Letting their hair down

One of the most striking things here in Austin is how the Clinton people are enjoying themselves; the campaign here seems to have embraced its underdog status. So at a Women for Hillary event last night, Clinton staffers had a drink while Gloria Steinem, the veteran feminist, rallied the crowd with a string of remarks that would have given the Clinton people heartburn just a few weeks ago. Steinmen dropped the f-bomb, riffed—rather tastelessly—on how the press would treat McCain for being shot down if he was a woman and generally served up...

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Obama's organisational advantage

After I’d been to Clinton HQ, I went along to see what the Obama campaign were doing. The first thing that strikes you is how the two campaigns have swapped roles. While the Clinton office is out of town next to a discount furniture store, the Obama one is in a corporate office building in the heart of downtown. It is now Obama offices—not Clinton ones—that have people chaperoning the press.

The Obama people here are very keen to stress how much of a grassroots’ efforts their campaign here is. They emphasise...

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There will be chaos

I’ve just been watching a caucus training session for Hillary Clinton supporters here in Austin and the only conclusion that you can draw is that the Texas caucuses are going to be a mess to rival what happened in Nevada. The Texas process is bizarre. On election day, there is a normal primary and then once the polls close there is a caucus which determines how a third of the delegates are allocated. The rules for the caucus are unbelievably complicated. The instructor was reduced to reassuring the crowd that there is “bound to be someone there who kinda knows what’s happening.”

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Winning early

By the end of the day on Thursday, more than two thirds of a million early votes had already been cast in the Democratic primary here in Texas. By contrast, only a little over two hundred thousand votes had been cast on the Republican side. This suggests that a decent slice of Republicans are crossing over to vote in the more competitive primary.

The intensity of the early voting and the Republican cross over are, if past performance is any guide, good news for Barack Obama. Astute observers here think that Obama is wracking up big margins among these voters. With early voting, which ended yesterday, expected to account for about a quarter of the overall turnout some are even speculating that Obama has already secured his margin of victory.  

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Come November

One thing that Hillary Clinton’s new ad did achieve was to put the spotlight back on her contest with Obama. Pundits, always keen to start chattering about the next thing, had begun to focus on the likely McCain – Obama general election match up which was starving the Clinton campaign of oxygen. But there is no getting away from the fact that a McCain – Obama race this autumn is by far the likeliest outcome. Such a race would be fascinating—another reason the pundits are so keen to talk about it—because the...

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Ad wars

The problem with Hillary Clinton’s new ad asking who do you want to take the 3am crisis call is that there’s no clear reason for people to think that Hillary would react better than Barack Obama. Indeed, the Obama camp instantly hit back with an ad pointing her support for the Iraq war, an albatross around her neck with Democratic primary voters, while the Clinton camp couldn’t point to a moment where Hillary has been tested by a foreign policy crisis when asked by a reporter. Instead, they had to resort to talking about her work on the armed...

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The audacity of expectations setting

Austin, Texas

The latest expectations setting memo from the Clinton campaign is a classic of the genre. It lays out how much money Obama is spending and how much time he has spent in the March 4th states and then declares:

“If he cannot win all of these states with all this effort, there's a problem. Should Senator Obama fail to score decisive victories with all of the resources and effort he is bringing to bear, the message will be clear:
 
Democrats, the majority of whom have favored Hillary in

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