Clinton will walk in nurse’s shoes for a day

By J. Patrick Coolican (contact)

Tuesday, Aug. 7, 2007 | 7:02 a.m.

Sen. Hillary Clinton, whose greatest disappointment was her failure to reform the American health care system when she had the chance to in the 1990s, will work the health care issue on a slightly smaller scale this month - as a shift nurse at one of Southern Nevada's St. Rose Dominican Hospitals.

It's part of the Service Employees International Union "Walk a day in my shoes" program, which has presidential candidates pulling a union worker's shift to meet one of the criteria for winning the coveted SEIU endorsement. The national union has 1.9 million workers, politically savvy leadership and deep pockets.

The Clinton event, which promises to be a media circus, illustrates how important Nevada has become in the Democrats' nomination strategy. This is the second candidate to choose Nevada to do the "Walk a day in my shoes" event, even though SEIU membership in Nevada is small compared with states such as California and New York. (The other candidate was New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who served for a day as a social worker.)

A recent poll in Iowa shows a dead heat among the three front-runners - Clinton, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.

That means Nevada, which is after Iowa on the presidential calendar, will be an important battleground where the winner of Iowa will want to further his or her momentum, while the runners-up will want to throw up a wall to stop the momentum.

The Clinton event is just one of a flurry of Democratic presidential candidate visits this month because of the August recess in the U.S. Senate, as well as a kind of political arms race, wherein the front-runners try to match one another with visits and money spent on organization here.

Sunday night , Obama campaigned in Elko, packing the convention center there, even though the remote city is mostly Republican.

All three front-runners will be in Las Vegas this week, with Obama and Clinton speaking at the National Association of Black Journalists convention and Edwards at a union hall Friday. Clinton will venture out to rural Nevada with a trip to Pahrump next week, as well.

Former President Bill Clinton will be at the 10th anniversary of the Lake Tahoe environmental summit on Aug. 17, and candidates from both parties will take part in candidate forums in Reno this month .

The rhetoric on the Democratic side has sharpened in recent weeks, with Obama and Clinton going back and forth after Obama said he'd be willing to meet with some of the world's worst dictators, while also saying he'd invade parts of Pakistan if terrorists were hiding there, while ruling out using nuclear weapons in that scenario.

Clinton said the statements were signals that Obama is not ready for the presidency; Obama shot back that Clinton would be "Bush-Cheney lite." Edwards, meanwhile, attacked Clinton for having accepted money from News Corp. executives, including Rupert Murdoch. News Corp. owns Fox News, which many Democrats say is a propaganda outlet for Republicans.