SAN ANTONIO — Timo Hernandez pushes back his barking dogs and slips out the door of his home, curiously eyeing three 20-something campaign workers whose jeans and T-shirts are adorned with colorful buttons and stickers proclaiming Hillary Rodham Clinton as the best choice for president.
“Have you voted in the Texas primary yet?” asks volunteer Anthony Morales, clutching a blue-and-white yard sign and flicking a bead of sweat from the side of his face.
Hernandez, a DJ and tow-truck operator with an Elvis hairdo, leans against his light-blue door and says he has not. Seeing an opening, the well-prepared trio are ready to offer him a ride to early voting, discuss health care reform and educate him on the Texas two-step — a bizarre system that permits Democrats to vote early or on election day and then vote again at a caucus.
But Hernandez is supporting Barack Obama. And his reasons sum up one of the major obstacles facing the New York senator as she hangs on to her bid to become the nation’s 44th president.
“It’s like Coke versus Dr Pepper,” said Hernandez, 33. “Neither are bad. You just prefer one a little more. You don’t really know why.”
Call it Obama’s momentum, call it likability or charisma, but this is the type of elusive political appeal that Clinton is battling here and in Ohio — the two primary states that Tuesday may determine whether she continues her bid for the Democratic nomination or becomes an entry in history books as a presidential also-ran.
“If she doesn’t win both states, the pressure for her to get out of the race is going to be enormous,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
Party officials fear that a protracted battle between Clinton and Obama could hurt the Democrats’ chances in November, especially now that John McCain is the presumptive GOP nominee.
The race is tight, but Obama has an edge in Texas because independents and crossover Republicans — who gravitate toward Obama — can cast ballots.
He also has siphoned some of Clinton’s core base of women, blue-collar men and labor groups, and he is making inroads with Latino voters, whom she needs if she is going to win Texas. That group, which is expected to make up at least one-third of the vote, is splitting along generational lines, with younger voters leaning toward Obama.
In addition, some political experts say, Clinton has spent a lot of time wooing the older, more established Latino communities near the border but hasn’t focused enough on suburban Dallas and Houston, both of which have fast-growing populations of Latinos.
“I think her campaign has slightly misunderstood how Texas has shifted in 10 years,” said Daron Shaw, a University of Texas political scientist and former adviser to George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns.
There is little room for Clinton to expand turnout in south Texas, he said, because a consistent number of Latino voters come out every election cycle. Instead, a push for Latino voters in the Houston and Dallas areas could reap big gains.
Those areas are critical because Texas awards a higher number of delegates to areas of the state that voted heavily Democratic in past elections — such as Houston and Dallas. Those cities have a large number of black voters who overwhelmingly support Obama. In a race for delegates, Clinton needs to cut into his margin there as much as possible, Shaw said, because she could win the popular vote but still lose in the delegate count.
Staying the course
Undaunted by 11 losses since Super Tuesday on Feb. 5, the Clinton campaign is sticking to its core message and ground game.
Staffers and volunteers are running phone banks, sending out voter mail and educating voters on the Texas two-step. High-profile surrogates, such as former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros, are making stops around the state, as is former President Bill Clinton, who has climbed up on the back of a pickup to stress health care reform.
Campaign volunteers, many of whom have come in from earlier primary states, like California, are disciplined and well-schooled in the message: Experience. Experience. Experience.
Nick Clemons, the campaign’s field organizer and former New Hampshire campaign director, said they are preparing for Texas’ “unique” primary and caucus system with fundamental basics.
“We’ve been working traditional grassroots activity and doing things that have borne out in other states,” he said.
And he isn’t worried about the possibility of netting less-than-expected support from Latino voters. “They said the same thing in California, and 70 percent turned out to support (Clinton),” he said.
A lot can be said for sticking to a message and ground game when it has worked in such critical states as New Hampshire and California.
And when there is little time to do anything else.
“The focus on Clinton’s experience and being ready on Day One turned out to be out of sync with the Democratic primary electorate,” said William Galston, a former policy adviser in the Bill Clinton administration and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “But she’s going to live or die with that message, not campaign as something she’s not.”
There is likely no bigger test than Texas, where the primary system, Clinton has said, is so complicated “grown men are crying over it.”
