In five polls since the Governor Crist endorsement, John McCain has surged and now is either tied with Mitt Romney or has a narrow lead in Florida. There’s an argument that this movement to McCain is directly a function of the Crist news and the media coverage which followed. Pollster/Analyst Charlie Cook tells me: “In a really close race, when conservatives are troubled by whether McCain is really one of them, sure it might make a difference.” The other argument: most of these new polls show Rudy dropping below 15 percent. When the headlines scream that Rudy is slipping from relevance and analysts paint his demise, the voters surely pick up on it. (It is also possible that Crist’s nod for McCain contributed to this by signaling to Florida voters Crist’s view of Rudy’s viability.) Cook offered this alternative view regarding the Crist endorsement: “It may just be a sign that the smart money and sharpies are seeing the handwriting on the wall. Are the endorsements a cause or an effect?” Either way, it is hard to escape the conclusion that as Rudy’s vote total goes down, McCain’s goes up.

Romney, eyeing those poll numbers, launched a counterattack, labeling McCain a “liberal Democrat.” The McCain team put out a statement under McCain’s name accusing Romney of “wholesale deception” and reminding voters of Romney’s flip-flops on “cap and trade,” immigration reform, and campaign finance reform. The statement ends:

The truth is, Mitt Romney was a liberal governor of Massachusetts who raised taxes, imposed with Ted Kennedy a big government mandate health care plan that is now a quarter of a billion dollars in the red, and managed his state’s economy incompetently, leaving Massachusetts with less job growth than 47 other states.

Well, I guess we won’t be ending on a warm and fuzzy note in Florida.