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Opinion: Hillary Clinton’s Nevada stop ends up mostly off the radar

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L’affaire John Edwards blotted out virtually all other political news Friday after word surfaced that he’d copped to adultery; events the story overshadowed included Hillary Clinton’s first solo campaign stop for Barack Obama.

Perhaps, for Obama, that was just as well.

What coverage there was of Clinton’s speech in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson, Nev., underscored that the reconciliation between the two camps that competed so mightily for the Democratic presidential nod remains a work in progress.

And, at this stage in that process, greater attention to the image of her standing behind a podium emblazoned with Obama’s campaign slogan may have proved more aggravating than anything else to many Clinton partisans across the nation.

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The Times’ Ashley Powers covered Clinton’s appearance and, in her dispatch, noted that it was clear the New York senator ‘was speaking to a crowd still lukewarm toward’ Obama.

The Associated Press story reported: ‘The crowd let her know they still held her in high regard. They cheered Obama’s name and waved his campaign signs, but no mention of him won as loud a roar as Clinton’s introduction.’

But if the effort to meld Clinton supporters into Obama backers is proceeding fitfully in Nevada, as elsewhere, a different trend is evident at the purely grassroots level in the state. According to Sunday’s ‘Political Memo’ column in the Las Vegas Sun, the Obama forces are creating nothing less than an ‘organizational juggernaut’ in the fight for the state’s five electoral votes.

Eric Herzik, a political scientist at the University of Nevada-Reno, says in the piece that Obama’s ‘on-the-ground organization looks real good. (John) McCain’s is very quiet up here. If I’m a Republican strategist, it would scare me.’

Herzik, a registered Republican, cautions that it remains unknown whether impressive registration gains by Democrats in Nevada translate into strong turnout by these new voters on election day. And the article points out that Obama ‘will have to overcome his fairly conventional liberal voting record in a state with an electorate that detests gun control and higher taxes.’

Still, it’s worth remembering that organizational prowess is a key reason Clinton was speaking on Obama’s behalf last week, and not vice-versa.

-- Don Frederick

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