More on the SEIU and Edwards

Sen. John Edwards’s campaign just wrapped up a conference call to discuss their Iowa SEIU endorsement (and, it turns out, endorsements from other as-yet-unnamed SEIU state councils), and they’re obviously touting it as a “major victory” and an “enormous boost” here.

But they also played up the fact that Sen. Edwards worked very hard to get the endorsement. “He has done something quite unprecedented,” campaign manager David Bonior said, because he has “involved himself in organizing” SEIU members across the country. “He’s just literally been quite astounding in the work he’s done,” Bonior continued.

Sure, this is good news, but it isn’t as good as it could have been, and I wonder whether playing up the amount of work Edwards put in for the endorsement is the right tack for them, unless they are worried that the rank-and-file SEIU members still need hand-holding to get them on board. I guess that comes with the territory.

Charlotte Eby asked the question that someone like me doesn’t get to ask, because I’m just a muckraker: Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign sent out a release and held a conference call at the same time as this one to tout “400 Iowa Health Care Professionals for Hillary.” Eby asked whether anyone thought this was a coincidence.

This was a softball for the Edwards campaign, but it yielded an interesting answer from Bonior: “Sen. Clinton has traditionally followed us in this campaign on most major issues,” he said. “I’m not surprised that she’s following us today on this.”

I was surprised that they didn’t play up the health care angle of this endorsement very much throughout the call. It was mentioned briefly at the beginning, but I think that is the real strength of the endorsement — that enhances the credibility of Edwards’s health care plan. And Clinton’s reaction — to attempt a major health care roll-out of their own — reflects that campaign’s own perceived weakness in light of today’s announcement.

The focus was mostly on organizing, which is important. But this far out, perception and persuasion matter almost as much as boots on the ground.

Update: The Illinois SEIU just announced its support of Sen. Barack Obama. There were questions on the Edwards campaign call about what the Illiniois SEIU was and wasn’t allowed to do in Iowa, and according to the Edwards campaign, they aren’t allowed to do much here. Senior Edwards Advisor Chris Chafe said, “Our understanding of the rules is very clear: They cannot come into Iowa, they cannot phone bank SEIU members [in Iowa], they cannot run advertisements with SEIU members, targeting SEIU members [in Iowa]…Member-to-member contact is not allowed.”

“There are clear rules here,” Chafe said, “and I’m confident they will be followed.”

On that, the Illinois SEIU press release contains a carefully worded explanation of what their members are doing: “Already, hundreds of members are volunteering to phone bank, door knock and to travel to neighboring states to support Obama’s presidential bid.” That doesn’t mean the SEIU is organizing the members who are volunteering or that they are specifically targeting fellow SEIU members in “neighboring states” (I wonder which neighboring states they might be talking about?), but after all, anyone in Illinois is welcome to volunteer for a candidate in Iowa if they want to do so on their own.

Still, SEIU has 170,000 members in Illinois and only about 2,000 in Iowa. Other SEIU state councils will endorse Edwards, and all told, those councils will “represent hundreds of thousands of members across the country,” according to Bonior.