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Got an interesting e-mail from the Clinton campaign yesterday, one which probably will set the tone for much of the campaign rhetoric we’ll be hearing for the next month.  

“For Hillary Clinton, Pennsylvania is as much a homecoming as a stop on the presidential campaign trail,” the statement explains. “Hillary has deep family roots in Pennsylvania — and lifelong memories of her time spent there as a child.”

The e-mail lets us know that the Senator’s grandparents settled in Scranton “more than a century ago.” And her father “went on to play football for the Penn State Nittany Lions” in the 1930s.

When your family’s Penn State football legacy predates that of the Paterno clan, it’s fair to say you have some Keystone roots. Still, there’s something a wee bit cloying about the way the campaign tells us (for example) that Senator’s Clinton family “remained connected to Pennsylvania even after her father had to jump a railroad car and leave the state to find work in Chicago.”

There’s no word on whether he played a harmonica during that time, or whether he conversed with colorful but down-on-their-luck hobos who shared with him their melancholy wisdom while crouched over a campfire. But we do learn that “every summer of her childhood, Hillary, her parents, and her brothers loaded up the family car and drove east to … the family cabin on Lake Winola [near Scranton], which they still own today.”

Interestingly, the statement leaves out a part of the story where young Hillary learned to shoot a rifle on vacation, a bit of biography she’s noted in her book, Living History. I can only assume that Senator Clinton will not forget to bring up this portion of her background during campaign stops.

In any case, the same day Clinton issued her statement, the New York Times ran a profile of her family’s eastern Pennsylvania connections. And for the most part, the locals are happy to claim her.

“She’s tough,” explains Scranton’s mayor, who then invokes the area’s coal-mining past: “That’s a real Scranton trait. That’s an anthracite trait.” You know, unlike those wussies in western Pennsylvania where they mine bituminous coal.

It’s no surprise that a candidate would tout such connections, both to an important state and to an important demographic — blue-collar folks trying to sort out their place in a deindustrializing America. As the Times itself observes, Clinton’s “supporters here hope that her local roots will help her do something she rarely does on the stump: connect the dots between [her] policies and her life.” And as this space has noted previously, class issues do go a long way toward explaining Clinton’s edge in Pennsylvania.

The result of such coverage, though, usually makes me feel like the reporters are listening for banjos playing in the distance. Sure enough, the Times also quotes a Scranton radio personality observing that the locals “are bound by ‘tribalism’.” And the mayor says that in anthracite country, “we take it day to day. We watch our pocketbook. We care about small-town things.” Whereas in larger cities, presumably, no one cares how much they spend.

I guess this is the inevitable result of being in a state whose primary actually matters. For years, we’ve been hearing about the small-town pocketbook-watching habits of Iowans and New Hampshirelings. We’ve been told how folks there like to meet their presidential candidates all up-close and personal-like. As if anyone else in the United States wouldn’t like to have a future president in the living room, so we could yell at him.

For better and worse, over the next couple weeks things that are basic human nature — caring for your family and community, for example — will be treated as some sort of quaint local folkway. And out here in “KD Country,” we’ll eat it right up. It flatters our own nativist prejudicies, after all … our belief that our ordinariness is somehow extraordinary. The same rhetoric applies whether you live in DuBois or Des Moines, of course, but that’s all the more reason for a politician to embrace it.

This article appears in Mar 6-12, 2008.

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6 replies on “Hillary Clinton’s Hometown Advantage”

  1. “I guess this is the inevitable result of being in a state whose primary actually matters.”

    Good comments about the process, but now it’s your state’s turn to have a say. HRC has campaigned all over, but your state tugs at her in ways different than most others. Maybe that will have an impact on communication there. The whole world watches.

  2. Pennsylvania loves Hillary!

    Homecoming for Hillary
    with video
    BY BORYS KRAWCZENIUK
    STAFF WRITER
    03/11/2008
    Email to a friendPost a CommentPrinter-friendly

    Hillary Clinton chats while enjoying a pizza at Revello’s Cafe in Old Forge on Monday during her visit. PAMELA SUCHY / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
    She never officially lived here, but she sure is loved here.

    Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton blamed the nation’s faltering economy on President Bush taking the country on “a big detour in our destiny” in a 28-minute speech Monday at Scranton High School.

    About 3,000 wildly enthusiastic supporters frequently interrupted her, including when she said Mr. Bush squandered a budget surplus left behind by her husband, President Bill Clinton, on the Iraq war and “tax cuts for the wealthiest of this country.”

    “We’ve got to end his misplaced priorities and start investing in America and bring that money home right here to Scranton and put it to work for American priorities,” Mrs. Clinton said. “We’ve got to start thinking of our future the way we did when we went into space.”

    Supporters in the gymnasium waved signs that said “The Electric City (Heart) Hillary,” and “Just Say No to Obama.”

  5. How ironic that Pennsylvania is of such utmost importance to Hillary all of the sudden. That cabin has been there for a long long time, but no history of the press ever covering Hill, Bill and Chelsea’s vacations there. Perhaps that’s because they never happened. Perhaps that’s because Pennsylvania is only important now because her future as a viable candidate relies on it. Politics, politics, politics. She has a husband who makes racial inuendo to slander an opposition candidate and now she has her own campaign finance director making racial comments against the same candidate. Well, if Barack has gotten to where he is only because he is black, then Hillary has only gotten to where she is because she has a vagina, and nothing more.

  6. To poropatichb

    Does the sentiment in your post reflect the politics of unity that Obama describes? Or is his unity message not something that resonates with you?

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