Great stories coming out of the Lone Star state.
First of all, if you want more evidence that Clinton is being done in by her campaign, there's this blog post from TV reporter Elise Hu in Austin.
Since the arrival of the competing presidential campaigns, I have had a difficult time getting a hold of the Clinton campaign's Texas press contact, Adrienne. It's rather difficult to include the Clinton campaign in stories when we cannot connect. For example...
-- A February 8th email to establish first contact went unreturned.
-- A call and voicemail message on February 13th regarding office openings went unreturned.
This morning, I called for a response on the House Democratic Caucus leaders taking issue with Clinton's comments about Texas not being in her "electoral calculation" in November. Adrienne responded with, "Oh, Lord," and said she would call back once she found out more about the dust-up, and I never heard from her again.
Not encouraging if you're a Clinton partisan or, well, Hillary Clinton herself.
Next up, for you Texas readers, Anna will be doing an online texas convention training this Friday afternoon on Daily Kos. If you're a Texan and want to know how the whole system works, anna will help you out. And as a bonus, she sent me this report from the ground:
and let me just add to what karl sent you last night about the obama campaign doing more to rebuild the party in two weeks than the party's done in years.... he's 1000% right.
we have - in tarrant county alone - 3400 volunteers and over 600 precinct captains. that means that we could fill almost every single precinct captain spot in tarrant county. one of our goals has been to ask these volunteers to continue to serve their local parties, and we are urging our precinct captains to become precinct chairs where ever there is an empty spot. if our people will fill the empty spots, we could have a precinct chair in every precinct in tarrant county for the first time in over 15 years.
we have also been conducting multiple caucus training sessions around tarrant county over the past week, and these will continue through next weekend. i have yet to attend a training event where less than 250 people showed up. if just half of that 250 showed up to one County Executive Committee meeting, we could literally have a majority voting block and take back our county party. this was one goal of howard dean's campaign and it is being fully realised with the obama campaign.
our outgoing county chair showed up at our first training session - 400 attendees showed up on two day's notice - and was floored. although he's on team hillary, he could not help but be amazed at what we were doing. i know because i asked him. i told him i knew he was team hillary, but asked what he thought of our event. to paraphrase, he said (and told me i could quote him on this) that he and Garry Mauro (one of Clinton's top Texans) go way back and he couldn't exactly walk away from that history, but he could see which campaign was stirring people. that was two weeks ago when we were in our infancy stages.
another thing that i keep hearing from the paid staff is how amazed they are at the infrastructure that our local volunteers created. before our paid staff arrived, we had a volunteer mailing list consisting of a few hundred people. we sent out the call for office space, supplies, homes for the staff, crews to prepare the offices, etc etc. in less than one week, we volunteers - working without the support of our county party - prepped and created two primo locations out of whole cloth. all our staff had to do was literally show up and get to work. this allowed them to concentrate on what they do best: running the ground game. i strongly suspect that tarrant county - which has been a republican stronghold for over a decade - is going to suprise everyone on march 4th.
Inspiring stuff, no doubt. And that YouTube above? Thank anna for putting it together.