Obama camp not missing out on work

By Mike Joseph

- mjoseph@centredaily.com

Political rhetoric and reality hit home last week after Barack Obama’s national campaign manager, David Plouffe, declared that “our campaign will not be defined by Pennsylvania.”

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That statement, together with an Obama campaign memo saying that Pennsylvania is “only” one of 10 remaining contests, gave Hillary Clinton’s chief campaigner, Gov. Ed Rendell, material to squawk about.

The Obama campaign “diminished the importance of this state’s primary election,” Rendell squawked, and it “is really sort of off-putting to me and, I think, a lot of Pennsylvanians.”

Obama dismissed Rendell’s remarks. “Come on, that’s politics,” he told a reporter, and added: “I’ll bet Ed Rendell couldn’t do that with a straight face.”

The straight-face remark reminded me of a Rendell statement in a campaign appearance at Penn State in the closing days of the 2006 election, when Democrat Scott Conklin and Republican Barbara Spencer were competing for the 77th state House seat.

With an inflated sense of urgency, Rendell told a crowd of students to be sure to get out and vote for Conklin and bring their friends because internal polls were showing his lead over Spencer to be a mere 2 or 3 percentage points. But internal polls at the time were actually showing Conklin with a double-digit lead, about 17 percentage points.

As I recall, as Rendell spoke, he had a grin on his face.

The cars parked in front of the old Verizon building at 224 S. Allen St., State College, Obama’s headquarters, bespeak a difference as well between rhetoric and reality.

The small, fuel-efficient cars not only bear out-of-state license tags — New York, Tennessee, California, Illinois and Oregon — but also have back seats full of bed sheets, blankets and pillows.

These are sure signs of a Team Obama nationwide campaign that’s moving through primaries state by state and has come to Pennsylvania to stay awhile.

The central Pennsylvania field organizer in the office, 30-year-old Nicole Derse, lately of Manchester, N.H., and six other primary states and before that of San Francisco, says she won’t give interviews. But Googling her name lights up a computer screen with the highlights of an intense, young career as a community organizer.

BeyondChron, which calls itself San Francisco’s alternative online daily, reported a year ago that “most people involved in city politics today know Nicole Derse ... who has earned a solid reputation in progressive circles as a dedicated grass-roots organizer.”

The occasion for the report was Derse’s pending departure to work for Obama’s campaign in New Hampshire. Other online reports say Derse worked for the Alliance for a Better California, a labor-backed organization formed to oppose Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s November 2005 ballot initiatives, and that she managed Ross Mirkarimi’s successful 2004 campaign for San Francisco supervisor.

The central Pennsylvania Obama office that Derse runs in State College, for which the campaign is paying the borough $2,000 a month rent for two months, sent more than a dozen volunteers into the streets Saturday to register voters.

The Clinton campaign headquarters at 1318 W. College Ave., Ferguson Township, is busy, too. It’s full of telephones, and three campaign workers who said they could not answer a reporter’s questions were hard at work Saturday.

But Obama is not “diminishing the importance” of Pennsylvania, from what I can see. If Clinton does win the state, as early polling suggests she will, it will not be for lack of trying by the Obama campaign.

Mike Joseph can be reached at 235-3910.