In Texas, Clinton’s Veterans Test Obama’s Rookies

[sonias]

NYTimes 3/2/08
In Texas, Clinton’s Veterans Test Obama’s Rookies

TEXARKANA, Tex. — Just 32 miles from a place called Hope, this small working-class city at the Texas and Arkansas border is "Clinton country," as people here frequently and firmly remind you.

And Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign wasted no time in ensuring that it would remain so, moving almost three weeks ago into an old Beaux-Arts dowager near the empty storefronts of downtown and arming locals like Diana Johnson, a 60-year-old schoolteacher, with hundreds of carefully culled phone numbers.

But just a few blocks away, Althea Dixon and her cousin Cathy Conley-Vanhooks, with little initial support from Senator Barack Obama’s campaign, began diligently mounting the opposition. They set up in a donated former quickie-loan store, plugged in their computers and got the place cleaned up for a celebrity cameo by the actor Samuel L. Jackson, who was filming a movie in nearby Shreveport, La.

The women did not seem to mind that their tiny office, with its wooden cactus decorations and plastic flowers, was not even listed on Mr. Obama’s campaign Web site. Nor that the candidate himself had no plans to appear anywhere near it before Tuesday’s primary, a contest fought in recent days with a fierceness that has few parallels in the state’s political history.

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