If the candidates' dueling visits this week foster a sense that Florida Democrats are too disaffected to unify, it could boost pressure on the rules panel to seat the state's delegates in proportion to the popular vote. The Obama campaign has resisted such a plan.
Clinton's Florida piggyback visit comes just as Obama was hoping to savor another milestone in his march toward the nomination: The primaries in Oregon and Kentucky Tuesday were expected to give him a majority of pledged delegates nationally.
The campaign events Wednesday – Obama in Tampa and Clinton in South Florida – will create the unusual spectacle of a nomination fight in a state whose primary took place nearly four months earlier.
"Florida will be the first state to have a campaign after the election," quipped Bill Carrick, an unaffiliated Democratic strategist. "It could be a new HBO special."
Obama plans to be in Florida through the end of the week, with visits to a synagogue in Boca Raton and with a Cuban-American group in Miami, as well as a few fundraisers. Clinton had not released her schedule past Wednesday. But according to her website, her supporters have organized several of their own events to picket Obama's visit.
"Protest Obama coming to Florida when he does not even recognize our right to vote!" reads the listing for an event outside an Obama fundraiser in Hollywood, Fla., Thursday. "Bring Signs!"
