The scene during Barack Obama's most recent visit to Tampa Bay said a lot about the state of Florida politics.
Obama came here two weeks ago to raise money at dual private parties, but owing to the ongoing feud between the state Democratic Party and national leaders, he could not "campaign" or speak publicly about any issues. At the first event, he crossed the street to answer a Tampa Tribune reporter's questions after gathering up his loot.
But by the second stop, in St. Petersburg, he was already spooked enough by the Trib encounter that he ignored shouted questions from the Times' political editor. He had to figure that simply answering a reporter's questions could be construed as "campaigning" and held against him by angry and jealous Democratic voters in the early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire.
Contrast that enforced duck-and-dodge with his first visit here, when he drew thousands of people to an open-air rally in Ybor City. It was a beautiful, windy day. Bands played. Babies were kissed. Hands were shaken.
So this is what Florida has been reduced to — an absurdist political automated cash machine?
In our state's effort to be more relevant to national politics, legislators moved our primary earlier than a bunch of other states that are used to going first and garnering lots of candidate love and attention. Why? We didn't get enough attention during that whole butterfly-ballot-and-hanging-chads thing?
And let's face it: The candidates would rather campaign first anywhere but Florida. This is not, after all, a good state for one-to-one campaigning, for retail politics. It is not a state where a candidate can have a single message about his or her vision for our nation. We're too big, with millions too many people for all of that.
It is instead a state where you have to puff up your chest and carry a hunting rifle if you are in the Panhandle or feign concern for the tax burden on suburban Republicans in Orlando or drink café con leche in Tampa or slag Fidel on Calle Ocho in Miami. And it's a state where candidates have to spend millions of dollars for expensive, unsatisfying and often misleading campaign television commercials.
By contrast, Iowa's quaint caucus system and New Hampshire's small population give candidates a chance to win races in person, on the ground, door-to-door. Never mind that Florida has a gazillion times more voters. Never mind that Florida's demographics more closely match the nation's.
I read a daily newspaper account from Naples that confidently declared that the entire Democratic primary brouhaha was overblown. It dutifully quoted a number of Democratic Party operatives and officials who — and this is a shocker — said the flap will have absolutely, positively no impact whatsoever on Democratic turnout. Case closed.
That misses the point (in addition to, I predict, being wrong). The story isn't about whether Democrats will or won't vote next year. It isn't about whether the presidential nominee will seat Florida's convention delegation anyway, rather than risk upsetting the chances of carrying the state in November. It isn't about whether Victor DiMaio's elections lawsuit against the state and national parties was a good idea (it was dismissed by a judge last week) or if Sen. Bill Nelson's litigation is better (it's probably not going to have much more success than DiMaio's).
The story is that citizens of the United States who happen to live in Florida are getting shortchanged when it comes to getting the information they need to make their democratic decisions. Instead of hearing from candidates at their annual convention later this month, Florida Democrats can't even convince the wives of the presidential contenders to attend. The party faithful will be treated, instead, to a keynote address from the household name that is Steny Hoyer. (Democratic House majority leader? Congressman from Maryland? This ringing a bell for anyone?)
Then again, in a day and age where the national media's big campaign exposés are Hillary Clinton's cleavage and cackling laugh, or Rudy Giuliani's cell-phone calls from Wife No. 3 in the middle of his campaign speeches, maybe Florida really isn't that far behind the rest of an uninformed nation. It sure would explain why we have the national leadership we have today.
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This article appears in Oct 10-16, 2007.