CLINTON RELYING AGAIN ON EARLY VOTING

I’m listening in to the noon Clinton campaign call with chief strategist Mark Penn, communications director Howard Wolfson, OH state director Robby Mook, and TX state director Ace Smith (great name!). The general theme was to try to focus intently on what’s to come, as opposed to Hawaii and Wisconsin, other than to play the expectations game by saying, as Wolfson did, that the Obama has “predicted very sizeable victories” in both.

Most of the call was turned over to the two state directors, so here are some early, quick-transcription highlights. Note that they are emphasizing the early vote advantage, which makes sense since they are basically trying to collect votes before Obama even starts holding events there. This was, I suppose, the benefit of mostly bailing on the other 10, post-Super Tuesday states:

Mook: We have a full operation up and running, and we are up in all 18 congressional districts. We’ve been all over the state; Sen. Obama has only been to Youngstown so far. We are targeting every delegate in every district but also to win statewide….

“We have a farm tour with upstate New York farmers coming in to talk to Ohio farmers about what Sen. Clinton has done to promote agriculture. And another set of surrogates from NY to talk about her efforts to protect and promote jobs in New York….

“We have an aggressive absentee and early-voter campaign. We are aggressively encouraging our voters to vote early,” adding that the campaign had events with Gov. Ted Strickland and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones to encourage people to vote early.”

Smith: “The first thing you want to look at is the crowds the candidate is generating. There are two reasons for the enthusiasm she is generating. One, she has a 36-year history down here…she has a long relationship. The other thing is that Texans realize this is a fight for the middle class…

“We already have 100,000 volunteers and 4,000 precinct captains. We fell comfortable we will have a ground operation like nothing seen in this state in a long time. We have 20 campaign offices open and will concede nothing here.”

“There’s a huge early voting component in Texas. It really means showing up to different locations in your county and you can show up and cast your vote. The absentee vote is relatively small. The main part of it is the early vote. We have operations in every county pushing the early vote.”

Wolfson piped in between Mook’s and Smith’s presentations, again playing expectations game: “These are real battlegrounds. The Obama campaign is pouring in real resources and pulling out all the stops.”

--Tom Schaller