Obama Campaign Playing Spy Games…On Hillary
Anyone thinking that campaigns don’t do opposition research on each other within the same part hasn’t read this post on the Primary Colors blog:
Things got a little eerie in Erie today.
At Hillary Clinton’s campaign office in West Erie Plaza, a young man who told workers that he came to volunteer for the New York senator turned out to be a Barack Obama volunteer.
According to the Clinton staff in Erie, the young man in question was leery of signing the mandatory sign-in sheet that all volunteers fill out when they come into the office.
But after some time, he agreed, but his sketchy behavior, asking the volunteers if they were “cutting turf” (campaign lingo for literature drops), led them to first search for his name on Google, then Facebook and finally the Federal Election Commission Web site. It turns out, thanks to Google and Facebook, he is an Obama supporter. And the FEC lists him as receiving disbursements from the Obama for America campaign, as standard student campaign cash.
After one quick call to the Obama campaign office in Erie, guess who answered the phone?
“I was just there to check things out,” said Sam Glenzer, who oddly used his real name when signing in at the Clinton campaign office.
Glenzer said he had nothing nefarious in mind.
– Salena Zito
That’s pretty stupid, really. Why didn’t Glenzer use a ficticious name? That way, he could’ve signed in, thereby not raising red flags. What this tells me is that the Obama and Clinton campaigns are still fighting hard for Pennsylvania votes. If Hillary doesn’t win by double digits in Pennsylvania, her shot at winning decreases significantly.
This should be an interesting primary. According to this post by Salena Zito, Pennsylvania is an interesting state from a demographic standpoint:
Pennsylvania is a complex state in a general election, but in a primary election, it is pretty simple. Think of it as Philadelphia and the state’s northern tier of counties as the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and the rest of the terrain as a Midwest state with mid-state Democratic voters. If everything was equal, that would highly benefit Clinton, but this is politics, and everything isn’t equal.
The benefit for Obama can be that the bulk of the votes in a Democratic primary race come from that small swath of geography in the east and not the vast hinterlands from here to the Ohio border.
His challenge is to make a huge dent in those northern counties. This is a quirky territory because while it is home to Obama-friendly latte liberals, the area is also filled with staunch Rendell supporters, a big-time Clinton fundraiser and campaigner. To add even more oddness to those counties’ voting patterns, they split their ticket between Al Gore and Rick Santorum in 2000.
Let’s hope that the shine is off Obama. Let’s hope that Hillary wins with a solid margin. That’ll keep things boiling a little while longer.
Technorati Tags: Obama, Opposition Research, Hillary, Pennsylvania, Ed Rendell, Al Gore, Election 2008
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog