'I think it would mean you would have a friend and real partner in the White House'

bigtree

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Mon Mar-10-08 08:31 PM
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'I think it would mean you would have a friend and real partner in the White House'

Edited on Mon Mar-10-08 08:39 PM by bigtree

Sen. Hillary Clinton held her first rally in the campaign for the Pennsylvania Democratic primary today at Scranton High School.

By 5:30 p.m. there was a line of people outside the school that wrapped around Seventh Avenue and Providence Road.

"The 1990s were good for Pennsylvania, and we were feeling good," she said, recalling the eight years she spent as first lady during her husband's time as president. She called it a time of "peace and prosperity" for the region.

"It feels wonderful. You know, this is like a second home to me. I spent so much time here growing up. It's where my grandparents were and where my dad was born and raised. I've been to Old Forge before to have pizza. I just love being back. It's really like a homecoming," Senator Clinton said to cheers from supporters.

She ate a cut of Old Forge-style pizza and said she chose Scranton as her first stop because of her roots here. Clinton's father, Hugh Rodham, grew up here before moving his family to Illinois, where she was born and raised. Rodham is buried in Scranton.

Clinton spent about an hour and a half at Revello's. Supporters there said they have been fans of the Clinton campaign for years, dating back to when her husband, President Bill Clinton led the country.

With Pennsylvania's April 22 primary suddenly pivotal for Democrats, it will surprise no one if Clinton points repeatedly to those admittedly long-ago ties before the prolonged statewide campaign runs its course.

"It's definitely a moment of pride," said Mary Stoko, past president of the Lake Winola Cottagers' Association, who lives year-round in her lakeside home. "She is a part of us - that's the way I believe most people think of it."

Clinton's family still owns the yellow, wood-sided cottage on a hill overlooking the lake. Her brothers, Hugh and Tony Rodham, visit each summer, locals say, whacking golf balls on the nearby course and turning up in the local eateries.

And it was in a series of letters written at the cottage in the summer of 1967 that Clinton - reared by a staunch Republican father - first began referring to the GOP as "they," not "we."

Even in prosperity, Hugh Rodham clung to his hardscrabble past, a part of which was the cottage, originally built with no heat or inside plumbing. Each August, he piled the family before dawn into the family Lincoln - "the barge," according to Clinton - and set off for another two weeks at Lake Winola.

In his new biography of Hillary Clinton, Carl Bernstein writes that Rodham "meant the vacation to connect his children to a past not as privileged as the one they knew in Park Ridge, as well as to maintain a strong sense of family."

On one trip, Rodham insisted the family visit a coal mine. "Whatever her discomfort with such gestures at the time," Bernstein writes, "Hillary's later political identification with working-class values and the struggles of average wage-earners was not something acquired at Wellesley or Yale as part of a 1960s countercultural ethos."

When asked what it would mean for the region if Clinton were elected president, she replied, "I think it would mean you would have a friend and real partner in the White House. Someone who has a great deal of affection for the people here and knows how hard people have struggled the last 50 years."