Two parts primary and one part caucus, the state proportionally awards 126 of its 228 Democratic delegates based on the primary results. Those votes are cast during the 11 days of early voting, which ended Friday, and all day Tuesday.
Another 67 delegates are allocated during a caucus that starts 15 minutes after the polls close Tuesday evening. Voters can only take part in the caucus if they cast a ballot during early or election-day voting.
The remaining 35 are so-called superdelegates.
Bringing their A games
The Texas contest brings out the strengths of both Clinton and Obama.
The New York senator has proved she can win big primary states: New Jersey, New York and California, for instance.
Obama has prevailed in nearly all the caucus states. Once the long shot, the Illinois senator had to prepare for contests in smaller states and those further down the primary schedule, and implement strong grassroots organizations in those states.
Yet, after Feb. 5, both campaigns were sent scrambling, not only in Texas but Ohio. Clinton now has 41,000 volunteers and 18 offices in Texas, and 26,000 volunteers in Ohio and 19 offices in Ohio. The campaign said it has also made “significant” progress in signing up precinct captains for each of the state’s 8,300 precincts.
The Obama campaign says it has 100,000 volunteers in Texas and 20 offices. In Ohio, there are “thousands” of volunteers and 22 offices.
Clinton is being outspent in both states by Obama, who is running prime-time spots during “American Idol” and other highly rated television shows. He also has the Service Employees International Union running ads and going door-to-door on his behalf.
Clemons said the Clinton campaign has focused on getting out the early vote, especially along the border in towns such as McAllen and Brownsville. Clinton first worked in south Texas 35 years ago, registering Latino voters for George McGovern, and Clemons said there is familiarity and loyalty there.
Texas is predicting record turnout. Through Thursday, 959,666 people had voted early, according to the secretary of state’s office. Seventy-five percent of those voting were registered Democrats.
In cities like Dallas and Houston, where he said early voting is less of a tradition, they are trying to raise Clinton’s profile for Tuesday.
“We want to run up the vote in districts where we know we will do well and stay competitive in other areas,” he said.
About 4,000 raucous supporters, some of whom arrived three hours early, turned out for a Clinton rally in northwest Houston on Thursday. They sang Aretha Franklin’s “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” and entertained themselves with a female Elvis impersonator before Clinton’s arrival. Three women held a sign saying “Love the Pantsuit!” while a man in the front sported a yarmulke with “Hillary 08” stitched on the back.
With a significant number of Latinos in attendance, chants of “si se puede” — loosely translated as “yes we can” — rang out when Clinton spoke about health care reform, ending No Child Left Behind, college loan forgiveness programs and fixing the “broken immigration system.”
Perhaps her loudest applause came when she spoke about ending the war in Iraq and repairing broken relationships with other countries.
“We can’t be the leader of the world if no one will follow us!” she said.
When her speech ended, Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” played, a pitch to working-class women.
Clinton is using that same pitch in Ohio, where she is running an ad titled “Night Shift.” Featuring women working at a hospital, hair salon and restaurant, the ad shows Clinton as sympathetic to their plight and saying she “worked the night shift too.”
In Ohio, Clinton is working on turning out high numbers of her constituents — women, older voters and union households.
“She’s a known quantity with blue-collar workers,” said Joel Lieske, a professor of political science at Cleveland State University. “They have the most trust in Hillary to take action to help them out.”
It’s the economy
The big issue in the Buckeye State, as in most of the country, is the economy. The legacy of shuttered steel mills, auto plants and myriad blue-collar-intensive industries that supported them continues to create real pain in Ohio.
In a remote steel-and-coal valley in eastern Ohio last week, more than a thousand people lined up on a bitter cold, snowy afternoon outside the St. Clairsville High School basketball gym to see Clinton.
Flanked by former astronaut and longtime Ohio Sen. John Glenn, Clinton equated voting for her to good business: When you want to build a house, she said, you hire a carpenter who knows how to build. When a family member needs surgery, you hire the surgeon with ample experience.
“So I need your help,” Clinton told the crowd. “I hope you will choose to hire me for the toughest job in the world.”
Her stumbling block, however, has been her support for the North American Free Trade Agreement, which many in the Buckeye State blame for the loss of jobs and industry.
Clinton has tried to address this, at least in part, by putting out a 30-second commercial featuring Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland. In the spot, called “Fighter,” Strickland touts Clinton’s plans to “fix NAFTA” and create jobs.
