Hillary Goes High Tech in Non-Concession Speech, Solicits Online Endgame Input; Did She Go Underground to Duck Barack's Call?
By Dan Manatt, 06/04/2008 - 12:41am

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UPDATE: Reporters were puzzled by the Clinton camp's choice of venue last night - an underground gymnasium with no cell reception. Now we learn, via NBC's First Read, that Sen. Obama and his campaign tried to reach Sen. Clinton by cell phone several times through the night to congratulate her on her win in South Dakota - unsuccessfully.

Did Hillary borrow a page from Steve Jobs and intentionally pick a rally site with no cell reception – to duck Obama's calls??? I know, I know... Conspiracy theory. In any case - an interesting metaphor - the only way she and Bill (especially Bill - cellphone victim many times over) can avoid cellphone problems is by going underground - literally.

Interesting metaphor for the first real e-Lection.

UPDATE #2
Markos/DailyKos on Hillary's online input solicitation – it may just be about money: http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/6/3/233532/1250/967/528892

ORIGINAL POST: Hillary Clinton gets less credit that she deserves for he Web campaign – probably due to Web demographics. That said, she has a knack for embracing it even tighter in hours of need - til recently, especially financial need.

But tonight, to a bigger degree than perhaps any time in her campaign, she went interactive: she seemed to suggest her decision to concede the race to Obama would lie in the HillaryClinton.com community. In her non-concession speech, she said:

"Now, the question is: Where do we go from here?... This has always been your campaign. So... I want to hear from you. I hope you’ll go to my Web site at HillaryClinton.com and share your thoughts with me and help in any way that you can."

OpenLeft.com's Chris Bowers takes her at her word in a post:

"Since she asked, I suggest that you send her a message on her website. Tell her that it is time to suspend her campaign ASAP, and acknowledge that Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee. Really, this needs to happen tomorrow, because otherwise the media focus will be on Clinton's refusal to concede and a continued division within the party. However, I will settle for Thursday, at the latest."

(Surely Peter Daou should have realized the mastermind behind google bombing might do something like this).

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The feedback won't be that different, but the outcome may be.

She'll receive a lot of messages from people telling her to stay in, and she'll receive a lot of messages asking her to step down, and she'll receive a lot of inflammatory notes that go straight into the trash. I doubt much of it will be too different than what she's been receiving the past month or so. (As Gary Hart's online director, I was privy to his inbox when he was deciding whether to run in '04... the email gets predictable pretty quickly.)

She'll raise some money, and it looks like there are some campaigns pushing her as VP choice for Obama. She might receive suggestions as to whether she should stay in the Senate, go for a different post in the administration, take a hiatus, etc.

The real question is how much the campaign is actually listening vs. just doing this to buy time. They started out with an online announcement suggesting the campaign would be a "conversation", so how does that conversation end? James Carville noted on CNN last night that it takes time to figure these things out.

By Sarah Granger at Wed, 06/04/2008 - 7:03pm | login or register to post comments



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