All over North Carolina and Indiana, crowds of teachers and truckers, salespeople and small business owners, have been hailing Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as one of their own.
“She’s a working mom,” Tracy Zettel, who works for a health insurance company, said Saturday while waiting for Mrs. Clinton to appear in Cary, N.C. “That’s what I am.”
“A good ol’ girl,” Clyde Swedenberg, owner of a small jewelry store, called her in Lakeside Park, N.C.
After listening to her speak in Fort Wayne, Ind., on Sunday, Joe Jakacky, a warehouse worker, remarked that Mrs. Clinton had started out just like he did, in a menial job.
Whatever the results of the primaries on Tuesday in Indiana and North Carolina, Mrs. Clinton has accomplished the seemingly impossible in those states. Somehow, a woman who has not regularly filled her own gasoline tank in well over a decade, who with her husband made $109 million in the last eight years and who vacations with Oscar de la Renta, has transformed herself into a working-class hero.
In promoting herself as a champion of ordinary Americans in a troubled economy, Mrs. Clinton has also tried to cast her rival, Senator Barack Obama, as an out-of-touch elitist. She has made her case at all the right stops (an auto-racing hall of fame) and used all the right props (lately delivering speeches from pickup beds).
But what is more remarkable about Mrs. Clinton’s approach in Indiana and North Carolina is how minimally she uses her own biography. Perhaps because almost nothing she could say about her life would sound humble or hardscrabble — she grew up in an affluent Chicago suburb, went to prestigious schools and is, of course, a lawyer — Mrs. Clinton says very little about herself at all. Instead, she focuses on her audience’s concerns. In most speeches, she now offers just one suggestive strand of her life story.
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“She’s a working mom,” Tracy Zettel, who works for a health insurance company, said Saturday while waiting for Mrs. Clinton to appear in Cary, N.C. “That’s what I am.”
“A good ol’ girl,” Clyde Swedenberg, owner of a small jewelry store, called her in Lakeside Park, N.C.
After listening to her speak in Fort Wayne, Ind., on Sunday, Joe Jakacky, a warehouse worker, remarked that Mrs. Clinton had started out just like he did, in a menial job.
Whatever the results of the primaries on Tuesday in Indiana and North Carolina, Mrs. Clinton has accomplished the seemingly impossible in those states. Somehow, a woman who has not regularly filled her own gasoline tank in well over a decade, who with her husband made $109 million in the last eight years and who vacations with Oscar de la Renta, has transformed herself into a working-class hero.
In promoting herself as a champion of ordinary Americans in a troubled economy, Mrs. Clinton has also tried to cast her rival, Senator Barack Obama, as an out-of-touch elitist. She has made her case at all the right stops (an auto-racing hall of fame) and used all the right props (lately delivering speeches from pickup beds).
But what is more remarkable about Mrs. Clinton’s approach in Indiana and North Carolina is how minimally she uses her own biography. Perhaps because almost nothing she could say about her life would sound humble or hardscrabble — she grew up in an affluent Chicago suburb, went to prestigious schools and is, of course, a lawyer — Mrs. Clinton says very little about herself at all. Instead, she focuses on her audience’s concerns. In most speeches, she now offers just one suggestive strand of her life story.
Discuss Add this link to... Bury
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