Hillary Clinton looks back to "good old days" to get ahead

[DeepModem Mom]

LAT: Hillary Clinton looks back to get ahead
Remember the good old days? She does, in campaign appearances that increasingly seek to tap national nostalgia.
By Noam N. Levey, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 6, 2008

....There is a lot that Clinton wants to get back to these days. On the presidential campaign trail, Clinton talks of reviving steel mills, rebuilding bridges, reprising the war bond campaign of the 1940s and recapturing the excitement of the Apollo space program in the '60s. Clinton, a baby boomer born in 1947, did not initially campaign on the triumphs of America's past. But as she works to narrow Illinois Sen. Barack Obama's lead in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, she is weaving a strain of nostalgia into her speeches. Her message seems to resonate in states hit hard by the shutdown of once-booming factories....

Clinton decisively won Ohio last month on the strength of her support among white, working-class voters. And she is relying on them to sustain her candidacy in the next three months as the last states -- including Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia -- go to the polls before the primary season ends in June.

"Change has not been all that positive for a lot of people here over the last 20 years," said Tom Murphy, a former mayor of Pittsburgh. "Their kids may have moved away. Their factories may have shut. Their jobs may have disappeared. "There are a lot of people here who fondly remember the old days," he said.

Clinton has family roots in the industrial heartland of eastern Pennsylvania, where her grandfather spent decades as a factory worker in Scranton. She began her 2003 memoir, "Living History," by recalling the prosperous years that followed World War II, when her father, a Navy veteran, started a business and bought a two-story brick house in the Chicago suburbs to raise a family.

Yet Clinton, whose public image has been shaped by her years as first lady, did not launch her presidential campaign with a sepia-toned message. Her pitch was largely built on her experience, to contrast with Obama, 46. Today, Clinton still frequently cites her work in the Senate, the White House and elsewhere to argue that she is better qualified to be "commander in chief on Day One." But since the emergence of working-class voters as her core constituency, Clinton has increasingly shaped her message to match their sensibility, said Mark Mellman, a veteran Democratic strategist.

"It's common to say elections are about the future. They're not," he said. "They're often about the past. . . . And effective campaigns often draw on those historical analogies."...

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-nostalgia6apr06,0,1021204.story

[stellanoir]

1. That time is OVER

I've said repeatedly that beyond the rancor of sexism and racism, ageism will be the larger factor.

That and Clinton fatigue.

[trashcanistanista]

2. "reviving steel mills"?

Blatant hypocrisy. NAFTA put a permanent end to that and she is well aware of it. That was the whole purpose of it! Repealing NAFTA, apparently is not woven into her speeches. "factory work"? Doesn't exist anymore. Most American voters don't know what it is. Hillary needs to drop out now. She has no clue.