Hillary Clinton in Scranton, March 10 2008

I hadn't made my mind up to see Hillary Clinton in Scranton this past Monday until I was practically there. Arriving on Providence Avenue, I did a typical Left-Right mixup and headed the wrong way, only too late noticing the crowd of people behind me. I reoriented myself and drove past the crowd into a nearby complex and parked on some muddy grass. (HELPFUL HINT: If you have a front-wheel-drive car, and you have the option of parking part of your car on pavement and part on muddy grass, put the rear wheels on the muddy grass and the front wheels on the pavement. It will help when you decide to leave.)

The line was already very long when I got to the location at about 4:50. Doors had opened at 4:30, and people had probably started gathering a few hours before that. The gym where Hillary would be speaking could hold 3500 people. The line was moving in fits and starts and we made progress very very slowly.
The point where the line wrapped around itself. There were over 3500 people ahead of me.

Free Enterprise thrived along the line. Button vendors and T-shirt hawkers sold their ware up and down the line to a captive audience eager to buy.

It was at about this point that I noticed several rather...fancily dressed women walking towards the end of the line. Ever since Sex and the City hit the air, there has been considerable overlap between the worlds of high fashion and dressing like a prostitute. Earlier I had noticed a woman dressed like a Dominatrix on the way to meet a client: thigh-high leather boots, short skirt, black coat with the collar pulled up, sunglasses. But the women who approached us were dressed somewhat more...as they approached I noticed some things: The breadth of their shoulders. Their tallness. The huskiness of their voices.

Transvestites! I thought. (Or, as I would later learn they called themselves, "Homos for Hillary.") I turned to the guy behind me, who had also noticed them. "You usually have to go to Wal-Mart after 9:00 on a Saturday night to see that," I quipped. He laughed. (I wasn't joking. I was apparently at the Wal-Mart in Wilkes-Barre late one Saturday night - I forget why - during Transvestite Shopping Hours. The place seemed full of them, though it may have been just two.) I regret not getting a photo of them.

A lone Republican crying out in the wilderness. He's opposed to Universal Health Care, apparently. Stupid babies and old people, why should they get a break?
The Obamanites, a small but vocal group of Obama supporters who chose not to join the other pro-Obama individuals who were going in to hear what Hillary had to say. Barack Obama has not yet announced any plans to visit Northeastern Pennsylvania.

There was another group of protesters across the street from the line. At one point they had a bedsheet with the word "GOOGLE" followed by a good half a dozen terms, apparently a string that you're supposed to type in to go to proof positive that Hillary eats aborted babies for lunch or something like that. Actually, I have no idea what the sign said. By the time I got into position to snap a picture - the only way I could get the entire message - they had apparently gotten tired and dropped the banner. Honest, whatever they were pushing couldn't have been that popular or they wouldn't have needed so many terms. (Lately, instead of giving people my blog address, I just tell them to Google "headless rabbit." Another Monkey, the world's #1 source of news and information on headless rabbits!)

Later one of the protesters walked over to Obama Island carrying a small sign. "Does that say 'War 1955'?" the guy behind me asked. "What war would that be? Korea?"

The sign actually said "H.R. 1955". (I had to explain to him that "H.R." stands for "House Resolution".) This is also known as the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007. Now I'm wondering who these people were. Ron Paul is mentioned in the linked article. Could they have been Ron Paul supporters?

Six o'clock came and went and we were still well outside of the gym - closer, but outside. We were all very cold, and as the sun set behind Scranton High School I noted that we were all about to get a lot colder.

6:15 and Hillary had not yet taken the stage. This was a good thing. But around 6:30 a police officer came and told us that the gym was now full, and they were re-routing people to the school auditorium, where at best people would be able to watch Hillary on a TV. A trickle of people were now heading from the front of the gym to the auditorium.

A few seconds later the crowd began to buzz, and then break up. Either everyone was beginning to disperse, or...

Mad dash! Everyone was suddenly racing up a muddy hillside to the auditorium. The line had dissolved, and it was first-come, first served at the doors.

The auditorium filled up pretty quickly, with people of every race and gender identification. (I learned yesterday that the transvestites were there with us!) But, as we quickly learned, there was no TV screen there to watch Hillary's speech. At best we would hear it, over two Public Address speakers mounted above the stage.

And hear it we did. The audio was lousy, the introductions droned on, and no one outside the auditorium could see or hear us. But that didn't stop the crowd from cheering or clapping at appropriate times. One of the most popular items in both Hillary and Chelsea's speeches was a vow to end "the Unfunded Mandate known as 'No Child Left Behind'," one of the most far-reaching of the Bush Administration's many failures.

People eased out of their seats throughout the speech, which went on for a good while. Hillary opened with a good 10 minutes of local name-dropping ("I remember going to Tunkhannock for ice cream at the Shadowbrook! I just had white pizza in Old Forge!"), but in her case it was legit - she does in fact have family ties to this area (her father is buried in Scranton) and did in fact spend portions of her childhood here. Then she launched into a stump speech that was fairly light on specifics, save for a pledge to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq within 60 days of taking office. But for the most part, it was just cheerleading to an enthusiastic crowd - two crowds, if you counted us in the auditorium.

Towards the end of the speech, after many people had left, a teenage boy in a crumpled gray suit slipped onstage, made a pressing-down ("stay here") motion with his hands, and said something that only people at the front right of the audience could hear. One of them turned and shouted to the murmuring throng. "Stay here!" she yelled. "She's coming! Hillary's coming here!"

Suddenly the auditorium was alive again as people swarmed to fill the positions toward the front. The speech ended, and we waited.

And waited.

People came and went onstage. A microphone was set up. Several people who appeared to be aides, and probably not local - nobody wears long, dangly scarves around here - appeared onstage and seemed to take in the crowd. Several people entered the auditorium from the back and set up a "velvet rope" to define a do-not-cross zone.

At one point the boy in the gray suit peeked around the curtain, and the audience burst into applause and cheers. This became a running joke: every time he appeared the crowd erupted in cheers. Finally he walked across the stage and removed the microphone, stand and all. Huh?

And suddenly, she was there. Hillary Clinton herself. She didn't have to do this, of course. She had just spoken to a screaming, enthusiastic crowd of 3500 in the gym, and we had heard her. What did she have to gain by spending some extra time with a few hundred folks who weren't able to get in to the main show?

But she did. She spoke to us, just us, for a good ten minutes. That impressed me. Then she came down off the stage and into the crowd - I think she was on the other side of the rope - and shook hands and met with people for another good long while.

I found her surprisingly charismatic. While neither as eloquent nor as charming as her daughter, she was still much more pleasant than the monster she is being made out to be by her opponent's fervent followers. And she did stir up quite a bit of enthusiasm in the crowd, quite the opposite of the effect that I am hearing being described in other sources.

Finally it was over and the crowd dispersed. Everyone left and cheerfully trudged to their cars, glad to have seen Hillary Clinton in her first official campaign stop in Pennsylvania.

And yesterday I saw Chelsea. (Call me, kiddo.)

Now I'm looking forward to seeing Barack Obama. If he ever decides to visit Northeastern Pennsylvania.