Zero Hour For Rudy In Florida

Rudy Giuliani's campaign strategy of losing all the primaries and caucuses, earning no endorsements, and ceding the media spotlight to all of his contenders for two solid months was charitably described as "unconventional" by the Associated Press today, probably because the editor of the piece wouldn't allow the use of words like "stupid" or "foolhardy" or a LOLCat that read "I can haz votes mommy?" But reporter Devlin Barrett points out that "If he wins Florida, he will have earned the biggest, brashest "I told you so" of his political career." And he's right! People will say, "See! Florida is filled with a bunch of senile, butterfly-balloting, mistaking-Pat-Buchanan-for-Al-Gore fools! Told you so!"

Nevertheless, Rudy does have a wafer-thin hope to cling to: the ballots cast by Floridians who took advantage of the option to cast early, absentee ballots. The Miami Herald noted that "More than 1.05 million early and absentee ballots were cast even before the polls opened at 7 a.m." Thanks to the efforts of campaign volunteers who are apparently camped out behind many of Florida's finer Shrimp Shacks, the Giuliani campaign has been pitching to Florida early-birds for some time now, playing on the hopes that these "early adopters" will reach a "tipping point" and achieve all that nerdy Malcolm Gladwell stuff that nobody believes anymore.

At every campaign stop Giuliani has made, aides have distributed flyers telling voters where and when they can cast early ballots, and it's the first and last thing Giuliani urges his audience to do. He clearly believes it's his secret weapon, and one that polls can't really detect.

"Florida is going to catapult us to the nomination because Florida is going to vote in a way that I think people don't even realize," he told a boisterous crowd in Naples last week.

Privately, aides insist they can see the fruits of their labor already in early voting data.

So there you have it. Rudy is pinning his hopes on people who cast votes long before they had the good sense to be fully repulsed by his rat-faced terrormongering. It's sort of like that time where everybody initially got way into Zima before they realized that drinking something with the taste of a malted car battery wasn't worth the minimal buzz.