Clinton's California Campaign - classic front-runner's strategy - pushed to a whole new level

With just more than five months until California's Feb. 5 presidential primary, the effort by the campaign of New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to organize trained volunteers - 1,000 strong across the state - suggests it is no coincidence that she has amassed a 30-point lead in California over her closest Democratic rival, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.

The Democratic front-runner's California grassroots organizing effort has been dubbed by Clinton campaign strategists as the "1,000-20-200" plan. And it will use "the power of the Internet with traditional field methods to create millions of voter contacts leading up to the Feb. 5 primary," according to a 27-page "HillStar" campaign manual obtained by The Chronicle.

The Clinton campaign strategy in California is noteworthy for its scope and for its target - to help her secure the votes of potentially millions of absentee voters in California's rich delegate field before Democratic voters in Iowa and New Hampshire ever weigh in at the polls.

"Politics is about the bottom line," said Averill "Ace" Smith, Clinton's California campaign manager, who noted that in 2008, "the largest number of votes cast at a relatively early stage" will be in California.

Beginning Jan. 7 - when voters can begin to cast absentee ballots in the state - "we have a 29-day election" that starts before the current Jan. 14 schedule for the Iowa caucus and the Jan. 22 New Hampshire primary, Smith said.

That calls for unprecedented organization and innovation in California to get those voters to the polls, Clinton senior adviser Ann Lewis said in an interview Monday in San Francisco.

For the first serious female presidential candidate, Lewis said, "the power of networks, the growth of social networks, will be the strength of this campaign."

Presidential candidates are lavishing the lion's share of money and attention on early primary states such as Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, and some political strategists suggested the efforts by the Clinton campaign to build, train and organize a California bank of 20,000 volunteers is a savvy move. That could help Clinton guard her front-runner status and construct a crucial firewall against Democratic rivals such as Obama and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards - regardless of the results in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The Clinton "1,000-20-200" plan takes its name from the campaign's ambitious goal in California: training 1,000 "HillStar" corps members to then train and manage 20 other "Hillary Corps" campaign volunteers each, who in turn will be "contacting 200 voters in their social networks and convincing those people to vote for Sen. Clinton," according to the campaign manual.

The Clinton campaign said it is targeting a still largely overlooked factor in the 2008 presidential race: the crucial role of early primary voters in the nation's most populous state.

With the use of absentee ballots continuing to grow, it is estimated that as many as half of the state's 6.7 million registered Democrats could be absentee voters in the 2008 presidential primary.

The "HillStar" campaign manual notes that "up to half a million votes will be cast in California in the week before the Iowa caucus ... (so) for the first time, the California campaign will be in the vanguard of the presidential nomination process."

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