Charlie Crist

Governor Charlie Crist bluntly tried to shed two big image problems — his hug of President Obama and past support of the $787 billion federal stimulus package — in a unity party-unity plea Saturday that sounded like a preview of his U.S. Senate campaign theme.

Crist told more than 200 members of the state Republican Executive Committee that “this guy in the White House” is doing more to build the GOP than they could do for themselves. But he stressed that “I do not apologize” for welcoming Obama to Fort Myers or his acceptance of Florida’s share of stimulus cash, which he said kept cops and teachers on the job.

Former House Speaker Marco Rubio, the aggressive conservative Miamian who has been building momentum in the Senate race, signaled that he won’t let the Obama-stimulus controversy subside in Republican ranks. However Crist explains it now, Rubio said, the governor “cut the legs out from under” the GOP economic alternative in Congress and happily applauded Obama on the president’s first visit to Florida last February.

“Some people criticize me for going down to Fort Myers, being nice to the president of the United States of America. I do not apologize for it and I never will,” Crist said at the state GOP meeting. The governor, who is known for being effusively polite to everyone he meets, said his parents brought him up that way.

“I don’t agree with the guy on hardly anything he does but that’s OK,” he said of Obama. “That’s also part of our great democracy. I mean, what they are doing with health care right now is unbelievable — raising your taxes for it, raising rates for it, taking half a trillion dollars out of Medicare, and the part that bothers me most is, the whole thing has become a covert operation.”

Crist appeared with Obama in Fort Myers last February and thanked him for the stimulus plan, saying it was important for Congress to pass it. When Obama visited Jacksonville late last year, after Crist’s poll numbers had fallen and Rubio’s had risen, the governor did not join the president and said he didn’t even know Obama was in the state.