Thursday, November 25, 2010
Saturday, May 24, 2008
How Will It Play in Apex?
You have to give Bill Clinton credit. Sure we think he’s self-involved. But on Wednesday the former president of the United States was campaigning for his wife in North Carolina, making appearances at Apex, Sanford, Lillington, Dunn, Hope Mills, Lumberton and Whiteville. Following a 7:45 a.m. event in Apex, he was scheduled to discuss “Solutions for America” on “the lawn in front of McSwain Extension Education and Agriculture Center.”
This does not sound like the itinerary of a person who’s incapable of relinquishing center stage. In a way, though, it’s his idea of heaven. The man is perfectly happy to go anywhere as long as he gets to talk. Harvard, McSwain Extension Center, somebody’s living room, somebody’s lawn, the checkout line at Rite Aid. Just sit him next to a human being with ears and he’s good to go.
Men with egos are, of course, the central topic this week, what with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. dominating the American conversation to an extent that even he could have not imagined in his wildest dreams. It’s getting so you can’t even have a starlet-in-crisis story without an overweening father figure lurking in the background.
This week, Miley Cyrus, the 15-year-old star of the excruciatingly popular “Hannah Montana” TV series, got into hot water for appearing in Vanity Fair clad only in a blanket. While she issued a statement saying she “never intended for any of this to happen,” it seems hard to believe one could accidentally pose for an Annie Leibovitz photo spread. Personally, I blame Miley’s father, a formerly famous singer named Billy Ray Cyrus.
Dad, who appears in his daughter’s series, also showed up in the photo spread, lounging with his child in a shot that might have seemed weirdly intimate if we had not been distracted by the blanket thing. He claims he wandered off before things got R-rated. You’d think that a truly concerned parent would have given top priority to the topless part of the proceedings, but I suspect Billy Ray was too engrossed in his role in the picture-taking to focus on anyone else’s.
We digress. The subject here was the damage that egoistic men can do to a political campaign belonging to somebody else. The Jeremiah Wright event has raised questions about Barack Obama’s presidential campaign that go beyond speculating about how aging white voters are going to react. (As an aging white voter, I would like to report that we have moved on and are now concentrating exclusively on the fate of the farm bill.)
Obviously, Obama doesn’t share Wright’s racial paranoia. But the saga does play into Hillary Clinton’s most powerful argument: that he is not seasoned enough to be elected president.
By seasoned, she actually means hardened by the soul-searing fires of humiliation and defeat. When Hillary was around Barack’s age and still in Arkansas, it’s perfectly possible that if her longtime pastor suddenly became a political embarrassment, she’d have loyally tried to distance herself without disowning him entirely.
Since then, she’s had a long string of painful lessons learned. One is that when beloved associates become political embarrassments, they tend to be much more concerned about their own reputation than yours. Many bodies under the bus later, when she tells you that she’d have dumped Rev. Wright at the first mention of chickens coming home to roost, you’d better believe it.
This sales pitch — I know how the cruel world works — is powerful in a political party that keeps losing elections that it thinks it deserves to win. On the other hand, young voters who have yet to have their hearts broken by a politician find it wicked depressing.
One hitch in the Clinton argument is that Hillary still has Bill, a walking encyclopedia of political near-death experiences.
She has suggested that her husband would be kept offstage, serving as a “roving ambassador” in her administration. (“On Wednesday, the former president will continue his goodwill tour of Paraguay, appearing in Limpio, Ñemby, Encarnación and Mariano Roque Alonso, where he will discuss Solutions for South America behind the ice cream cart three houses down from the bus stop.”) It would be pretty to think so, but can I see a show of hands on how many of you believe it?
When Hillary was on the ropes in New Hampshire, Bill rather famously told a crowd that “I can’t make her younger, taller, male ...” And while the “younger” part was a little hurtful, the message really seemed to be that he sees himself as the central player in this drama.
We’re down to a race between the candidate who claims he will make the political process better but has yet to demonstrate exactly how that works, and the woman who claims she’s the only one who’s powerful enough to take on the Republican forces of darkness. Don Quixote vs. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Both accompanied by their lieutenants — the men who think it’s all about them.
With Right Props and Stops, Clinton Transforms Into Working-Class Hero
By Jody Kantor
May 6, 2008
All over North Carolina and Indiana, crowds of teachers and truckers, salespeople and small business owners, have been hailing Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as one of their own.
“She’s a working mom,” Tracy Zettel, who works for a health insurance company, said Saturday while waiting for Mrs. Clinton to appear in Cary, N.C. “That’s what I am.”
“A good ol’ girl,” Clyde Swedenberg, owner of a small jewelry store, called her in Lakeside Park, N.C.
After listening to her speak in Fort Wayne, Ind., on Sunday, Joe Jakacky, a warehouse worker, remarked that Mrs. Clinton had started out just like he did, in a menial job.
