Hillary Shines in Kentucky

Today, I took my daughters with me to see Hillary Clinton speak at a rally at Kentucky State University in Frankfort, KY.


The rally was as interesting and impressive as the candidate. The RSI family arrived about an hour and fifteen minutes early after a ninety minute drive. All of the major Democratic presidential candidates have made appearances within driving distance of our home in Morehead and we've now seen John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton.

There was very little notice for the rally in Frankfurt. As a result, it was no surprise that there were fewer than 100 people there when we arrived. The initial group was older, relatively downscale, and feisty. There were a lot of women there in their sixties wearing sneakers, t-shirts, and lots of Hillary paraphernalia. Actually, I was wearing sneakers too.

Where the Obama crowd last August was well-healed and wore "dress casual," the early crowd at the Hillary crowd was so casual that it would be fair to say that they were ostentatious in their lack of concern for taste. The Hillary crowd also seemed more relaxed.

The early crowd had 10 or 12 African-Americans out of a hundred. So it looked like a representative group. But as the audience swelled to it's final size of 500 plus, the new arrivals were overwhelmingly white and a lot more prosperous and stylish looking. It was like an LA sports event where the cool people always arrive fashionably late.

Compared to the Obama event, Hillary's rally had bare bones organization. Where Obama's rally featured speeches from starry-eyed local high school students and a killer rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner that brought the crowd to their feet, Hillary was introduced by a couple of the usual lackluster Kentucky Democrats--Jerry Lundergan and an African-American state senator whose name I forgot.

Lundergan mentioned that Hillary had raised a million dollars for the Kentucky Democratic Party when they were almost bankrupt. Given that the Kentucky Democrats are almost always floundering and that I'm a Kentucky Democrat, I very much appreciated the help.

As a candidate, Hillary Clinton is very impressive in a different way from Obama. The Obama crowd was so jazzed up by the time Obama hit the stage that all the candidate had to do was hit his applause lines and the crowd went wild. Hillary was impressive in the sophisticated approach she took to her hour-long speech. During the first ten to fifteen minutes of her speech, Hillary was essentially campaigning for Barack Obama by focusing entirely on John McCain's wrong-headed ideas about tax policy, social security, health policy, and the war in Iraq. Without any seeming effort or segwe's, Hillary then transitioned into her own policy ideas giving patient and well-done explanations of how she would approach health insurance, energy independence, withdrawing from Iraq, and caring for veterans.

It wasn't "blow you away" kind of stuff, but Hillary was energetic, engaging, and effective in a way that led one to see her enacting these ideas as President of the United States.

Hillary's supporters are supposed to be a "low information" group, but Hillary's speech assumed that her audience was interested in policy, able to follow policy arguments, and viewed those policy arguments as important for their own lives. To the contrary, Obama speaks as though he believes that his upscale and impressively educated audiences have as little toleration for public policy as Chris Matthews or Bill O'Reilly.

Hillary Clinton was also impressive in the way she carried herself after the speech. Starting on the other side of the gym, she posed for pictures, shook hands, and small-talked her way over to us. At the beginning of this process, Hillary was working the crowd in the sense that she was initiating communication as much as others were communicating with her. Evidently tiring by the time she got to our end, Hillary allowed the crowd to "work her" for pictures, autographs, and brief testimonials about how much they loved her.

Liking attention but only liking "so much attention," Hillary was still determined to be warm, friendly, and giving even as it was wearing her out. The stereotype on Hillary is that she's supposed to be manipulative and controlling. But she seemed as genuine as the artificial situation and superficiality of contact allowed.

I was impressed.

Over all, Hillary Clinton showed how good of a president she could be. I'm voting for her next Tuesday in the Kentucky Democratic Primary.