Florida Straw Poll Falls Victim to Budget Crisis : Politics: Delegates are on hand, but many GOP presidential candidates stay in nation’s capital. Senators make it onto TV debate, late, via satellite.

The convention center is still under construction here, and so, as it happens, was the Florida Straw Poll--a self-proclaimed Republican bellwether reduced this Friday to just another hostage of the budget crisis in Washington.

The delegates were certainly on hand to cast ballots for the conservative candidate of their choice: 3,393 of the most slogan-chanting, button-wearing, red-white-and-blue-swathed members of the Grand Old Party that you’d ever want to see. But where were the candidates at this lavish Republican sideshow, which marks Florida’s first time at center stage in the early days of the political season?

Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, the free-spending front-runner, was back in the Capitol, although his campaign presence was hard to miss, from the free barbecue lunch and live country music under circus tents at Camp Bob to the seven-story Bob Dole sign temporarily draped from the side of the Clarion Hotel.

Texas Sen. Phil Gramm played hide-and-seek with this extravaganza billed as Presidency III--now he’s in Washington, now in Orlando, there to vote, here to talk. His fellow senator-cum-candidates were stuck up north, grappling, too, with the budget.

A much-awaited televised debate--envisioned as nine candidates wrestling live onstage at the Orange County Convention Center here--turned into a battle of the no-shows.

It was not until late Friday, after the Senate approved the Republican budget blueprint, that Dole, Gramm, Sens. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana and Arlen Specter of Pennyslvania and Rep. Robert K. Dornan of Garden Grove joined the proceedings--40 minutes late, via satellite from Washington.

Publishing magnate Malcolm S. (Steve) Forbes Jr. also put in an electronic appearance. The only candidates to show up in the flesh were ex-Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, commentator Patrick J. Buchanan and former State Department staffer Alan Keyes.

Earlier, California Gov. Pete Wilson, working the crowd on Dole’s behalf, said his candidate’s corporeal absence could only improve the already-strong standing of the gentleman from Kansas.

Not everybody thought so.

Gramm, taking potshots at Dole in front of a cheering Orlando crowd before racing back to Washington for the late-night budget vote, said: “There’s no way the public will accept someone who says, ‘I’m too busy.’ ”

Keyes, while working the delegate crowd, took a swipe at his absent fellow candidates by decrying those “who are so attached to the federal government that they can’t leave it for 30 seconds. They need to worry more about what’s destroying our families and our country.”

Clearly, though, the people who really matter here are the delegates, the thousands of faithful Republicans basking in the southeastern sun and the national spotlight. And not everyone minded the smaller passel of politicians. There were, after all, souvenirs to gather.

*

“I’m for Gramm,” said one Dole-bedecked alternate delegate who shall remain nameless for obvious reasons. “But I’m wearing all the Dole stuff because I want the freebies. You get in free to the [Christian Coalition’s $15-a-ticket] God and Country rally if you wear a Dole T-shirt. Man, you’ve got to understand, this is the biggest thing we’re ever going to go to, and we want to feel important.”

And important they did feel. In New Hampshire and Iowa, where pressing prospective presidential flesh is considered not a privilege but a God-given right, the early primary and caucus respectively ensure that candidates for the nation’s highest office go there early and often. Florida’s middle-of-the-pack primary means that the state generally receives less attention. The straw poll is an effort to change all that, and this year it almost worked.

Until Washington crashed earlier this week, the nine candidates were all scheduled for a debate at 9 p.m. PST on “Larry King Live.”

After a day’s worth of uncertainty, they got to hear all nine engage in disjointed discussion--three here and six there. Most vowed that no American soldiers should fight the ground war in Bosnia. All were preoccupied by the budget problems perplexing Washington. There was little substance, only a little flash. For, as Dornan moaned early in the evening, “Many of our candidates, God love ‘em, are charismatically challenged.”

Delegates were planning to have post-debate dessert--”pastries, international coffees & cordials!”--over jazz with Bob and Libby at the Omni-Rosen Hotel. No luck.

Sure, they got to hear Alexander sing along with Crystal Gayle and Ray Stevens, a medley of tunes including “Your Cheating Heart.” Stevens: “Something wrong with that?” Alexander: “Sounds like a Bill Clinton song to me.”

They got to gush over Keyes, who took a few potshots of his own as he strolled through the hotel lobby, chastising one unsuspecting Buchanan delegate for the “venomous” campaign tactics of her candidate.

They got to hear Naomi Judd tell a wild Christian Coalition rally that she would rather “run naked” through a Teamsters convention than attend a political event, but that her admiration for Alexander brought her to Orlando. And they got to hear Buchanan tell the same rally, “I will pick a pro-life running mate. I will appoint Supreme Court justices who will overturn Roe vs. Wade and restore prayer in the public schools.”

This morning they can still take a “Walk with Lamar”--across the street, not across the state. And they can buy a presidential sandwich at the hotel deli: Steve Forbes, pastrami, $6.95; Pat Buchanan, plain hot dog, $3.95; Bill Clinton, turkey, $6.50.

*

But it just isn’t quite the same--at least not for the delegates. Dr. Guirlaine St. Fleur, from Charlotte County via Haiti, was looking forward to seeing Dole again, the man she reveres right up there with her grandfather.

“I am 100% for Sen. Dole,” she said, enraptured, after greeting Keyes, her distant second choice. “There isn’t anything I pray to God for that he doesn’t give me. I ask God to make Sen. Dole President. . . . In the spiritual world, I believe in God. In the world of humankind, I believe in Bob Dole.”

St. Fleur will have to wait nearly a year to find out if her prayers are answered. She’ll at least have to wait until tonight to find out if he wins the Florida Straw Poll. But she and other Dole supporters got a little good news Friday morning.

In the latest Orlando Sentinel/Mason Dixon poll of Florida voters, 44% of those surveyed said that they would vote for Dole if the state Republican primary were held today--up from 33% in September.

That puts Dole 31 percentage points ahead of his nearest competitor, Gramm, whose support dropped slightly to 13% from the 14% he polled two months ago. According to the poll, Buchanan comes in third with 9%, Alexander is next with 5%, and Forbes, Keyes and Dornan split 8%.

Dole delegate Claudette Croteau of Ponte Vedra Beach pins her hopes on those numbers, rather than this afternoon’s straw vote, which she fears could be disappointing because the candidate is not here.

“If he can get more than anyone else [in the straw poll], even just a few votes, I’ll be happy,” she said, taking off her winter-white blazer to protect it from the barbecue at Camp Bob. “I’m very pragmatic. That’s what I’m looking for.”

Times political writer Ronald Brownstein contributed to this story.