Loyalists abound in Texas
Even though Clinton has lost the past 11 contests, there is no shortage of loyal followers, and over and over again they cite her experience as the reason they are voting for her.
Campaign surrogate Gonzalo Barrientos, a former state senator, has made numerous campaign stops around the Austin area, talking about Clinton “working in the trenches” and “paying her dues.”
In Waco, John Newnam, 88, a Navy veteran who survived Pearl Harbor, wears a “veterans for Hillary” pin on his yellow cardigan and a red Hillary baseball hat. He’s been knocking on doors of town homes — 52 to be exact — handing out Clinton literature and telling people that Clinton has “the experience to be a true leader.”
Relaxing at a get-out-the-early-vote barbecue, Newnam says “that Obama” moved ahead because of “some kind of glitch” he can’t quite pinpoint. The change in fortunes hasn’t affected Clinton’s true supporters, he said, but he worries about undecideds.
“It may hurt her with some riding the fence,” he said.
At Clinton’s Austin headquarters — a boxlike building next to a discount furniture store — about 40 people are bustling around at any given time, making calls and handling caucus training. In a corner, staff members are educating voters about casting their ballots twice.
A steady supply of coffee, candy, cookies, barbecue and soda is always available for the roughly 400 people the campaign says show up every day to help.
A lengthy “wish list” is taped on the front door. Rubber bands have been granted; tables, chairs and pizza are still needed. Homemade signs in bright-colored markers are taped on the walls, tallying delegate counts, mapping out precincts and declaring “No Obama Vote Hot Mama” and “They say a woman’s place is in the home. You’re right! 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.”
Gilbert M. Martinez, a fifth-generation Texan and retired banker, is voting Democrat for the first time since 1986. He’s tired, he said, of the Republican Party being “bankrupt of ideas.”
The 75-year-old stopped by the campaign office to give a small contribution and saw it had run out of wooden stakes for the campaign lawn signs. He jumped in his white pickup and drove to Home Depot, where he spent about $125 buying new ones. Then he helped attach the stakes to the signs.
“You know, this may be the only time in my life I will have to vote for a woman president,” Martinez said.
The atmosphere is generally loose, although as election day nears, the pace becomes more frantic, if not a bit tense.
Kamyl Bazbaz, a Clinton spokesman who came to Austin after working on the California primary, said he isn’t getting undue pressure from the campaign bigwigs.”We’re not getting e-mails saying ‘don’t mess this up,’ ” he said. “But everyone knows how important winning is here.”
The public, on the other hand, is getting the hard sell from Bill Clinton.
“If she wins in Texas and Ohio, I think she will be the nominee,” he told Texas voters a week ago. “If you don’t deliver for her then I don’t think she can. It’s all on you.”
“Hunger for change”
Although the Clinton campaign is making a serious effort to attract younger voters, in the college town of Athens, Ohio, the organization appears more like a traditional establishment campaign — “sort of corporate-headquarters, top-down,” said Ohio University political scientist and History department chair John Gilliom.
“Whereas you look at Obama’s campaign and it’s families walking through the streets,” he said. “Grassroots is the more traditional term, but I think ‘viral’ is the more telling.”
“I hate to get back into cliche land, but it’s sort of the difference between a movement and a campaign.”
And therein lies the problem, say many political observers. The so-called movement is what, at least in part, dropped Clinton from the inevitable nominee to mere front-runner. And then into her current position of trying to climb back up on top.
Her campaign’s strategic shortcomings have encompassed everything from bad financial decisions to poor field operations to her advisers early on considering Obama little more than a flash-in-the-pan candidate.
“There’s been this strong hunger for change” that Clinton’s advisers appeared to have missed initially, Ohio Democratic Party Chair Chris Redfern said. “Maybe if you’ve been advising candidates for 30 years, you forget to talk to the folks who live in America.”
The campaign, however, did raise tons of money early, organized with an emphasis on the delegate-rich states, and has continually turned out the Democratic machine, complete with high-profile endorsements.
“They had a terrific overall strategy, but for a 2000 race, not 2008,” said Shaw. “This year, students and other non-traditional party activists who usually don’t turn out are involved.”
Karen Crummy: 303-954-1594 or kcrummy@denverpost.com
