The Texas Observer

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama found their way to the same city tonight for rival rallies ahead of Tuesday’s critical Texas primary. Obama went first — ramping up a crowd of roughly four thousand at a packed Verizon Wireless Amphitheater outside San Antonio.

An hour later, Clinton took her turn across town, addressing a much smaller — though no less enthusiastic — crowd at Hemisfair Park downtown. San Antonio, along with Dallas-Fort Worth, has become one of the important battlegrounds in the state.

The campaigns dueled across town just as they were snapping at each other over Clinton’s latest ad, and as new polls today indicated the races in Texas and Ohio are tight.

Obama’s rally showed the impressive organization of his campaign — and a hint of its controlling nature.

No sooner had I arrived at the Verizon Amphitheater, then a string of five Obama volunteers — from as far away as D.C. and Hawaii — personally escorted me to the press area. When I remarked on the stunning service, a staffer told me that’s what happens when so many volunteers flock to a campaign.

Waiting for Obama to arrive, I ventured out of the press area to interview supporters. Apparently, that was a no-no. When I sat down next to a woman wearing an Obama shirt, a volunteer tapped me on the shoulder and told me the campaign forbids reporters from interviewing anyone before speeches.

The campaign wants reporters doing interviews after the speech, when everyone is fired up and ready to go. It was a bizarre moment: I’ve never been forbidden to interview campaign supporters at a political rally. (Eventually, I managed to sneak away from the Obama police and talked to some folks.)

Obama took the stage at 8 p.m. on the button — a remarkable on-time arrival. His 45-minute speech was stump material that you’ve probably heard from him before. Yet, coming from Obama, it sounded like he was saying it all for the first time. It’s an impressive trait, that he can repeat the same lines so many times without draining the words of their power and energy.

“I don’t just want to end the war. I want to end the mindset that got us into war,” he said, prowling the stage with a cordless mic, in front of the word “Hope” erected in red, white and blue balloons. “End the politics of fear. And using 9-11 to scare up votes.”

Here, Obama deviated from his stump speech to wade into the latest controversy on the campaign.

“Since I’m talking about the politics of fear, I want to take a moment to respond to the ad Sen. Clinton put up today.” The crowd booed lustily. “We’ve seen this before. It won’t work. Because the question isn’t who’s picking up the phone. The question is what kind of judgment will the person picking up the phone have. Sen. Clinton may not be aware but we already had a red phone moment.”

He meant the decision to invade Iraq. “And Sen. Clinton gave the wrong answer. And John McCain gave the wrong answer. George Bush gave the wrong answer….All three of them, they got a particular way of doing things.” He then pointed out that he had opposed the Iraq war from the start. “That’s the kind of judgment I’ll have when the phone rings at 3 in the morning…..You won’t see me trying to scare up votes using the threat of terrorism. I’ll make sure we rally the country together against our common enemies.”

After Obama finished, I dashed to the car, nudged my way through the crowded parking lot, and sped 20 miles down Interstate 35 to hear Clinton. (In my haste, I had forgotten to remove my Obama press badge, which elicited a sneering comment from a Clinton supporter.)

Her crowd was much smaller. She spoke on a stage in front of the park; the crowd filled the street intersection. Perhaps a thousand people.

“When the phone rings in the White House at 3 a.m., there’s no time for speeches, there’s no time for on-the-job training,” Clinton said. She will be ready on day one, she said.

But Clinton couldn’t help but slip in some of that Obama, change-the-world kind of rhetoric. She noted that Dolores Huerta, legendary Farm Workers activist, was there to support her. “Dolores is with me because she knows where I’ve been. People who look at where we’ve come from know we have work to do, but there’s no reason we can’t keep marching….Starting on Tuesday, we will take our country back and we will change the world.”

Voters in San Antonio and all over Texas will be hearing a lot more from these two before Tuesday. As Bill Shute of San Antonio put it, sitting in the back of the amphitheater as the crowd filed in before Obama’s speech, “It feels like I live in Iowa or New Hampshire, the way people have been coming down here and catering to us.”

Two campaigns with lots of fire and lots of money. Obama responds to Clinton ad that she is best qualified in a dangerous world.

The ad is here and this is the text:

Ringing”
:30

SCRIPT: It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. But there’s a phone ringing in the White House. Something’s happening in the world. When that call gets answered, shouldn’t the president be the one – the only one – who had judgment and courage to oppose the Iraq war from the start… Who understood the REAL threat to America was al-Qaeda, in Afghanistan, not Iraq. Who led the effort to secure loose nuclear weapons around the globe… In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters. I’m Barack Obama and I approved this message.

