Monday, October 27, 2008

Why Obama Staffers Are Secretly Worried











From the Daily Beast

hat tip to HH


Publicly, he's acting like he already won. But behind the scenes, Obama's campaign is amassing lawyers and gearing up to counter dirty tactics on election day.

Austin, Texas
By Paul Alexander

This week, Barack Obama has shown clear signs that he is confident he is going to win. But privately, top Obama leadership are still worried that Republicans might be able to pull off another improbable election night victory.
Last week, in closed-to-the-press meetings, Obama officials briefed major donors about their concerns heading into the election’s final stretch. One of those meetings took place in Austin, Texas—a city in the solid red state of Texas that has raised a surprisingly large amount of money for Obama, mostly from the city’s high-tech community.

“The Obama campaign has learned the lessons of 2000 and 2004. On Election Day, lawyers will be everywhere—all the way down to the county level.”
In Texas and other states, Obama officials are preparing for the possibility that polls may be wildly off because of the so-called Bradley effect.
“The Obama officials are very cautious,” says an attendee at the Austin meeting. “They want comfortable margins in place just in case. They are looking at three to six percentage points as a possible Bradley effect. Before they consider a state comfortable, they want it outside the polling margins. They think the Bradley effect could be as large as six—maybe even seven—percentage points, but they don’t really know.”

Another major concern of the campaign is what they consider to be voter suppression. “The Obama leadership believes there is a systematic campaign,” says the attendee, “by the White House and the Justice Department to suppress voter turnout across the country.”

To counteract the Bradley effect and potential voter suppression, the Obama leadership has amassed one of the largest legal teams ever assembled by a presidential campaign. The main goal of the legal team, almost all of them volunteers, is to guarantee ballot security. “The Obama campaign has learned the lessons of 2000 and 2004,” my source says. “On Election Day, lawyers will be everywhere—all the way down to the county level.

Obama officials point to the government’s treatment of ACORN, the nationwide association of community organizations, as an example of possible voter suppression. The campaign has never relied on ACORN for its voter registration drives, according to Obama officials, and is viewed as only one of many venders hired by the campaign. Of the $605 million raised by the Obama campaign so far, only $800,000 has gone to ACORN—a number that could be much larger, and would have been had the campaign relied on it more heavily.

But perhaps the most important asset the Obama campaign has is an army of workers estimated to be as large as 100,000 nationwide. Some paid staffers, mostly volunteers, the workers are being spread out across the country to states the Obama campaign is targeting. For example, 5,000 workers based in Texas—a state Obama doesn’t expect to win—are being relocated to New Mexico, a state Obama believe he can win.

Obama workers will be flooding into other battleground states in the waning days of the presidential race, among them Colorado, Nevada, and Ohio—perhaps even Georgia and Montana. What is impressive about this sizable operation is its very organization. By Election Day, campaign officials believe, they may have the most extensive grass-roots organization of any presidential campaign in history.

9 comments:

  1. I like hearing that Obama staffers are worried, AND I can understand that they raised a lot of money in the Liberal college town of Austin.

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  2. Who is this HH who gets a hat tip in the beginning?

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  3. I understand that ABC won't be running the half hour Obama campaign add -- people need to email the heck out of FOX and demand that FOX stand in solidarity with ABC and not run that add, since the OBAMA camp are determined to shut down all adversial questions, which I suspect is just more of Obama's assault on free speech.

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  4. ACORN is a dirty organization! The Obama campaign should have never gave them a penny - let alone $800,000. No matter how you look at it, they helped fund an organization that promotes voter fraud. That is not ethical, not moral, most importantly NOT AMERICAN!

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  5. I thought Joe Biden just told that newscaster in Florida that the campaign had NO TIES TO ACORN. Hmmm...

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  6. I believe they are worried as some of the more accurate polls show McCain down by 1-2% and he is closing in on Obama. Also, I find it funny that the lead Economic Advisor for Senator Obama is the one that helped push the repeal(in1999 along with President Clinton) of the 1933 Act that seperated investment banks from commercial banks. That is why we are in the mortgage crisis. It is sad when history repeats itself and people do not learn from mistakes. The Great Depression showed that investment banks need to be seperate from commercial banks.

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  7. Why is Adamn concerned about who HH is? Do you want to look into whether or not that person is licensed and has paid their taxes?

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  8. Acorn is into everything...The New Party, the Working Families Party in NY...the list goes on and on. Most people do not realize how far the deception and corruption goes....

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