PHILADELPHIA—“We need her,” Barbara Vizzini, a 46-year-old equipment operator from Middletown, said before Hillary Clinton took the stage at a rally in Fairless Hills Monday night. “If we don’t get her, we’re going to end up with John McCain.”
What about Barack Obama? Why couldn’t he beat the Republican nominee?
“The race thing,” interjected her colleague Daniel Kirner, 52, from Tullytown.
“I mean, a president named Barack?” agreed Ms. Vizzini.
Hillary Clinton has spent the past few days courting the white, blue-collar workers who are most receptive to her no-nonsense message of hard work and experience. They also happen to be the people most suspicious of Mr. Obama. Some, like Ms. Vizzini, like him well enough, but echoing Pennsylvania governor and Hillary surrogate Ed Rendell, they think he will have problems with some white voters. Others think he’s an unreliable upstart who will stumble when it counts, or worse, that he’s simply a fraud.
Among such voters, Mrs. Clinton is reveling in her role as the anti-Obama—a grounded, nuts-and-bolts candidate who refers to infrastructure problems on I-95 and declares herself “excited” to be in whatever factory or faded manufacturing center she happens to be touring at that moment.
She frequently says, in an implicit contrast with Mr. Obama’s cosmopolitan heritage, “My father was from Scranton.”
And in a purposeful counterpoint to Mr. Obama’s nonspecific message of hope, Mrs. Clinton casts herself as a deliverer of more jobs, fairer trade and a better economy.
On the evening of March 31, Mrs. Clinton spoke at another “Solutions for the Pennsylvania Economy” rally, this time in Fairless Hills, just over the border from Trenton.
Before the candidate arrived, a long line of cars filed past the Sugar N’ Spice Gentleman’s Club (“Continuous Dancing”), past modest homes and slowly through the Keystone Industrial Port Complex, where signs directed visitors toward International Salt and ABC Crushed Materials in the green zone, the Café Too Busy to Cook in the blue zone, and Bulk Terminals and Air Products in the red zone.
Inside a gaping and chilly hangar that housed a tanker, wind turbines and a yellow tractor, a mostly white, working-class audience of about 1,000 cheered as Mrs. Clinton took the stage to the ultimate comeback soundtrack, Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” from Rocky III.
Her speech consisted of a litany of populist applause lines and references to small-bore economic issues—Pell Grants, college loans and targeted tax cuts—that resonated with the attendees. She spoke disparagingly of the “Wall Street money manager,” and said that her father, a former Penn State football player, “was a little skeptical about having a daughter who was a lawyer.” She spoke worshipfully of the workers she recently met, “a nurse, a teacher, a truck driver, a steel worker, right here in Pennsylvania,” and promised a return to fiscal responsibility. She lashed out at oil companies for getting tax breaks, and at “China and their unfair trade practices.”
And unlike Mr. Obama’s supporters, who have been trying hard in recent days not to look like bullies, Mrs. Clinton warmed to the opportunity to underscore (if the Rocky metaphor wasn’t obvious enough) that she’s no softy.
“You know,” Mrs. Clinton said at one point, “I see that sign out there that says, ‘Do not quit.’ Well, you know one thing about me is I do not quit.”
By the end, some of the people in the crowd found it frankly inconceivable that she could lose to Mr. Obama.
“She’s got this one locked,” said Mary Yates, a 67-year-old retired worker in a chemical factory. “No Muslim is going to be president. No drug addict. If Hillary isn’t the one, everyone I know will vote for John McCain.”
Her campaign may not be at liberty to say so, but that sort of sentiment–factually misguided though it may be–is just what the Clinton campaign needs right now. Mrs. Clinton trails Mr. Obama in elected delegates, and can pretty much only win by convincing the bulk of the party’s uncommitted superdelegates—the appointed political elites—that she has to be the party’s nominee in November if they want any shot of beating Mr. McCain.
The really tricky part, though, will be selling a bunch of lunch-pail, underdog-loving voters—the very ones she’s enjoying success appealing to—on the idea that it’s all right for a powerful cadre of political officials to, essentially, trump the decision of the primary electorate.