Whatever the results of the primaries on Tuesday in Indiana and North Carolina, Mrs. Clinton has accomplished the seemingly impossible in those states. Somehow, a woman who has not regularly filled her own gasoline tank in well over a decade, who with her husband made $109 million in the last eight years and who vacations with Oscar de la Renta , has transformed herself into a working-class hero.
In promoting herself as a champion of ordinary Americans in a troubled economy, Mrs. Clinton has also tried to cast her rival, Senator Barack Obama, as an out-of-touch elitist. She has made her case at all the right stops (an auto-racing hall of fame) and used all the right props (lately delivering speeches from pickup beds).
But what is more remarkable about Mrs. Clinton’s approach in Indiana and North Carolina is how minimally she uses her own biography. Perhaps because almost nothing she could say about her life would sound humble or hardscrabble — she grew up in an affluent Chicago suburb, went to prestigious schools and is, of course, a lawyer — Mrs. Clinton says very little about herself at all. Instead, she focuses on her audience’s concerns. In most speeches, she now offers just one suggestive strand of her life story.
Introducing her plans to overhaul the student loan system, Mrs. Clinton explains that although her father paid her tuition, room and board for college, he refused to pay more. “If I wanted a book or a cup of coffee, I had to pay for it with money I made,” she said Monday at a community college in Greenville, N.C. She never says the name Wellesley.
This is a surprising turn in the Story of Hillary Clinton, who spent her Wellesley years as an activist and a student leader. She wrote a chapter of “Living History,” her autobiography, about the college, but never mentioned earning money. What the work was, she does not say in these speeches. (A campaign representative said she baby-sat, did research for a professor and supervised a park.)
From there, Mrs. Clinton quickly turns to the concerns of the people standing before her, usually a few hundred and usually white.
At Indiana Tech College in Fort Wayne on Sunday, she repeated a favored anecdote, about watching a young commuter paying $63 for a half-tank of gasoline.
“Ninety-five dollars!” cried an audience member, offering his testimony.
“One hundred and two dollars!” another called.
Exuding empathy, Mrs. Clinton bellows accusations at the villains of her speeches — oil companies, the Chinese government and George W. Bush — and returns to a plaintive voice to plead the case of hard-working Hoosiers or Tar Heels. She raises eyebrows and arms in exaggerated indignation. Students who take jobs they do not particularly want after graduation just to repay loans are “indentured servants,” while Americans who took out mortgages they could not afford are victims of manipulation.
She never quite says, “I feel your pain,” Bill Clinton's most famous line of the 1992 presidential election, but she comes close.
“I don’t think folks in Washington listen enough,” Mrs. Clinton said in Greenville, a catch developing in her voice. “Because if we listen we will hear this incredible cry: ‘Please just pay attention to what’s going on in our lives.’ ”
Many voters at these events marvel at Mrs. Clinton’s understanding. After 16 months of hearing hard-luck stories, she has developed a special radar. Delivering her speech on Sunday in Fort Wayne, Mrs. Clinton’s gaze fell upon a man in fatigues. “I see someone in uniform that I’m especially concerned about,” she said. “While our troops are serving, their homes are being foreclosed on.”
Sure enough, the man, Lance Recht, a National Guard member who served in the first Iraq war, is struggling to save his home. He works at a muffler shop and may join the border patrol in Arizona, leaving his wife and children so he can pay a mortgage whose interest rates have shot up.
“We are that close to foreclosure,” Mr. Recht said in an interview, joining his thumb and forefinger.
When Mrs. Clinton singled him out, his wife, Marissa Recht, said, Mrs. Clinton had no way of knowing their story.
As the economy has weakened, Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy has strengthened, and like Oprah Winfrey interviewing a tearful guest, she cannot seem to help but exult a little in bad news. At each event, she asks for student loan interest rates.
“Is anyone paying more than 20 percent?” she asks. “Twenty-seven percent!” she said Saturday night in Indianapolis, repeating a reply in the crowd.
She said she had recently met someone paying 30 percent, adding, “I think we hit the jackpot.”
Even as Mrs. Clinton shifts herself down market, she moves her audience up market, speaking in flatteringly aspirational language. Choosing a president is like choosing a builder for your dream house, she told an audience in North Carolina. She tells histories of wealthy people who struggle with, would you believe, the same problems as her audiences. A C.E.O. of a grocery chain who decided that his company could not afford the increase in health care costs. A wealthy constituent who could not manage to make his insurance company pay for lifesaving care.
But she sometimes slips back to Washington wonk from factory girl. In Greenville, she expressed solidarity with struggling homeowners and truckers, but then talked about intellectual property theft by the Chinese, the need to expand production of cellulosic ethanol and the emergence of adult-onset Type II diabetes among pre-teenagers.
Waiting for an event on Saturday morning, Sharon Glenn, an eighth-grade teacher, said she knew Mrs. Clinton’s life was nothing like her own.
After a rally on Friday night, Ms. Glenn said: “I’m going home and doing laundry at 1 a.m. She’s not doing laundry.”
Still, she said, Mrs. Clinton seems more connected to her concerns than Mr. Obama.
“I’m not sure how that happened for us,” Ms. Glenn said.