The message in this ad from Hillary Clinton feels awfully familiar.

We’ve talked a bit about what record turnout in the primary will do for down-ballot races in the general election in November. Now it’s time to speculate on what this could mean for the Big Enchiladas of Texas politics — legislative and congressional redistricting. All the jockeying over who is speaker of the state House and the speculation over the governor’s race, much of that is really about who will control the levers of redistricting in 2011.

Every few days when I return to this subject to write a post on the impact of the primary, the early vote numbers just get more intense. (Btw, last day for early voting is today, Friday, February 29.) Charles Kuffner over at Off the Kuff was kind enough to post a pdf of a memo from Professor Richard Murray. The good professor at the University of Houston looked at turnout in 15 of the biggest counties up until Sunday. He extrapolates from the numbers to conclude that conservatively the early vote for Democrats will be about 1.2 million. He further projects that the final vote in the Democratic primary will be about 2.6 million. This would be more voters in the Democratic primary than the days when Texas was completely Democratic and the primary was the only game in town. Granted the state has grown quite a bit since then, but still…

Now to redistricting. The Legislature will likely take it up in 2011 based on the 2010 Census. But drawing maps and defending them in court also depends on past turnout and showing where the voters are. That was a difficult task for Democrats in recent years because of the anemic Democratic turnout. Obviously, if the Democrats win more seats in November and in 2010, then they can make a more persuasive case that they deserve more seats in redistricting. But the turnout numbers this time around will also show how many potential Democratic voters are out there.

Matt Angle who runs the Lone Star Project is working this hard, focusing in part on North Texas where his old boss Martin Frost lost a seat after Tom DeLay redistricted the area. “The problem in [the redistricting of ] ’91 and ’01 was that there weren’t elections that could demonstrate that a Hispanic could win a congressional district in North Texas,” he says. “It was a legal argument.”

If record numbers of Latinos come out in North Texas and Dallas, and Sheriff Lupe Valdez wins a primary against two African Americans and an Anglo challenger, then there is a convincing case to be made that the area deserves another Hispanic congressional seat. The population numbers warrant it. But until now, the voter behavior didn’t. That could change with this primary.

Media reports yesterday confirmed that Homeland Security took back its troubled virtual fence project in Arizona from Boeing. After paying $86 million to the company, Homeland Security discovered that the fence technology did not work. Oops.

Gregory Giddens, head of the Secure Border Initiative office, who is in charge of the SBInet project said the virtual fence will be finished some time in 2011 instead of 2008.

What happened? First of all, Boeing attempted to create a virtual fence with little input from Border Patrol agents who would be using the technology. Second, Homeland Security at the urging of Congress, wanted a sophisticated virtual surveillance system in less than two years. This 100-mile stretch of virtual fence included nine mobile towers, radar, cameras and vehicles with satellite phones and handheld devices. Third, according to a February 2007 U.S. Government Accounting office report, the SBInet office had 113 government officials and 157 private contractors staffing the office. The SBI office told the GAO that they were concerned that staffing shortfalls in federal employees would limit their government oversight efforts.

The GAO also warned in the same report that the SBInet contract which Boeing and a consortium of private contractors secured in 2006 needed a limit on spending. The contract has no limit on how much can be spent on securing our borders.

Let’s do the math: limitless contract + 6,000 miles of U.S. border = Boondoggle.

It’s important to point out that Boeing still has its contract. It will be providing steel for the border wall in Texas and possibly hiring more subcontractors to carry out tasks in technology and construction along the border.

The only thing that this contract is “securing” is the taxpayers’ money.

Hillary Clinton won’t be stopping in the capital city on her swing back through Texas this weekend—she’ll hold rallies in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and San Antonio in the final, frantic days before Tuesday’s primary.

So Wednesday night, she sent her best celebrity weapon to rally her supporters in the capitol city, someone with more name recognition than anyone else in this race: Bill Clinton.

Students and supporters packed the South Mall at the foot of the University of Texas tower, waiting for him to arrive. Warm-up act after warm-up act passed the mic: State Rep. Eddie Rodriguez (D-Austin), city councilwoman Jennifer Kim, a guy who yelled and threw T-shirts into the crowd. And then came the big moment, and as the cries of “We want Bill!” faded, onto the stage strolled none other than… actor Sean Astin. Remember him from “Rudy”?

Of course, Astin was followed by former President Bill Clinton, at around 7 p.m. Walking down the long path to a platform in the middle of the crowd, he was joined by his old Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and former mayor of San Antonio, Henry Cisneros.

