Hillary Clinton Chases the Prole Vote
Hillary Clinton began the campaign in pearls,
assembling a team of fundraisers that included
luminaries from New York's financial services industry
She's ending it in pickup trucks, Dairy Queens
and taking a 2-by-4 to "Wall Street money brokers"
Hillary Spells P for Populism
Hillary Clinton had been campaigning for more than 16 hours when she strode onto the stage at Evansville Central High School just before 11 p.m. Monday.
She had started her day at a community college in eastern North Carolina. There were rallies at a train depot, a firehouse in northwest Indiana and another across the state on the Ohio River.
But Clinton betrayed barely a hint of fatigue as she beamed at a crowd of screaming supporters at the high school. "This campaign has been a joy," she said before launching into a full-throated attack on the Bush administration.
Sen. Barack Obama may still be the favorite to take the Democratic nomination for president when the primary season ends next month.
But as primary voters go to the polls in Indiana and North Carolina today, Clinton is striking the pose of happy warrior.
While Obama labors to retool his message to reach working-class voters, she is exulting in a populist rallying cry that connects her own trials with those of Americans trying to pay for college or healthcare or gasoline at the pump.
She lingers with voters over barbecue and ice cream, and campaigns late into the night.
Obama can still draw thousands to rock concert-like rallies. But in train depots and town squares, at restaurants and schoolhouses, Clinton has brought a new zeal to the trail in recent weeks that she shows no sign of abandoning.
"I love campaigning," the senator from New York told a crowd over the weekend in Gastonia, N.C., a onetime textile manufacturing mecca decimated by the flood of cheap goods from China.
Working the rope lines after she gives her campaign speech, Clinton seems to feed off the crowd, reaching for books, T-shirts or anything else thrust toward her by fans seeking an autograph.
At a fire station in Merrillville, Ind., Clinton posed with supporters, taking their digital cameras and shooting photographs of herself with them Monday afternoon.
The day before in South Bend, Ind., she slurped on a Snickers Blizzard and chatted with children during an unscheduled half-hour stop at a Dairy Queen.
Even when her days end near midnight, Clinton often pauses before boarding her charter plane to shake another hand and chat with a bus driver or a baggage handler.
Her campaign is on a roll. After easily beating Obama in Pennsylvania, Clinton has closed on him in North Carolina and Indiana in the last two weeks as the senator from Illinois struggled to explain his relationship with his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.
But the former first lady -- who once took aim at a "vast right-wing conspiracy" that she said menaced her husband's administration -- also appears to be drawing renewed strength by attacking a new set of villains.
Clinton promises to take on Wall Street money managers she says pay too few taxes and oil traders she claims are manipulating the market and driving up prices.
She says she will fight insurance companies who deny Americans coverage and student loan companies she says are preying on people who are unable to afford college.
And she pledges to take on China, whose exports have crippled industries in North Carolina and Indiana.
The jabs draw cheers from her working-class crowds, whose struggles she invokes at each stop. She, in turn, seems to revel in the role of a fighter who can rescue them.
On Monday night, despite a broken microphone and the advancing hour, Clinton delivered a nearly complete campaign speech. And when it was over, she spent more than half an hour signing autographs and posing for photos, finally ending her day after midnight.
Who's More Red, White and Blue-Collar?
The presidential race has turned into a riveting competition for ordinariness, as both campaigns have concluded that whoever does a better job of winning over your average blue-collar man in an average American town of 60,000 -- is more likely to triumph in Tuesday's primaries in Indiana and North Carolina.
Identifying with the common man has been a requisite in presidential elections for almost two centuries. But the stakes are especially high in a race largely defined by an economic crisis, and campaign experts say the candidates have gone especially far in their appeals.
In the past six weeks, Clinton hammered down a shot of Crown Royal whiskey -- not necessarily the first choice of the workingman -- and chased it with a beer.
Obama visited a Pennsylvania sports bar and sampled a Yuengling after making sure it wasn't "some designer beer." Clinton told stories about learning to shoot behind the cottage her grandfather built. Obama went bowling.
Whether these voyeurs of blue-collar existence yield results depends on how working-class people perceive them.
Are these genuine attempts at connection or overly calculated tactics to win voters? Are they telling moments that reveal a candidate's humanity or patronizing charades that reveal a candidate's guile?
Presidential candidates have strived relentlessly downward in social class ever since the 1840s, when William Henry Harrison created what historians now call the "common-man myth."
While most of his peers campaigned from their estates, Harrison traveled the country and spoke under a banner depicting a log cabin and a bottle of hard cider. He won the presidency by a landslide, and his campaign model became the new standard.
With few exemptions since, American voters have picked presidents who mimic the public's most ordinary habits -- men who regularly mention drinking, or NASCAR, or old-fashioned farm work.
Ronald Reagan liked to be photographed chopping wood. George H.W. Bush spoke longingly about pork rinds. Bill Clinton stopped at McDonald's while on the campaign trial, even when it required a side trip. And George W. Bush is a champion brush-clearer.
Disruption to this role-playing occurs only when a politician makes a blunder so glaring that it reveals him to be a jester in costume.
Gerald Ford bit into a tamale without husking it while campaigning on the Mexican border in 1976, and he extolled its deliciousness before realizing he had consumed the wrapper.
John F. Kerry ordered a cheesesteak at Pat's in Philadelphia and asked for Swiss cheese, even though Pat's had specialized in subs with Cheez Whiz for 70 years.
In 1994, George W. Bush arranged for several media outlets to follow him on the first day of dove-hunting season.
He fired his gun, killed a bird and looked like a real woodsman until officials identified his kill as a Texas songbird, a protected species easily distinguished from doves by experienced hunters. Bush paid a $130 fine.
"If you can look like the common man and make your opponent appear out of touch, you've pretty much won the election," said Richard Shenkman, a George Mason professor who has written several books about presidential campaigning.
"The American people, given the choice between reality and the myth, almost always pick the myth. . . . We tell ourselves their average day is just like ours."
