Bill and Hillary Clinton were back on the campaign trail on Sunday, making their first joint appearance on behalf of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Bill introduced Hillary and she introduced Biden at an event in the north-eastern Pennsylvania city of Scranton. Biden was born in Scranton and Hillary’s father came from there and the city backed her over Obama in the Democratic primary by a margin of more than three to one.
Bill was lavish in his praise of Biden and he had a lot to say about Hillary but although he urged the crowd to vote for Obama, he couldn’t quite bring himself to praise the candidate’s personal qualities.
“In addition to the fact that Joe Biden understands you and your lives, I think it’s worth pointing out that if you had a secret ballot of all the Republicans and Democrats in the Congress – all of them – and you asked them to put two or three names down of the people in the entire Congress who do the most about the economic, political, and security challenges of America and the world, his name would be on every single secret ballot,” he said.
“I really like that because sometimes you hear some people talk about people from places like Scranton and Arkansas. They act like we’re by definition “rubes,” and we’re not and he’s not and Barack Obama could not have made a better choice. So we’re proud of you.”
That last bit was a fairly transparent dig at Obama’s “bitter” comments, when he explained to a group of San Francisco donors that rural Pennsylvanians didn’t vote for him because they clung to guns and God out of bitterness at their economic misfortune.
“You have to understand,” a loyal Clinton supporter told me the other day, “that this is a very difficult time for us.”
It was not, of course, a difficult time for them when Obama was slipping in the polls – that was “I told you so” time. But the prospect of an Obama landslide makes some of Hillary’s admirers simply ill with resentment.
Hillary herself has put a brave face on it but it must be especially galling for her to watch the campaign become a contest over domestic economic policy, which was always her strongest suit. Hillary would have been in her element now, producing detailed plan after plan for reforming the mortgage market, helping householders to stay in their homes, getting their grass cut and their windows cleaned.
Still, she managed yesterday to be both gracious and persuasive, something I’m not sure her husband pulled off:
