Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Clinton Texas campaign press no show

Interesting...
Since the arrival of the competing presidential campaigns, I have had a difficult time getting a hold of the Clinton campaign's Texas press contact, Adrienne. It's rather difficult to include the Clinton campaign in stories when we cannot connect. For example...

-- A February 8th email to establish first contact went unreturned.
-- A call and voicemail message on February 13th regarding office openings went unreturned.

This morning, I called for a response on the House Democratic Caucus leaders taking issue with Clinton's comments about Texas not being in her "electoral calculation" in November. Adrienne responded with, "Oh, Lord," and said she would call back once she found out more about the dust-up, and I never heard from her again.

I called again this afternoon to try to connect, but got a voicemail greeting.

I hear anecdotally from my press corps brethren that I'm not the only one having problems with this. So I'm starting the unofficial "Clinton Texas Campaign Response Time Tracker", to track future attempts at making contact and the time it takes to hear back. Time is obviously pretty important to journalists, since our deadlines are often "right now".

I'm not going to go out of my way to call the campaign just for the sake of it. Instead, we will continue only reaching out to the campaign about legitimate questions in which we're seeking a response, and we'll track the response time with each attempt.

So the clock on a response to today's question started at 10:45am. It's now 11:10pm, so it has now been 12 hours, 25 minutes...

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