2. We won't need Florida - it'll be in the bag, and this President very much wants to win New York in 2004.
Bush makes this assumption at his own peril, and please don't start thinking Florida will be a walk in '04. The main reason Jeb's margin was so big in November was that Bill McBride was a single-issue guy who was bought and paid for by the teacher's unions. His mission was to promote and implement a Constitutional amendment to limit class sizes (the teachers' union jobs bill, as I call it), as well as to ladle the gravy to the educrats.
McBride claimed he could provide all this teacher pork with only a cigarette tax increase , but this fell so woefully short of providing the needed funding that it didn't even pass the laugh test. When pressed on the issue, he danced all around the question. Then, in the last debate of the campaign, Tim Russert (the moderator) asked McBride how much it would cost to implement the class size amendment, and McBride didn't have a clue. The hissing sound heard statewide right after that came from all the air leaving the McBride campaign.
To give you a feel for the schizoid nature of the November election here in Flori-DUH (as the national media so fondly describe us to this day), even though Bush won, the class-size amendment passed as well : (. For that matter, so did an absolutely idiotic amendment regulating the treatment of pregnant pigs, which the animal-rights nuts foisted on a bunch of ignorant people who have never seen a live pig before, and which may well kill the entire pig farming industry in this state (which was, of course the goal, and I shudder to think which livestock industry will next fall into PETA's sights).
This is an extremely narrowly divided state, and will be for some time. The Republicans dominate the state government, but a lot of that can be attributed to the utter ineptitude of the Florida Democratic Party, which BTW just canned its chairman. Put Florida in the Republican bank at your own risk.