Florida Democrats Launch Drive to Defend Early Primary Date

BY BETH REINHARD, Miami Herald

Sun, Sep. 23, 2007

Striving to erase doubts about whether Democratic votes in Florida's early presidential primary will matter, party leaders on Sunday launched a public relations campaign -- complete with bumper stickers and a website.

''Make it count'' is the new Democratic rallying cry heading into the 2008 presidential primary, carrying deliberate echos of the contested 2000 presidential election.

Only this time, Florida Democrats are battling their own party establishment. When the state moved up its presidential primary from mid-March to Jan. 29, it upended a calendar carefully planned by the Democratic National Committee to encourage candidates to run grassroots campaigns in smaller states.

The DNC has decreed Florida's vote will not count at its 2008 convention unless the state party organized its own election after Feb. 5. Worse, all of the major Democratic candidates threatened not to campaign in the state.

But six days before a DNC deadline, Florida Democratic leaders ruled out a party-run election expected to confuse voters accustomed to going to the polls on a state-blessed Election Day.

''That is to say once and for all, to settle this, we will be voting on Jan. 29 with our candidates on the ballot,'' Florida Democratic Party Chairwoman Karen Thurman said Sunday. ``At the end of the day, we came down on the side of having a fair and open election.''

The press conference held by Thurman and more than a dozen other party leaders and elected officials capped a monthlong, ultimately fruitless negotiation between Florida Democrats, the DNC and the four sanctioned early primary states.

Thurman said a majority of the more than 200 party leaders from across the state supported the decision, but a vocal minority of activists said it would handicap the party at a time when it should be capitalizing on the Republican administration's dwindling popularity.

Florida voters will not see television advertising or receive mailings from the major candidates. They won't be able to see the candidates at the state party's convention in Orlando next month. And they won't be able to send delegates to the national convention backing the top vote getters in the Jan. 29 primary.

Those delegates could matter if the race goes down to the convention floor, though that hasn't happened in decades.

''It's a Thelma and Louise strategy of backing up the car while we're driving over a cliff,'' said DNC member Allan Katz, a Tallahassee attorney involved in the negotiations., Another DNC member who lives in Tallahasssee, Jon Ausman, went so far to compare Thurman's negotiating tactics over the past month to ``George Bush in his handling of Iraq.''