Campaign Notebook: is it March already?

Anyone out there who’s been waiting for a break in the election-season action is going to have to wait a little longer.  2008 is sixty days old, and this cycle isn’t letting up any time soon.

President

Hillary Clinton is pulling out all the stops ahead of her last-ditch efforts in Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Vermont on Tuesday.  In an ad released this week, Clinton played what some are calling “the red phone game” in an ad focusing on a 3 AM call to the White House, and asking the listener who they want answering that call.  Barack Obama’s campaign quickly responded that Americans want someone with the right judgment to answer that call, reminding voters that their candidate was opposed to the Iraq war from the beginning while Clinton voted for the infamous Authorization for the Use of Military Force back in 2002.

Will it have an effect?  Political momentum is inexplicable, unpredictable and capricious, but it does exist.  Exit polls have noted that the economy and health care costs have caught up to or surpassed Iraq as an issue in many states, and in Texas and Ohio especially, trade issues like NAFTA are thorny indeed.  In both states, Obama has surged — polls this week indicate he is either dead even or ahead in Texas and dead even or slightly behind in Ohio.  As a counter, Clinton’s campaign claimed late this week that anything but a win in all four states voting Tuesday would be a failure for Obama, but it is difficult to see how winning only tiny Rhode Island on Tuesday would be seen as a lifeline to Clinton’s candidacy.

Expect a few more big-name endorsements on Monday to solidify the news cycle, and perhaps an announcement of Obama’s February fundraising total.  The Clinton campaign announced this week that they raised an impressive $36 million in February, but Obama’s campaign would only say they raised significantly more than that total.  Holding their fire until they see the whites of their opponents’ eyes, perhaps?

Senate

Incumbent Norm Coleman has had a minor case of foot-in-mouth syndrome recently in his bid for a second term in the U.S. Senate.  First, the AP picked up on reports that his campaign allowed a stock letter to the editor to be sent in virtually the same form by two separate people.  It’s no Larry-Craig-in-a-public-restroom, but it’s a black eye for a campaign whose focus is on promoting their candidate’s professionalism and ability to get things done in Washington.

Later in the week, the Franken campaign and their allies called attention to an article in the Owatonna People’s Press in which Coleman appears to make supportive statements toward Mike Ciresi, Franken’s leading opponent for the DFL endorsement this June.  Making statements like these into a political kiss of death has been done successfully before — witness Ned Lamont’s 2006 primary campaign against Joe Lieberman in Connecticut — but as I’ve said before, at this point, the DFL race comes down to three issues:  organizing, organizing, and organizing.  Whichever campaign gets its message to Senate District and County Unit convention delegates and organizes their supporters most efficiently will win this race.

Congress

The three Third district DFL candidates debated this week for the last time before Senate District conventions begin.  Ashwin Madia’s campaign was out in force, with twice the number of identified volunteers in the crowd as his nearest rival, but Terri Bonoff’s campaign has had a pretty good couple of weeks, PR-wise.  Her hiring of the highly-regarded Franney Starkey as communications director puts a bold circle around the professional nature of her campaign, and her website now features a nifty little application showing volunteers and activists how the walking subcaucus system works.  I’ll have a full report on the progress of today’s SD42 convention later in the day — if I can confirm that Eden Prairie High School will have wireless internet turned on, I may even do a wee bit of liveblogging.  Stay tuned.