How fortuitous for Hillary her PA roots, very touching:
"THIS is me in Scranton," says the voice of Hillary Clinton over grainy black and white footage of a beaming little girl in a white 1950s dress. "This is where my father was raised and my grandfather worked in the lace mill."
The camera cuts to a shot of a weatherboard house, a rustic cottage in the Pennsylvania hills near Scranton where the Rodham family spent every summer.
"There was no heat or indoor shower, just the joy of family," says the Senator's voice-over as the music rises to a crescendo.
"I was raised on the American dream ... we all need to dream it again and I promise we will."
The television advertisement, being played and replayed throughout Pennsylvania, could hardly be more schmaltzy, more obvious, or more effective: this is Clinton's latest, and possibly last, roll of the dice in her campaign to secure the Democratic nomination. While Barack Obama is popular in the large cities, among liberals, blacks and students, Clinton is backed by older, whiter voters, conservative Democrats, Catholics, and the blue-collar workers who make up the bedrock of the party's support.
Clinton's future depends on rediscovering her past, opening up the family photograph album and displaying her working-class credentials. At every campaign stop, she stresses her links to this gritty, coal town in northeast Pennsylvania, where her father was born and buried.
"My feelings about Pennsylvania are real personal," she told a wildly cheering crowd on one of her last campaign rallies before tonight's vote.
"My grandfather worked in the factory from the age of eleven ... I have roots in Pennsylvania."
It goes down a storm with her Pennsylvania supporters. Much has been made of the extraordinary Obama story, but in many ways the journey of the Rodham family is just as remarkable and, for many Pennsylvanians, comfortingly familiar.
Jonathan Rodham, Clinton's great-grandfather, was a Welsh miner who arrived in Scranton in 1886 with his eight children, determined to extract a better life from the newly discovered coal fields. He made a living as a mine foreman, though never a fortune.
His son, Hillary's grandfather, worked for 55 years in a lace textile factory.
Scranton was then a cauldron of the industrial revolution, a place of belching factories, satanic mills, train yards and, above all, mines. The tonnes of coal and anthracite carved out of the mountains fed the trains and factory furnaces: Hillary Clinton recalled, as a child, marvelling at the Lackawanna River running through the city black with coal dust, and the burning piles on the horizon.
Hugh Rodham, Hillary's father, hopped a freight train to Chicago, founded a curtain business after the war and began to pull his family towards prosperity. The coal began to run out at about the same time, and the area has been in slow but steady decline ever since.
But Hugh Rodham never let his children forget where they came from. The family spent every summer in the wooden cabin on Lake Winola, near Scranton, which Rodham had built with his father in 1921.
Here the young Hillary learned to shoot, to fish and to play pinochle, the American card game, with local men with names such as "Old Hank".
The wooden cottage with the porch on Lake Winola still belongs to the Rodhams and Clinton repeatedly refers to it on the campaign trail: "A big part of my early experiences ... it meant the world to me". Mining this valuable seam of her past has paid political dividends. |
