NC Robo-Calls: Another Clinton Connection?
Wed Apr 30, 2008 at 03:56:22 PM PDT
A lot of information is emerging about the robo-calls that were placed to African American voters in North Carolina, arousing the suspicion of state authorities. In those robo-calls, a speaker calling himself "Lamont Williams" informs voters that they will be receiving voter registration packets and that they should send them in to register to have their votes counted. However, the calls were made after the deadline for mail-in registration had passed, and apparently many were made to voters who were already registered. It turns out that the calls were placed by an organization called "Women's Voices, Women's Vote".
WVWV's connections to the Clinton campaign have been blogged about here:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
But was the head of WVWV the "national women's vote director" for the Clinton campaign back in 1992?
Page Gardner, the head of WVWV, has a post at HuffPo trying to explain away the apparently disenfranchising robo-calls placed by her organization:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
It's been widely noted, here and elsewhere, that Maggie Williams and other close Clinton associates have been on the WVWV board. It's important to note also that Page Gardner herself, the head of WVWV, has her own long-standing ties to the Clintons. For example:
"O'Brien hired Page Gardner, a young campaign strategist who had been in the Clinton campaign war room in Little Rock."
-cited in a book on NAFTA by Frederick Mayer, text available at:
http://www.ciaonet.org/...
You can find a bunch of other citations of Page Gardner's old Clinton connections if you do a Google News Archive search on ["Page Gardner" Clinton], and then look at stories from around 1992. For example, in an excerpt that comes up from an October 28 1992 Philadelphia Inquirer article, she is described as:
"Page Gardner, national women's vote director for Clinton".
http://news.google.com/...
And now her organization has placed misleading robo-calls to African American voters that could help Hillary.
Obviously this alone is not conclusive evidence for anything nefarious, but it is another red flag on an already shaky landscape, documented elsewhere on Daily Kos. And it is a reminder that Hillary, her associates, and their campaign activities may need a little further "vetting" in this process - which hopefully the blogging community can provide.
More on the Clinton connections to WVWV, including information on Page Gardner's donations to Hillary's campaign, is blogged here:
http://www.dailykos.com/...