Out of runway.

It’s a personal saying — not quite a mantra, not quite an idiom — that I regularly resort to when I’m wont to describe a certain feeling of dread finality that comes over me — that sinking realization that your back’s up against the wall, of feeling the house lights dim, of sensing the final curtain about to drop down.

Charlie Crist is officially out of runway.

The once-popular Florida Governor was riding high just a scant year ago, his Republican good ol’ boy cred in a conservative state deemed enough of a momentum to let him cross the finish line of his Senatorial bid in a comfortable jog. In 2008, he was in the top running to be John McCain‘s VP prior to McCain opting to play the Penguin to Sarah Palin‘s Catwoman in a campaign equivalent of a schlocky supervillain tag-team. Prior to that, he was Florida’s Attorney General under Jeb Bush.

A lot can happen in a year.

Crist’s campaign coffers are now so in the red that they might as well have a DNR. Teabagger rival Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles with a conspicuously ethnic “o” at the end of both of his names — proof positive that the Tea Party can’t even manage coherent consistency in reviling the very type of person it was organized to detest — has been bracingly outdistancing him in polls.

Conventional Beltway Insider logic would point to numerous pitfalls that have made Crist’s path treacherous when it comes to connecting with his constituency: the legitimization of the Tea Party’s reach in shoving a moderate GOP member out of the spotlight in favor of a “real” Conservative, his too-ambitious tendency to make ever more lofty grasps for higher climbs, his disingenuous hard-lining of his middle-of-the-road policy stances in order to lock step with the party hawks, and his support of Socialist Overlord Barack Obama‘s stimulus plan.

In the chest-thumping, “I hate government more than you do, Pinko!” circle jerk that Republican challengers are having to engage in to prove their patriotic mettle, Crist is having trouble getting it up, but policy isn’t what’s left him vulnerable to party and voter antipathy. Instead, it’s the political hemlock that the Right can never manage to rid itself of.

One word. One syllable. Bad connotation: Gay.

Crist is just one of a host of red party boys either revealed to be or suspected of being a lifelong closet dweller, and perhaps only Lindsey Graham — both in a dead heat for bragging rights to the most extreme case of gayface ever — is as dogged by relentless supposition about his orientation. There have long been gaydar giveaways that Crist has done his best to dodge but not evade. There’s the short-lived — less than a year — marriage that ended badly and with sealed lips on both sides of the break up. Then came a long bout of dateless confirmed bachelorhood punctuated with repeated Paul Lynde-ish “I just can’t find the right special laaaay-deeee!” preemptive strikes. Whispers of Crist being something of a fixture at Tampa’s Green Iguana in the early ’90s suggested there was a time when he hadn’t yet learned to be so carefully guarded about his personal life

Tanned, silver-haired, and fit, Crist has always evoked a certain Cesar Romero vibe, and when Reihan Salam of The Daily Beast asserted that “with his permanent tan and slick white mane, he’s more like a kinder, gentler Latin American caudillo, who wants nothing more than to be cheered on by adoring throngs,” the sense of Crist seeming out of place in power-rabid Conservative ranks is apt. He never fit the WASPy Republican template from the get-go, and the anglicizing of his Greek surname — he was born Charles Christodoulou, Jr. — is telltale Uncle Tom protocol. The Right loves its tokens that it can trot out to give a self-serving claim that it’s not a country club, and Crist is among the pool of minority lapdogs who self-whitewash and/or straight lace with the directive that Lily White Is Right and Fake-Ass Straight Is Great.

A Salon.com breakdown of Crist’s flare-out published this week completely — and inexplicably — omits any reference to this obvious factor, spurring a flurry of comments focusing on the elephant in the closet: a political career emitting its last death rattle due to the GOP not wanting to hitch its ride to a potential Jim McGreevey in the wings.

Crist has had tough going especially since 2006 when pressure focusing on his personal life’s dissonance with his political one began to ratchet up. Not only was he romantically linked to Bruce Carlton Jordan — embezzler and aide to the other Bush‘s flying monkey Katherine Harris — but another Harris aide, Jason Wetherington, also made claims of being Crist’s sloppy bottom. Crist, still just oily enough, managed to slither under allegations that both he and Mark Foley were effectively shielded from outing by Jeb Bush, Foley ultimately thrown to the wolves (with the dreaded scarlet “D” placed next to his name by Fox News, no less) while he went on to supplant Bush as governor in a tidy little transition of power.

Crist’s engagement and subsequent marriage to costume heiress Carole Rome — again, the subliminal trope of masquerade and play acting lurks beneath the artifice — during and after his consideration as McCain’s right hand man was largely viewed as a transparent and desperate ploy operating under two pretexts. The need to rehabilitate his image after a scathing profile in the Kirby Dick/Mike Rogers documentary Outrage was exigent, and with Bo Derek exhausted from her constant beard duty, Crist was feeling the heat of the “Behind every good man…” imperative for his Senatorial bid. Enter Rome (pictured right), looking as if she’d agreed to play Lisa Marie to his Michael, standing beside her Nero hubby with an “Oh yeah, bitches! — The rafters are on fiiiiiiii-yaaaaaaa!” expression of shit-hitting-the-fan what-the-fuckery.

That Crist — whose initial judicious views on same sex marriage and adoption turned increasingly hardbitten and mercenary — has the luxury of perpetrating such a grotesque farce of political theater in a state with prohibitions on both is just about the most cynical “Fuck you!” a weak man with an imbalance of political clout could wield. Like too many of his ilk, this is a pathetic sham of a man using the law to exorcise his own personal sexual pathology.

And so Crist now falters under the strain of a life built completely upon a lie, finding that the devil’s bargain he made with the power structure carries with it an ironic price tag. No longer able to curry favor with the party that has insulated him over the years, and having bowed to the Man for so long that his spine has atrophied into a permanent stance of linguini noodle supplication, he now needs a backbone more than ever. His former benefactor Jeb Bush has abandoned him. The Tea Party has swung even further right, and unlike the G.O.P., has no equivocation about condemning homosexuality publicly while tolerating it privately. Ball-less and shunned, he’s in the impossible position of having to prove to the clubhouse boys and the voters that’s he’s even remotely independent and self-possessed. A deluded sychophant who’s lived his life in the Fakery Closet, he’s bound for the just-desserts personal hell that all hypocrites self-create one shackle at a time:

The Dustbin of Nihility.

© 2010, Shawn Baker. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com