CELEBRATION, Fla. — In a bizarro primary season in which the Republican Party’s two front-runners see Iowa and New Hampshire as afterthoughts, Florida is shaping up to be the site of a showdown between Mayor Giuliani and Fred Thompson. With that in mind, I spent yesterday on the Thompson campaign bus as he made his Sunshine State debut.

Jacksonville, Fla.

At the first event of the day, in downtown Jacksonville, Mr. Thompson laid it on thick.

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it to be back somewhere that they don’t think I talk with a funny accent,” Mr. Thompson started off, using a line he’s been whipping out down South.

“It’s good to be back among neighbors,” he said. “What Floridians do is going to be important to the future of our country,” he said. “In the primary election, in the general election.”

Roughly 150 to 200 people came out to hear Mr. Thompson in the heat (my laptop’s online temperature reading was 77 degrees, but that must have been Celsius), and they gave him a warm welcome.

After his standard stump speech, Mr. Thompson took questions from the audience. One was on education, and he laid into No Child Left Behind, President Bush’s signature education law.

“We’ve been spending increasing amounts of federal money for decades, with increasing rules, increasing mandates, increasing regulations,” Mr. Thompson said. “It’s not working.”

He neglected to mention that he voted for NCLB — which increased federal spending on, and regulation of, education.

The Villages, Fla.

This was the big one. The Thompson campaign is claiming 1,000 people came out to the stop at this mega-retirement complex (population 60,000). That’s what happens when the district attorney from “Law & Order” stops off in a town where no one has to be at work — though the number was probably closer to 500.

“I really admire him,” one gentleman who came out to hear the speech, Craig Meshaw, who moved to the Villages from Jacksonville last December, told me. “I’ve always liked him on TV.” Mr. Meshaw said Mr. Giuliani’s “voice is too thin. … It doesn’t have that deep, ‘I’m sincere’ feeling.”

Mr. Thompson didn’t make any news in his stump speech or the Q&A here. But he did in an interview with the St. Petersburg Times, whose reporter asked him about the Terri Schiavo case. The man who was shepherding Chief Justice Roberts through the Senate during the controversy said he didn’t know enough about the case to offer an opinion.

“Local matters generally speaking should be left to the locals,” he told the Times. “I think Congress has got an awful lot to keep up with. … I don’t know all the facts surrounding that case, I can’t pass judgment on it. I know that good people were doing what they thought was best. … That’s going back in history. I don’t remember the details of it.”

By “history,” Mr. Thompson apparently means “two years ago.”

On the way to the next location, I asked the Thompson campaign to clarify. A campaign spokesman, Jeff Sadosky, offered this: “While he believes in the sanctity of life, he also believes that it was a decision for the family to make under state law, so there was no role for the federal government to play.” Later, on the bus, he added: “Congress has better things to do with their time.”

That’s not an answer the right-to-life crowd is going to like. But along with his refusal to support the Federal Marriage Amendment, this goes a ways in proving Mr. Thompson’s commitment to federalism.

Did I mention the Villages has a golf-cart overpass across the highway?

Celebration, Fla.

In this community, near Disney World and designed by Disney, Mr. Thompson was asked about why he hasn’t done a debate yet. “Standing up here 10 in a row, you know, like a bunch of seals waiting for somebody to throw you the next fish, is not necessarily the best way to impart your information to the American people,” he said, to substantial applause. “I’m not above acting like a seal every once in a while and waiting for the next fish, I just don’t want to do it all the time.”

Mr. Thompson is not likely to take the stage with his rivals until early October. Maybe, by then, he’ll have added some substance to his style.

rsager@nysun.com