Hillary Clinton says Barack Obama doesn't care about Florida and Michigan votes counting at the convention.
She's right.
Sorry, Florida Democrats. He's just not that into you, as one of the characters on HBO's Sex in the City learned the hard way. His campaign advisors, at times, have behaved as loutish as Mr. Big on his most commitment-phobic days.
Seven months ago, when the national Democratic Party cracked down on Florida for scheduling a primary out of turn, Obama didn't flinch. Privately, some supporters breathed a sigh of relief that Clinton wouldn't be able to rack up delegates in a state where she held a double-digit lead in the polls.
A few days later, when the four states entitled to hold the earliest contests pressured the candidates to really stick it to Florida and Michigan, Obama agreed not to campaign in the two states. After all, what did he have to lose? (Two big, delegate-rich, influential states that favored Clinton, that's what.)
Shortly before the two states held their primaries, the Obama campaign once again showed its lack of sensitivity to the voters. ''Neither the Florida nor Michigan primaries are playing any role in deciding the Democratic nominee,'' sniffed campaign spokesman Bill Burton.
Burton dissed Florida Democrats once again on Election Night, sending glib e-mails about how their votes would count toward exactly zero delegates.
Rude, rude, rude. (Though so far, correct.)
More recently, as Democrats in Florida and Michigan tried and failed to muster the political will to pull together new votes that would count toward delegates, Obama stood up the states again. Vague statements about following party rules were all he offered in the way of support.
He's just not that into you. But at least he's been consistent.
As Obama fairly pointed out this week, Clinton didn't make a peep when Florida and Michigan were ostracized by the national party. And when Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada urged her to blow off the two big states, she did. At the time, she needed those smaller states a lot more than she needed Florida and Michigan.
''It's clear, this election they're having is not going to count for anything,'' Clinton said of the vote in Michigan.
Now that she finds herself roughly 100 delegates in the hole, Clinton is clamoring for votes in Florida and Michigan to ``count.''
She said this week: ``I do not see how two of our largest and most significant states can be disenfranchised and left out of the process of picking our nominee without raising serious questions about the legitimacy of that nominee.''
But Clinton herself was complicit in the disenfranchising, the leaving out, by failing to speak up when the national party and four early states decided to make Florida voters irrelevant. (The lawmakers who moved the primary out of bounds deserve blame, too.)
''Sen. Clinton, I have to say on this, has been completely disingenuous,'' Obama told CNN's Anderson Cooper this week.
``She said when she was still trying to compete for votes in Iowa and New Hampshire that Michigan and Florida wouldn't count. Then, as soon as she got into trouble politically and it looked like she would have no prospects of winning the nomination without having them count, suddenly she's extraordinarily concerned with the voters there.''
So there you have it. Florida Democrats are left with two presidential candidates: a cold fish and a fair-weather friend.
What they need is a leader to help them get out of this mess.
Beth Reinhard is the political writer for The Miami Herald.
