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Hillary Attempts to Play up Florida's Beauty Pageant

The Clinton campaign is doing their best to play up Florida's beauty pageant on the Democratic side according to Politico:

Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign spent Sunday trying to play up the importance of a strong finish here even though no delegates are at stake -- a move Sen. Barack Obama's campaign called a transparent attempt to divert attention from Saturday's rout in South Carolina.

The New York senator held four fundraisers here Sunday and said she will be back on Tuesday after the polls close.

"I think it's fair to say based on recent experience that Florida will once again be a battleground state and I want the voters in Florida to know that I hear them. I deeply care about their problems," Clinton said.

Note that Clinton plans to be in Tuesday after the polls close in the hopes that the media will cover her "victory" speech. All indications are that Clinton will outpoll Obama in Florida but the contest is meaningless since no delegates are at stake. Clinton aides have attempted to portray this as an attempt by some candidates to disenfrachise Floridians:

With Florida's history as a lynchpin to the presidency, Clinton aides argue that it is nuts to ignore the very voters the Democratic Party will need to come out en force in November.

"Some of the other campaigns have pushed very hard to make sure Florida and Michigan voters were disenfranchised.

They hid behind a façade of respect for the early states, but people should make no mistake that this was a long-conceived and carefully plotted strategy to try and make Florida and Michigan not matter," one aide said.

As far as I know, it was the decision of the Democratic Party to strip Michigan and Florida of their delegates if they moved their primaries to before Super Tuesday. The candidates had nothing to do with it.

The Florida delegates chosen tomorrow will probably not be seated at the convention. They can only be seated if a majority of the seated delegates vote to include them. Pretty simple logic here dictates that Obama delegates will not vote to seat Florida's delegates and Clinton delegates will assuming Hillary outpolls Obama in Florida. So what really matters is not the Florida results, but the results in the rest of the country where delegates are being chosen that will be seated. Those delegates will decide the fate of Florida's delegates and if Obama has a majority of them they won't be seated (unless of course he has a big enough advantage so they don't matter). Don't expect Obama to fall on his sword by supporting the seating of these delegates if they tip the balance to Hillary.

All of which makes the contest effectively a moot point. The Clinton campaign will be hoping that the media covers the Florida Democratic primary as a regular race so that they can blunt some of Obama's momentum coming out of South Carolina.

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