Hillary Clinton on the High Road in Oregon

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Sat May-17-08 01:12 PM
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Hillary Clinton on the High Road in Oregon

JUNCTION CITY, Oregon -- Every election season, candidates discuss everyday problems with everyday voters by simply walking up to a front door and starting a conversation.

And if it works for future city councilors and school board members, why not a candidate for president of the United States?

Hillary Clinton gave it a try on Friday, pulling off the highway in Junction City, turning into a half-built subdivision, and walking up the front steps of Marv and Sandy Mehlbrech’s home to say hello.

. . . after sitting down with her family and Clinton at her oak dining room table, Sandy Mehlbrech said it wasn’t hard to block out the spectacle around her.

“After she began to talk I felt more at ease,” Mehlbrech said. So at ease that, as the hourlong conversation was wrapping up, she decided to make a request.

“Please stay in the race,” Mehlbrech asked Clinton. “I know there are so many people behind you.”

It was an http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/1210994722185180.xml&coll=7">unusual event by modern campaign standards. The motorcade, complete with motorcycle cops and national press bus, rolled into an all but silent neighborhood of green lawns, new streets and a mix of finished and partially complete homes. A few curious onlookers watched as Clinton, wearing an orange-and-rust pantsuit, got out of a gray Suburban and had a brief conversation with Eugene homebuilder Mike Gansen.

The Mehlbrechs, who recently moved from Tualatin, told Clinton they're retired and living on a fixed income. They said they bought the house as an investment that might later help pay for assisted living.

But with home prices on the decline, they're worried. They also had hoped to travel more but have been stymied by the cost.

"We can't pay $4 a gallon for gas, so we just kind of hang around here," Marvin Mehlbrech said.

Also at the table were the Mehlbrechs' son and daughter-in-law, Scott and Christy Mehlbrech; Gansen, the homebuilder; and Jason Hartman, who owns a tile and stone shop in nearby Springfield. All said the slow economy, compounded by rising gas prices, had cut into their businesses and caused them to make lifestyle changes.

Hillary Clinton didn't mention Barack Obama in her stop in this small town north of Eugene today. Or John McCain. But she leveled an array of attacks at President Bush, including a mocking of his energy policy that she blamed for economy-stifling gas prices. (http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/politics/blog/2008/05/clinton_tea_is_no_energy_polic.html)

Clinton popped into a half-finished new subdivision here to talk housing concerns and high gas prices with a half-dozen voters around a dining-room table. The event carried a sort of parallel universe feel: While Obama and McCain verbally sparred elsewhere over direct talks with hostile governments, Clinton acted the part of a presidential nominee - with Bush as her opponent.

Clinton criticized Bush on education, economics and timber harvesting. She said his energy policy amounted to "begging" Saudi Arabia to increase oil production and pledged to fight the "monopoly" of OPEC.

"I think it's very important that we do something more dramatic than go and have tea with the Saudis," she said, referencing Bush's meetings in that country on Friday.

Clinton promised to probe OPEC and oil traders, Teddy Roosevelt-style, for possible antitrust violations and market manipulation.

“I don’t think it is a good energy policy to depend upon the kindness of the Saudis … while businesses and individuals are trying to figure out how they’re going to afford nearly $4 a gallon gas and nearly $5 a gallon diesel,” she said. “The impact is really beginning to ripple dramatically through the economy.” (http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/05/16/1033533.aspx)

“The Saudis may decide, well we better do something to help out President Bush, but that’s a short term fix. It is not going to have any long-term consequences. And we just have to take a different approach if we’re going to begin to get serious," she said.

Clinton generally lamented the sense of “paralysis” in the country today.

“We just can’t get anything done. Here we are the greatest nation in the world, the greatest problem solvers, and we’re not solving our problems,” she said. “We’re not solving our energy problems; we’re not solving our infrastructure problems. I mean it just doesn’t add up. And we’re sure not solving our health care problems.”

Mehlbrech later told reporters she had already voted for Hillary Clinton in the Oregon primary, the only state to conduct all its elections exclusively by mail.

"I don't want her to give up, even though people keep saying that it's time," Mehlbrech said.

Her husband said he admires Clinton for refusing to give up at this point, even though "the odds are really against her."

"She's not a quitter," Marv Mehlbrech said. "She's still at home plate swinging away. This is her final splash."

PORTLAND, Oregon -- At a Friday night town hall in Oregon, Senator Hillary Clinton criticized Senator John McCain for his speech predicting victory in Iraq by the end of his first term. (http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/05/17/clinton-mccains-2013-speech-like-mission-accomplished/)

"It sounded a lot like 'Mission Accomplished,' only postponed into 2013," said Clinton, referring to President George Bush's declaration less than two months after the Iraq invasion that major combat was over. "From my perspective, it's just more of the same. It's a continuation of the Bush policies that have been failures."

Both Clinton and Barack Obama have been attempting to paint a McCain administration as a third term for President Bush. Clinton also attacked the president on Friday for meetings with Saudi officials in which he asked them to increase oil production in order to bring down prices.

"It was embarrassing today," Clinton told the town hall organized by an Oregon TV station. "President Bush is over there begging the Saudis to increase production because he has no energy policy."

She also went after Bush for comments he made in Jerusalem on Thursday when he took a shot at Democrats — and many argue Obama — saying, "some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals," drawing parallels with appeasing the Nazis in 1939.

"I am very offended by President Bush's remarks which seem to suggest that Democrats are the equivalent of Nazi appeasers," said Clinton. "That was way out of line and really outrageous and should be rejected out of hand."

It appears that Clinton, after a week when former candidate John Edwards gave his support to Obama and his superdelegate count passed hers for the first time, has backed down from attacking her rival for the nomination.

Tonight, the only reference Clinton made before the Portland audience to Obama was complimentary – pointing to how he voted for measures that lessened the strain from high fuel prices on consumers. “There were two state of examples of this in the last seven or eight years, both Illinois and Indiana -- in fact, my opponent voted for it when he was in the Illinois state senate – had a gas tax holiday, and consumers got the benefits of it,” she said.

There was a silence on the telephone line as well, with Clinton’s campaign holding no conference calls with the press – a main source of the trench warfare between Obama and Clinton’s camps in recent weeks. What could be seen as too negative to be said by Clinton herself in public was told to the press by her communications team – Howard Wolfson, Phil Singer, and Geoff Garin – all of whom remained strangely quiet.

In the final moments of the town hall meeting, Clinton was asked what her highs and lows had been in the last year of campaigning. Hillary told the audience that the high had been campaigning alongside her daughter, Chelsea.

The low – “sleep deprivation.”

But it also appears that when it comes to Obama, the Clinton campaign might have reached that low for one of the last times. Looking forward to catching up on their rest and exhausted by the campaign, Clinton might finally be starting to save strength for defending her Democratic Party.