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NBC's Aswini Anburajan reports:
If Rodney Woodill hadn’t received a call from his wife Tuesday night, asking him to come home because his two-week old baby was sick, Edwards might have never won the endorsement of New Hampshire Service Employees Association, part of the Service Employees International Union. Woodill, who represents 900 county and municipal employees within the state, was on his way to Concord, N.H., to participate in the second Executive Board Meeting within a week to choose a candidate for the state’s union to endorse, but turned back home after his wife called. The board voted without him, split 8-8 between Obama and Edwards. ...“If I had gone straight to the meeting, there wouldn’t have been an endorsement for John Edwards last night,” Woodill said in an interview today.The article goes on to say that Obama, Edwards, and Bill Clinton all made last minute visits or phone calls to the executive board on the day of the vote. You know, Hillary, it looks bad if you don't at least last minute advocate for yourself (kinda like when John sent Elizabeth to the Planned Parenthood conference). And the fact that this endorsement almost slipped out of Edwards' fingers shows how perilous his claim on "front-runner" status is. Despite his past few years of sustained commitment to the labor movement, and a health care platform that most experts agree has shaped the debate, the grassroots activists who you'd expect to be most loyal to Edwards are hesitant to throw their support behind a candidate in distant third.--Dana Goldstein
