PHILADELPHIA, Penn.--Forget "
Not as Bad as You Think." I had a new name for Clinton's final swing through Pennsylvania swing all ready to go: the "Glutton for Punishment" Tour.
Checking Clinton's schedule after yesterday's appearance on the sylvan campus of Haverford College--a place packed, like most upscale suburban schools, with iPhone-toting Obamaniacs--I was surprised to see that her next stop was in (what I read as) "
North Philadelphia." For a "block party." I'm no Eddie Rendell, but as someone born in the city and raised 30 minutes away, I do have a sketchy familiarity with Philly's basic layout--and there was no doubt in my mind that "North Philadelphia" was either a typo or a bold (if futile) political maneuver. That's because the area is almost unanimously black--and in previous primaries, Barack Obama has trounced Clinton among African-Americans by margins of 70 or 80 percent. If there's one city in Pennsylvania that he's guaranteed to win, the 43-percent-black Philadelphia is it, and North Philadelphia will be a big reason why. It's not Clinton Country. So typing the address--7373 Frankford Ave.--into my GPS, I simply assumed that Clinton was spending the first day of her pre-primary tour reaching out to unfriendly audiences before moving west over the weekend to woo her older, whiter, working-class constituencies. Hence "Glutton for Punishment." As a Philadelphian friend put it to me on the phone, "A block party in North Philadelphia? Fine. With Hillary Clinton? Um, no."
It was clear from the moment I arrived that his skepticism was warranted. For starters, Clinton was speaking from a stage wedged between the chrome-tastic Mayfair Diner and a place called "McNoodle's Irish Pub"--a forehead-slapping illustration of the fact that, far from North Philly, I had actually landed in
Mayfair, a neighborhood in the
Northeast that happens to be near-exclusively (you guessed it!) Irish. Then there was the crowd. Of the thousands thronging the 7300 block of Frankford St., I only spotted one who was, you know, black. It seems Hillary had come to Clinton Country after all. Her strength in Pennsylvania is largely predicted on the support of voters just like last night's, who were waving signs that read "Lettercarriers for Hillary" or American Federation of Teachers or AFSCME or "We've Got Your Back"--the brawny, blue-collar "white ethnics," whether of Irish, German, Polish or Italian descent, who form the Catholic backbone of the state, from Philly to Pittsburgh to Erie in the northwest. And Clinton's Pennsylvania stump speech (which
she debuted at Temple last month) was perfectly calibrated for the crowd. Shouting hoarsely over near-constant cheering, she spoke of her grandfather, who labored in Scranton's lace mines from the ages of 11 to 65; her father, who played football at Penn State; the power of unions; nostalgia for the 1990s ("When I hear [Obama] criticizing the '90s, I keep wondering what part he didn't like--the peace or the prosperity--because I liked both"); and even the recent detours on I-95 ("Wouldn't it be better if we put hardworking Americans back to work building roads and bridges?"). "Think of this election as a really long job interview," Clinton said. "Who are you going to hire for the hardest job in the world? After all, you're the boss." She'll spend the next four days making the same working-class case to the same working-class voters.
So far, it's working (pun intended). As you've probably heard, "
Archie Bunker" voters--white, blue-collar types straight out of "All in the Family"--powered Clinton to victory in Ohio and seem poised to put her over the top in Pennsylvania. At first, some pundits doubted that the lunch-pail Dems would warm to a woman millionaire; Bunker, you'll recall, was something of a misogynist. But last night it was clear that any initial hesitation is ancient history. After her speech, as Clinton autographed and posed her way around the circular barricades surrounding the stage, 64-year-old Ernie Spain--something of a
Carroll O'Connor lookalike, actually, with the same shag-era sideburns, same halo of wispy white hair, and same overgrown baby-face--struggled up onto a flimsy folding chair and steadied himself. As much as Spain shifted, stretched and straddled--he almost fell at one point--he could barely see Clinton through the tangle of hands and heads. "Hey, Hillary!" he shouted, waving his cell-phone camera. "Over here!" No response. "Would you people put those signs down for a second so a guy could get a picture!" Still nothing. Intrigued by the sight of a neighborhood guy making like a Motorola-toting 'tween at the High School Musical premiere, I asked Spain, a nurse at Einstein Hospital with two kids in college, if he'd always supported Hillary. His answer was revealing. "In the beginning I gave them both an equal look," he said. "But Obama is always talking about hope, and Hillary has the details. Where are his details, you know?" I asked for an example. "Well, take the retirement age," he replied. "I'm lucky. I can retire in two years, three years. But people are talking about raising it to 70. Now, you don't have to tell me about the obesity epidemic. We're lifting 250-pound men onto stretchers every day. But how many 70-year-olds you think can do that? For the guys like me doing the heavy lifting and digging the ditches, this stuff matters. And I like what Hillary has to say."
Spain was referring, of course, to the Democratic debate over Social Security. Back in Iowa, Clinton ruled out raising the retirement age; Obama initially left "every option on the table." But what Spain didn't realize is that Obama quickly
nixed an age hike as well--meaning that on this issue, as on so many others, his and Clinton's stances are identical. Which only goes to show: for Spain and Co., as for most other American, differences in "the details" aren't really determinative. After all, Obama is
pretty darn detailed. As I've
written before, "
the 2008 Democratic race is by far the heaviest on policy of any nominating contest in recent memory. It's just that voters who aren't paying close attention--and that's most of us--can't 'hear' [Obama's] specifics over all his talk about airier concepts like hope, unity and change. We allot a tiny corner of our brains to each presidential candidate, and Obama has filled that space with rhetoric." After all this time, that's still why voters like Spain are keeping Clinton's candidacy alive. By
emphasizing the details--along with experience, hard work and solutions--she signals that the nitty-gritty is more important to her than "the process." And for the guys doing the heavy lifting, that makes all the sense in the world.
Walking back to my car, I checked the schedule again. "Northeast Philadelphia," it read. Turns out it was me who was off, not Clinton. She was right on target.
