It’s a cold, wet night in the countryside outside Philadelphia, the rolling hills dotted with pleasant suburbs and occasional blasted towns, all boarded-up buildings and liquor stores where the proprietors stay safe behind bullet-proof glass.
Hillary Clinton is in a vast building, big enough to assemble 747s. It’s been built on a site long abandoned by US Steel, and with the growth of a new industrial centre here it’s meant to symbolise regeneration after the big corporations have abandoned their workers.
The audience is mostly blue-collarÂÂ, working-class, in coats turned up against the cold. By contrast, she is in a powder-blue trouser suit, the subject of much mirth to the late-night comics. It’s the kind of garment that makes children say: ”Mom, you’re not going to the school play dressed like that?”
But she’s always attracted that kind of bad-mouthing. ”Why does Hillary always look as if she’s telling you off for not cleaning round the bath?”
But this audience loves her — or at least the claque who are there to cheer love her very much. The cheers seem to give her a jolt of life — the audacity of hope, as her main opponent puts it — and even across the concrete acres you can see the eyes and teeth gleam with enthusiasm. She is ahead in Pennsylvania, a state she must win handsomely if she is to stay in the contest.
Plenty of Democrats think she is behaving selfishly by staying in at all. Obama is now the likely winner and John McCain, the Republican, is happily watching the two Democrats kick lumps out of each other. As one New York Times commentator put it, some Democrats would love to slip a sack over Clinton’s head and bundle her out of sight before anyone notices.
But even if she is tired, tearful and depressed, she can’t admit it, even to herself, not for one moment. She walks in to the thump of Eye of the Tiger, the Rocky theme, a film about a white boxer who defeats, among others, a big tough black guy. Was it subliminal? I doubt it.
In modern politics, glaringly obvious is the new subliminal, and this week she made the point directly. She said ending her campaign now would be as if ”Rocky Balboa had gotten halfway up those art museum steps and said ‘Well, I guess that’s about far enough.’
”Let me tell you something, when it comes to finishing a fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common. I never quit. I never give up. And neither do the American people.”
The claque cheers maniacally, and since then I’ve seen the clip a dozen times on TV. Watching television during a US election is like being trapped on a train by a bore who insists on making the same point over and over again.
The election has turned mean. Clinton’s husband, who has spent the past seven or so years as a wise, far-sighted elder statesman, seems determined to reinvent himself on his wife’s behalf as a bad-tempered dog.
”I think it would be great if we had two candidates who love this country” — a reference to Obama’s former pastor, who famously led his flock in a rousing chorus of God Damn America.
Saying Obama doesn’t love his country is the equivalent of saying: ”It would be great if we had two candidates who aren’t paedophiles.” It’s way below the belt, as are some of Clinton’s lines in the aircraft hangar: she implies that Obama would bring in universal healthcare except for people who need it, the old, the poor.
She voted for the Iraq war and Obama didn’t, so now she has to re-appear as a peacenik — but a militant peacenik: ”I think we need a commander in chief who not only respects our armed forces but provides them with the body armour and equipment they need.” The implication that Obama would leave them to face the warlords dressed in pyjamas and driving golf buggies is left hanging in the air.
Clinton’s biggest problem lately has been the time last week that she ”mis-spoke”, describing how, as first lady, she landed in Bosnia under heavy sniper fire when TV footage shows her strolling across the tarmac.
Cartoonists have had a great time. ”Then I gnawed through the ropes, knocked a couple of alligators out and pulled myself to safety …”
”The new Indiana Jones movie?”
”No, just Hillary’s stump speech.”
Was the tale another Clinton lie? Can either of them ever present a fact without embroidering it? Or was it the notorious sleep deprivation? Either way, the mistake has done great harm and helped wipe out the memory of Obama’s preacher. Some polls have him 14 points ahead among Democratic voters nationally.
But here in Pennsylvania she is playing the union card. The language is all tied to them. ”Who would you hire to do this job?” she asks. She keeps repeating the word ”hire”, as if the president was just another working guy with a lunch pail worried about healthcare.
Earlier this week, speaking to a hugely sympathetic crowd, she said: ”I’ll fight for you and I will fight for you as president.” The militant peacenik even spoke lovingly of target-guided missiles, because they are made in the US. She came close to tears when she talked about a woman in Ohio who lost her baby and then died because she couldn’t afford a hospital’s $100 fees.
”A Clinton had to clean up after the last George Bush, and a Clinton’s gonna have to do it again,” she said. Which is, after all, the point of her campaign. — Â