This says it all,the Hillary going door to door in South Texas.


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February 14, 2008
Knocked Off Balance, Clinton Campaign Tries to Regain Its Stride
By PATRICK HEALY and KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

SAN ANTONIO — The Texas and Ohio presidential primaries, on March 4, have become must-win contests for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, her advisers say. So why is she just opening campaign field offices across those states?

The primary in Pennsylvania, on April 22, is also a crucial battleground. So why is her campaign telling its most prominent supporter there, Gov. Edward G. Rendell, that there is not enough money now for his proposed piece of direct mail to voters?

And the Maine caucuses on Sunday were the one recent contest that Mrs. Clinton had hoped to win. So why did the campaign of her rival, Senator Barack Obama, have better political and Internet operations to energize its supporters there? (Mr. Obama won Maine.)

The answers go to the heart of Mrs. Clinton’s current political challenge. She and her team showered so much money, attention and other resources on Iowa, New Hampshire and some of the 22-state nominating contests on Feb. 5 that they have been caught flat-footed — or worse — in the critical contests that followed, her political advisers said.

She also made a strategic decision to skip several small states holding caucuses, states where Mr. Obama scored big victories, accumulating delegates and, possibly, momentum.

Her heavy spending and relatively modest fund-raising in January compounded the problems, leaving the campaign ill-equipped to plan after Feb. 5, advisers and donors say.

“It sure didn’t look like they had a game plan after Super Tuesday,” Mr. Rendell said in an interview on Wednesday. “What I would have done, knowing the line-up, I would’ve picked one or two states to make an all-out effort, whether Maine or Washington State or you name it, to really try to stop the Obama momentum.”

While Clinton fund-raising has rebounded, to about $1 million a day, her advisers acknowledge that Mr. Obama has been taking money in at a faster clip since January. They say his recent money advantage is one reason he was able to build stronger organizations and spend more on advertising than she did in several states this winter.

Several Clinton donors put the blame on the campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, and said that Ms. Doyle’s shortcomings as a long-range planner was a factor that led her to be replaced on Sunday by another longtime Clinton aide, Maggie Williams.

But Clinton aides said they were confident they would have enough money to prevail in Ohio and Texas. They plan to open a campaign headquarters in Austin this weekend, and to open field offices soon; more than 100 staff members have been redeployed to Texas.

They have a campaign headquarters in Columbus, Ohio, and are opening field offices now; an Ohio spokesman for Mrs. Clinton said there were staff members working in the state’s 18 Congressional districts.

Still, after eight straight losses by Mrs. Clinton since Feb. 5, and with finances only now stabilizing, the campaign is scrambling to build up its forces in both states. On Tuesday afternoon, it sent an urgent request for help to volunteers in California, New York and other states that have already voted, asking people to travel to Texas and Ohio “to spread Hillary’s message and help her win.”

“We are setting up field offices and are looking for volunteers to travel into these states and spend as much time as they can,” the campaign e-mail request stated. “Every phone call made and every person on the ground makes all the difference.”

The message did not mention assistance with travel costs.

If the Clinton organization appears a little improvisational, a review of its recent performances suggests that Mrs. Clinton was outmaneuvered by Mr. Obama, who won some of his victories by margins of two to one.

In Idaho, for example, Mr. Obama’s campaign started setting up nearly a year before the Feb. 5 caucus. By the day of the caucus, he had five offices in the state and 20 paid staff members. A few days before, Mr. Obama himself showed up in Boise, drawing 14,000 people to the Taco Bell Arena, the biggest in the state.

Mrs. Clinton, by contrast, sent one of her supporters, Senator Maria Cantwell of neighboring Washington State, to drop by just before the caucuses.

“Idahoans are not used to having attention paid, so when someone does, it’s a huge deal,” said Chuck Oxley, a spokesman for the state’s Democratic Party. Turnout in Idaho was four times what it was in 2000. Mr. Obama won Idaho by 62 percentage points and took most delegates.

In Minnesota, “the Clinton campaign was in triage mode,” said Lawrence Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. He said Mrs. Clinton appeared to have allocated her dwindling resources to New York and California, the biggest prizes in the Feb. 5 contests (and which she won), investing almost nothing in media advertising in Minnesota and leaving her campaign there “like a M.A.S.H. unit.”

At the same time, Mr. Jacobs said, Mr. Obama “had developed almost a new style of campaigning.”

“He merges modern campaign technology — he has the list of names, the follow-up effort, all the literature distribution — with these phenomenal rock-arena political revivals,” Mr. Jacobs said. “In a caucus state, it’s formidable.”

Mr. Obama won Minnesota by 34 percentage points.

In Washington State, Cathy Allen, a longtime Democratic strategist working for Mrs. Clinton, said the Clinton campaign had worked hard.

“Our people were there,” Ms. Allen said of caucus day, which was Saturday. “We got more of our people out than ever. They just did more.”

Mr. Obama won Washington by 36 percentage points.

Three months before the North Dakota caucuses on Feb. 5, the Obama campaign dispatched a staff member there to begin organizing. The campaign quickly expanded to include 11 full-time staff members, including one person solely for media outreach. And in Utah, in preparation for Feb. 5, Mr. Obama opened an office months before Mrs. Clinton did, said Rob Miller, the vice chairman of the Utah Democratic Party.

“Hillary did not set foot in the state of Utah,” Mr. Miller said.

Mr. Obama won both states.

In Maine, Arden Manning, chairman of the state’s Democratic Party, attributed Mr. Obama’s victory by almost 20 percentage points in Sunday’s caucuses to his superior organization, despite Mrs. Clinton’s apparent advantages with the state’s demographics of older, blue-collar, lower-income voters.

“A lot of the credit for what happened here goes to the Obama campaign, a grass-roots campaign, that was very well organized, with precinct captains and precinct leaders getting people out,” Mr. Manning said.

In addition, the Obama campaign was more adept at using the Internet.

“I got very little from the Clinton side,” said Amy Fried, a political scientist at the University of Maine, who signed up on both campaigns’ Web sites to compare them. “But I got a lot from Obama, urging me to come in and work and telling me about events, just giving me lots more.”

Mrs. Clinton has had her own share of big victories, like Arizona, California, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Tennessee. Yet given the strong lead that she held in national opinion polls for much of 2007, and the image of inevitability that her campaign pushed so ardently, her organizational weaknesses — starting with her third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses — have been notable.

Guy Cecil, Mrs. Clinton’s field director, told reporters on Wednesday that Mrs. Clinton would not be outmatched again, committing to opening offices and dispatching staff not only to Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania, but also other battlegrounds to come, like Kentucky, Mississippi and even Puerto Rico, which holds the final contest on June 7.

“We are recommitting and redoubling our efforts to not only have the best candidate in the race, but also have the most effective and largest grass-roots effort in the states going forward,” Mr. Cecil said.

While both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama are only now expanding their operations in Texas and Ohio, some Clinton advisers expressed concern that she did not have a head start, given the importance of the two states.

Some Clinton allies and donors worry that Mrs. Clinton has left herself vulnerable after losing so many recent contests, but the candidate herself sounded cockier about her political fortunes on Wednesday than she has in recent memory.

At a news conference in McAllen, on the Mexican border, she noted that “the depth and breadth of my support is obvious” in South Texas.

“I want to congratulate Senator Obama on his recent victories and tell him to meet me in Texas — we’re ready,” Mrs. Clinton said.

Patrick Healy reported from San Antonio, and Katharine Q. Seelye from New York. Julie Bosman contributed reporting from New York.



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