GOP grooms Florida vote

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — Rudy Giuliani found the audience he wanted in Frank Duffy, a retired New York police sergeant wearing the dark-blue cap of the NYPD, an ex-cop who remembers when New York was "a basket case" and thanks Giuliani for cleaning it up.

Duffy, several hundred more supporters and the just plain curious filled a packed ballroom Monday at a convention hall on PGA Tour Boulevard, home for some of the staunchest Republican voters in this state that is quickly becoming a tell-all contest for Giuliani and his GOP rivals.

"We need someone who has gotten things done in the past ... I have," said a shirt-sleeved Giuliani, standing before a placard reading: "Tested. Ready. Now."

Sen. John McCain found the audience he was seeking in the glittery, mirrored classic of Miami's Little Havana, the restaurant known as Versailles, with McCain knocking back Cuban coffee to the cheers of his crowd. He was accompanied by Miami's three Cuban-American members of Congress in a community that will count for perhaps 10 percent of the vote in Florida's presidential primary on Jan. 29.

"I understand Cuba," said McCain, a Naval Academy graduate who served in 1962 on the USS Enterprise. "I am proud to have sat on a flight deck of a United States Navy aircraft carrier during the Cuban Missile Crisis."

Mitt Romney, too, found his own audiences as the former Massachusetts governor crossed the Sunshine State in the final week of an appeal to some of the 3.8 million Republican voters who will help shape a contest still uncertain after several early caucuses and primaries.

The stakes in Florida could not be much higher. For Giuliani, who is openly pinning his hopes on winning the state, a loss could be devastating. For McCain, a victory could finally make him the undisputed front-runner of an unusually turbulent GOP field. For either Romney or former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a win here offers a badly needed revival heading into Super Tuesday in two weeks.

This could be a make-or-break primary for Giuliani, who has fared poorly in the opening contests of the year and invested heavily in Florida to launch a big-state strategy that he hopes will play out Feb. 5, when more than 20 states from New York to Illinois to California will hold primaries.

And McCain has arrived here with a South Carolina victory buoying a campaign that he launched with a victory in New Hampshire.

"We come into Florida with some wind at our back and recognize we've got some hard campaigning to do in the next eight days or so," said McCain, who also made stops in Jacksonville and Pensacola, home to a heavy contingent of active military and retired veterans.

This isn't Iowa anymore. After season-opening party caucuses and primary elections in states with relatively small populations and mostly white populations, Florida poses the first contest in a place, the fourth-largest state, that looks a lot more like most of America.

A significant Latino vote will turn out here, with Cuban-Americans accounting for one in 10 of all Republican voters, and a powerful military vote will turn out, with retirees and the active-duty living around or at bases largely arrayed across a northern tier from Jacksonville to the Panhandle.

Giuliani, Romney and others are appealing to the Cuban crowd as well — with Romney's Spanish-language TV ads ramping up this week. But Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., a fixture of Miami politics, suggests that many Cuban-Americans can relate to McCain, who spent 5 ½ years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam after being shot down over Hanoi.