Robert Gibbs

Patti Solis Doyle is expected to do some surrogate work for the Obama campaign to help woo Latino voters, according to the campaign's communications director, Robert Gibbs.

At the end of today's Obama conference call, Gibbs responded to a question from a Latino reporter who asked what surrogates the campaign might roll out in its effort to court the Latino community's voters. Gibbs said, "We will fold in surrogates that have been helpful to the Clinton campaign."

I asked him if Clinton's former campaign manager, Solis Doyle, would be one of those surrogates.  read more »

Barack Obama's communications director, Robert Gibbs, just said in a conference call that John McCain's apparently sympathetic remarks about comprehensive immigration reform to a group of Hispanic voters in Chicago amounted to more evidence of "John McCain being in a tortured debate with John McCain."

Gibbs pointed out that one of the attendees, who happened to be a member of the anti-immigration Minutemen group, said that McCain seemed to have one message for white Republicans and another for Hispanics.  read more »

Gibbs said that the remarks of McCain and his campaign on immigration, offshore drilling and

The Obama campaign is seizing on the evidence in the Clinton White House schedules that show she attended at least one meeting about Nafta.

“This is one of the most critical issues facing Americans workers,” said Roger Tauss, international vice president of the Transportation Workers Union, in a conference call just now. “Nothing played a bigger role in this than Nafta.”

He went on, “Senator Clinton likes to say on the campaign trail that she has always been a critic of Nafta. “Her White House schedules … show she played a major role in this bill.”  read more »

As Hillary Clinton continues to push the idea that Barack Obama is not ready to be president, the Obama campaign seems intent on pushing the message that Clinton is too secretive to be president.

After recently calling on Clinton to release her tax returns, the Obama campaign today released the Illinois Senator's earmark requests in an effort to put more pressure on Clinton.

Her campaign didn't seem ready to respond. At the end of the Clinton campaign's conference call today, Howard Wolfson was asked if Clinton was willing to desist from using earmarks for the rest of the year. "I don’t know the answer," he said, before referring the reporter to Clinton's Senate office.

Here is the memo calling for Clinton to release her earmark requests:  read more »

“I got the disturbing news this morning that Senator Clinton is probably going to write off North Carolina,” said Representative G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina.

He was referring to a quote by Clinton campaign senior adviser Harold Ickes that appeared in the New York Times today, which the Obama campaign responded to on a conference call this afternoon. Ickes said, while discussing Barack Obama’s primary wins in states that traditionally vote Republican in the general election:

"Most of those states haven't voted Democratic in a presidential since the Johnson landslide over Goldwater in 1964, and we don't see that changing. They're great states, but Idaho, Nebraska and the Carolinas are not going to be in the Democratic column in November."

Introducing the topic of Obama’s strength in North Carolina, which holds a primary on May 6 (and is the next primary after Pennsylvania), communications director Robert Gibbs said, “[Clinton] has, quite frankly, denigrated small states, denigrated caucus states and…southern states.”  read more »

Towards the end a Hillary Clinton stump speech at a gleaming white hall in Ottumwa, Iowa last month, the campaign’s communications director, Howard Wolfson, marched in out of the cold wearing a white sweater, gray sweatpants and unlaced brown work boots. Disheveled and unshaven, Mr. Wolfson possessed the feral look of someone who had spent the last 17 hours in a car.

Which, in fact, he had.

Mr. Wolfson, the chief architect and overseer of Mrs. Clinton’s communications strategy, does not fly.  read more »

After Barack Obama's Foreign Policy Forum yesterday, I asked his communications director Robert Gibbs if Obama was specifically contrasting himself with Hillary Clinton when he said, “When you elect our next President, you will choose someone who will make those judgments on Iraq, and Iran and how to restore America’s standing – and you have to be able to trust that he or she has the judgment to lead.”

Gibbs said, “Yeah. I don’t think there is any doubt. There is no question that they have come to vastly different judgments about foreign policy.”

I asked him whether it was by design that the Obama campaign has tended to respond to the Clinton campaign’s criticisms by embracing whatever alleged weakness he’s being accused of.

More after the jump.  read more »

As you might expect, Barack Obama's campaign headquarters, which I visited on Thursday and Friday and wrote about for this week's paper, is a place brimming with youthful enthusiasm. It looks like a college dorm. Cookies and jars of candy sit on the desks, ball caps rest on computers, and the door to the press office is adorned with a white sign that reads "Welcome to the Jungle."

The question is whether good cheer and enthusiasm (and lots of volunteers) can possibly be enough to compensate for the advantages the Hillary Clinton campaign has in terms of experience and money.

The Obama operation certainly seem to have the youthful-innovation component down. The new-media office has rolled out my.barackobama.com, a social organizing tool calibrated to locate and activate Obama supporters around the country. According to 23-year-old staffer Chris Hughes -- who happens to be the cofounder of Facebook (and who looks a lot like this guy) -- a good measure of real interest in the site is how many people download their photos. About half of them have.

Robert Gibbs, the elder statesman in the press office who came up with that howlingly aggressive response to Howard Wolfson during the David Geffen flap, promised that the Obama campaign was ready to take on the Clintons -- but in some unspecified new way.

"Obviously she has a stable of some of the best talent in the Democratic Party, and that's commendable," said Gibbs "But if we get into a contest of 'how are we going to outdo what everyone else has always done to win the presidency,' we are not going to win. I don't think there is any doubt that people can do politics as its always been done better than we can." --Jason Horowitz