TAMPA, Fla. — Barack Obama traveled to Florida on Wednesday to prepare the way for a general-election battle even as rival Hillary Rodham Clinton invoked the state’s incendiary recount dispute in 2000 to make her case to extend the struggle over the Democratic nomination for president.
A day after declaring the party’s nomination “within reach” at a victory rally in Iowa, the Illinois senator detoured from the remaining primaries to begin a three-day campaign swing through a quintessential swing state, offering praise for Clinton along the way as he sought to unify the party behind him.
While Obama trekked through central Florida, Clinton was 200 miles to the south, at the epicenter of the bitter recount battle that ended the 2000 election, summoning memories of the Bush vs. Gore Supreme Court decision as she argued for full representation for delegate slates from Florida and Michigan at the Democratic National Convention in Denver on Aug. 25-28.
Florida voters “learned the hard way what happens when your votes aren’t counted and the candidate with fewer votes is declared the winner,” she told a crowd in Boca Raton in Palm Beach County, a key site in the recount fight between Al Gore and George W. Bush that ended with a Supreme Court decision halting the recount.
“The lesson of 2000 here in Florida is crystal clear: If any votes aren’t counted, the will of the people isn’t realized and our democracy is diminished,” she said.
