Politico's Ben Smith: Chasing Kerry in Texas [View All]

[whometense]

What a difference a great surrogate can make.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/

March 01, 2008
Read More: Hillary Clinton

Chasing Kerry in Texas

A mistakenly forwarded internal Clinton campaign e-mail exchange offers a glimpse behind the scenes at the scramble for every vote in Texas -- in this case, for veterans in the Rio Grande valley.

The e-mail thread went out yesterday below a press release on veterans' issues that seems to have been sent to the campaign's veterans' list.

In the first e-mail, Clinton adviser Burns Strider contacted Texas spokeswoman Adrienne Elrod, Howard Wolfson and several other top Clinton aides.

THIS HAPPENED THIS MORNING: This morning Senator Clinton’s staff contacted Senator Cornyn’s staff and added her name as a co-sponsor to S. 1838, a bill to bring a VA Hospital to the Rio Grande Valley. Senator Clinton’s commitment to providing a state-of-the-art VA hospital to the Veterans of the Valley is real and she will see that it happens as President.

See article below… we need to move her cosponsorship asap… it’s a critical issue to valley veterans and they are moving emails now that Kerry is on the bill and, even though, they have been asking the other campaigns to get on Clinton has not… It may be the Obama is getting on and we need to get something out first if at all possible… anyway, Kerry’s getting on seems to be favoring Obama too in some of the vets corners… can you help??

Elrod responded:

Looping in Dana, Sonia, and Peter – guys can you move this quickly? I saw the front page story in the Rio Grande Guardian about JFK’s support of this today. Let’s move this fast. Are we doing a release from official office on her co-sponsorship?

The press release below which this exchange noted the launch of a new veterans' website.

And there's nothing really unusual about the exchange -- just a glimpse at how, below the frantic scramble on the surface of the campaigns, there's an even more frantic scramble behind the scenes, and dozens of different targets in each state. In this case, John Kerry's work on an obscure veterans' bill -- totally unnoticed in the mainstream media -- seems to have precipitated the mini-crisis.

Politico contributor Gebe Martinez, on a similar note, recently e-mailed that the Clinton campaign scrambled to put Bill Clinton out in Del Rio, Texas, after the Obama campaign sent John Kerry there.