Billionaire Jeff Greene, Florida Wildcard, Is on the Air

Billionaire real estate investor Jeff Greene is the wildcard in Florida's Senate race, and he's up on the air with his first statewide TV campaign. Greene is opposing Rep. Kendrick Meek in the state's Democratic primary, which won't be held until August. That means that, for most of the election cycle, we'll be hearing from Greene, Meek, Charlie Crist, and Marco Rubio as they vie for the state's Senate seat.

Greene plans to self-finance a lot of his campaign, telling voters that this frees him from obligations to special interest. The Miami Herald reported that the billionaire told some Democrats he's willing to put $40 million into the primary, but his campaign says there's no set budget--Greene will spend "whatever it takes to compete," spokesman Paul Blank said.

The knock on Greene, as his critics put it, is that he made his money (this time, after losing it all in the 1990s) by shorting the subprime real estate market. His critics call him a profiteer of the foreclosure crisis. His campaign says he's a businessman who saw the crash coming and did what he should have to protect the jobs he had created.

His new ad campaign focuses heavily on jobs, and on being a political outsider. His campaign won't say how much they're spending on it, only that it's a "significant" and "substantial" statewide campaign. See the ads below: