasingly glib non-responses.

As his fiscal and social policies blurred with the Democratic Party platform, restive Republicans went from upset to angry. Crist sealed his fate by caving to the Florida Education Association (i.e., Democratic Party) and vetoing Senate Bill 6, the teacher-pay measure authored by John Thrasher, a state senator who also happened to be chairman of the Republican Party of Florida. With the polls flipped against him in favor of Rubio, Crist bolted the GOP in April to pursue his Senate campaign as an independent.