Clinton began by promising a change of direction, and a better life in America if his wife is elected. Then he spent the bulk of his speech on the delicate business of selling his wife’s credentials to a crowd most excited to see the former president. He recalled her contributions to school reform as first lady of Arkansas, and her push for health care reform from the White House. As a testament to Hillary’s own star power on the global stage, he told stories about leaders in Northern Ireland who asked to consult with Hillary, above anyone else, in their peace talks; women in China, he said, slogged through nasty weather to hear Hillary speak at Beijing’s 1995 World Conference on Women.

Clinton drew applause with a promise that his wife had no plans for permanent bases in Iraq, then drew a much quieter response when he qualified it by saying a prolonged U.S. presence in northern Iraq would protect us in case Al Qaeda ramped up its attacks.

Austin loves a rock star, and in a town where Barack Obama repeatedly draws starry eyed crowds of ten thousand and up, Bill was the Clinton campaign’s best messenger of hope (Chuck Norris still isn’t available). Descending to shake hands and pose for pictures after his speech, Bill proved he could still fire up a crowd with the best of them. But the former president also mucked around with underdog language in his speech, deriding “the pundits” who say his wife’s campaign is on the ropes.

One UT student organizer introduced Clinton as “our first rock star president,” but even Bill couldn’t draw a crowd like Obama. Hours before Friday’s Obama rally, a line of thousands snaked around buildings downtown, waiting for tickets into a gated area near the stage. Wednesday night, about an hour before Clinton arrived one newscaster debated with a cameraman whether to describe the audience as “hundreds” or “thousands” of supporters. Clinton’s message of solidarity with the forgotten corners of our economy may hold more sway in South Texas and other parts of the state—but the showings at each candidate’s rallies this week suggest Austin would rather see a second “rock star president.”

An email from the Hillary Clinton campaign arrived in our inbox yesterday. It proclaimed that today a subset of the campaign, Women for Hillary, would “gather to showcase a video highlighting the life of former Texas Governor Ann Richards and how if she were alive today, she would support Hillary Clinton’s historic campaign for president. ”

At the midday event at their South Austin campaign headquarters, the Clinton folks sought to employ the former governor, who passed away 18 months ago, in their Texas electioneering.

It was part of the campaign’s efforts to mobilize “a million Texas women” ahead of the March 4th primary.

A former Clinton staffer, Courtney Spence, who now heads a group called Students of the World, produced a Web video for the campaign titled “This One’s for Ann.” Spence, a native Austinite, said she grew up idolizing Richards. “I came of age when Ann stood up as my governor. Because of her, I never questioned what I could do or who I could become,” she told a room tightly packed with Clinton supporters.

Standing in front of the projection screen, she introduced the film this way, “The bond between the legacy of Ann and what Hillary brings to us today is palpable and it is strong. It’s this legacy that is uniting the young and the young at heart. We here in Texas are standing up together, uniting to help women break that ultimate glass ceiling.”

Spence provided the voice over for the short film that spliced together clips of Richards and Clinton. We would have linked to the video, but we haven’t been able to find it on the Clinton Web site yet. (Updated below.) She closed the film by saying, “Today, Ann would be asking all of us to make a statement. She would be traveling to every big city and small town in Texas, urging us all to take a stand, to make a difference, to make history. This one’s for Texas, this one’s for our country, this one’s for Ann.”

There was hardly a dry eye in the room.

After the film, Cathy Bonner with standupforhillary.com and the MC for the event, returned to the mic. “Thank you, Courtney, for being the voice for a sister who can’t be here.”

Next at the podium was Emily’s List founder Ellen Malcolm. “If you all felt as moved by that, your friends will too,” Malcolm said. “When you all go home, send the video to everyone of your women and men friends in Texas and say in the spirit of Ann Richards, we have to elect Hillary Clinton….so people can understand the difference women can make in office. ”

Emily’s List will run radio ads over the next week in major Texas cities on behalf of Clinton targeting rural women, senior women, and women who have not attended college. (Malcolm had a lunch with Austin-based reporters to further press the Clinton case later in the day).

Bonner provided that last word at the Richards event and left little doubt what the take-home message was meant to be. “Ann’s legacy to us is that it does matter that Hillary Clinton become president and that a woman become leader of the free world, ” she said. “Who better than a mother to stop this war?”

We don’t have time to do a proper poll of the other outstanding deceased Texas women to see who they would support. Barbara Jordan? Billie Carr? We do have some words from Molly Ivins. We will let you know if she communicates a change of heart.

UPDATE: The Clinton campaign has the video up.