Giuliani Ends Florida Campaign Before Dwindled Crowds

The gusto with which he launched his campaign is long gone. It was a quieter, less confident Rudy Giuliani who addressed a small gathering of supporters on the tarmac of Fort Lauderdale airport last night.

The former New York mayor invested all his hopes on winning Florida. He virtually ignored the early states, Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, and spent more than 60 days campaigning in Florida.

Polls suggest that strategy is going to fail and that, when the votes are counted on Tuesday night, Giuliani's hopes of the White House will be effectively over.

Only about 100 supporters turned out at the airport for a campaign stop billed as a "rally". They were noisy, drowning out his short speech with chants of "Rudy, Rudy", but the poor numbers suggest much of the energy has gone out of his campaign.

Giuliani, stepping off a plane on his final tour of the state, stood in front of his campaign bus, painted with the slogan "Florida is Rudy Country", even though the polls indicate is more likely to be Mitt Romney or John McCain country.

Blinking in the sunlight, he claimed the pollsters and pundits would be proved wrong. About 500,000 Republicans have taken advantage of the state's early voting system to cast their ballots and Guiliani insisted many of them were for him. He predicted these early votes would cause an upset.

"We will win in Florida. We will win on February 5. We will win the Republican nomination and we will win the White House," the former Republican favorite claimed.

He tried to differentiate himself from the new front-runners, Mitt Romney and John McCain, by chastising them for exchanging personal insults.

"Things are getting very negative between some of my opponents. There is too much at stake for this name-calling," he said.

He ran through the big issues - his promise to fight terrorism and to introduce the biggest tax cuts in US history - but it is a measure of how much the ambition with which he began the campaign has had to be cut down that he also addressed local concerns, promising to support a natural catastrophe fund for a state worried about hurricanes.