Clinton tries to bounce back in Florida primary

Sarasota, Florida: Presidential candidates were canvassing in Florida on Monday, where Democrat Hillary Clinton tried to shift her momentum after losing heavily to Barack Obama in South Carolina.

Like all of her Democratic rivals, Clinton has agreed to a pledge imposed by national party leaders not to publicly campaign in Florida because of a dispute between the state and national party officials over the timing of the primary. But after her defeat on Saturday, Clinton was skating up against the edge of that agreement and trying to lend some credibility to the outcome, which now offers no delegates to the Democrat convention that chooses the party's presidential nominee.

For Republicans, the Tuesday contest in Florida will hold more weight in their party's nomination process. John McCain and Mitt Romney were leading in the polls, with former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani needing a win in the state to keep his campaign on course.

Clinton arrived in Florida on Sunday for two closed fundraisers, in keeping with the pledge not to campaign.

She clearly winked at that pledge with her arrival, joking about the warm weather and positioning herself so photographers had a palm tree for a backdrop.

Endorsement

After his decisive win in South Carolina, Obama received another boost with word he is receiving a highly-sought endorsement from Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a liberal icon and patriarch of the Kennedy dynasty.

Democratic Party officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed Obama would receive Kennedy's endorsement.

With split decisions in the Democratic contests thus far - Obama won Iowa and South Carolina, Clinton won New Hampshire and Nevada - there is increased speculation that the party's contest will extend beyond the mega-primary on February 5, when 22 of the 50 US states vote in primary contests.

The Super Tuesday races offer more than 1,600 convention delegates for the Democrats, a huge amount toward the total of 2,025 delegates needed to secure the party's nomination at this summer's national convention.

After Florida moved its primary up to today in an attempt to play a bigger role in choosing the presidential nominees, the Democratic National Committee said it would refuse to seat the state's delegation at the national convention in late August. But it is expected the eventual nominee will try to reverse that decision because of Florida's crucial role in the general election.

Clinton has already reached out to Florida residents by saying she favoured that step.

"I will try to persuade my delegates to seat the delegates from Michigan and Florida," she said. "The people of Florida deserve to be represented in the process of picking a candidate for president of the United States."

Michigan, which Clinton took in a nearly uncontested race, also violated party rules by moving its primary to January 15, and party leaders voted to strip the state of its 156 delegates as punishment.

Obama, who is seeking to be the first black US president, said his landslide win on Saturday in the Democrats' first southern primary this year marks a turn in party history, showing a black candidate can appeal to voters of all colours and in all regions. He also had overwhelming support from black voters - an exit poll showed eight in 10 black voters in South Carolina backed him.

However, Obama acknowledged Clinton, who leads in the national polls, will have an advantage on Super Tuesday because of her nearly universal name recognition.

Setback

Trailing behind Obama and Clinton in the Democratic race was former Senator John Edwards, who has yet to win any of the early state contests. His loss in his birth state of South Carolina was a sharp setback, but he has vowed to stay in the race.

On the Republican side, Romney and McCain engaged in an increasingly bitter and personal campaign with polls showing them running neck-and-neck before Florida's pivotal primary today, which could determine who wins the party's presidential nomination.

Romney, a millionaire venture capitalist and the former governor of Massachusetts, has cast himself as a business-savvy economic turnaround artist amid recession anxiety, while McCain, a former Vietnam prisoner of war, portrayed himself as a courageous wartime commander in chief in a dangerous world.

"He has an enormous disadvantage when it comes to the topics of changing Washington or fixing our economy," Romney said on Sunday, arguing he is far stronger than McCain on both issues.

Countered McCain: "Even if the economy is the, quote, No.1 issue, the real issue will remain America's security" and Romney is deficient in that area, he said. Preacher-turned-politician Mike Huckabee, the Iowa caucuses winner, was lagging in the polls.

No chads this time

There will be no "hanging chads" this time around in Florida. The punch-card voting that plagued the 2000 presidential election in the state is long gone.

But with Florida's critical Republican primary today, some in the state are bracing for more potential ballot trouble because the new electronic touch-screen machines in much of the state have aroused doubts of their own.

Florida legislators voted essentially to ban them earlier this year, after confusion in a 2006 congressional contest in Sarasota wound up in court. But the next set of machines will not be ready until the general election in November, forcing election officials to press the controversial machines back into use one more time.

"Every place in Florida with the touch screens should be doing the election supervisors' prayer - 'Oh, please, God, don't let this election be close,' " said Ion Sancho, election supervisor in Leon County and a longtime critic of the touch-screen machines.

The lingering doubts over Florida's machines in part reflect the difficulties of ballot reforms instigated across the country in the wake of the disputed 2000 election. What officials found is there is no perfect system for counting votes, and the switch to more modern means has not guaranteed reliability.

After Florida's presidential debacle in 2000, in which the outcome of the race came to depend on improvised rules about which marks on a punch card counted as a vote, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002.