Hillary's bridge back to the 20th century

With recession looming, Clinton banks on '90s nostalgia, reminding Pennsylvania voters of the good old days of her husband's administration.

By Mike Madden

Read more: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Politics, News, 2008 election, Mike Madden

Reuters/Tim Shaffer

Hillary Clinton speaking Tuesday at the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO convention in Philadelphia.

April 3, 2008 | PHILADELPHIA -- Hillary Clinton's supporters picked her official campaign theme song nine months ago, with Celine Dion's "You and I" beating out an eclectic field in an online contest (surely the only time the Temptations have competed directly with Smash Mouth for anything). As Clinton crisscrosses Pennsylvania to rally her base before this month's primary, though, you don't hear Celine much at her stops. For now, the new unofficial campaign song, taking a cue from Philly film history, is the theme from "Rocky." But the tune that Clinton and her supporters really seem to be humming lately is "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow," the theme song from her husband's 1992 campaign.

"There's a lot of work to be done, and I'm prepared to do that work," Clinton told the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO convention here on Tuesday, in a speech that harked back to the good old days before her family left the White House. "I've apprenticed, and I've learned how to do it. I have watched it being done for eight years ... It took a Clinton to clean up after the first Bush, and it'll take a Clinton to clean up after the second Bush."

Facing yet another contest in a state she's declared to be a firewall against Barack Obama, Clinton is tapping into 1990s nostalgia everywhere she goes. (Especially this week, when Obama made an overt play for Clinton's base.) It is, once again, the economy, stupid; Hillary is practically offering to build a bridge back to the 20th century. The white working-class voters she's relying on to win say they miss the prosperity and peace of the Clinton years, and they figure she's the next best thing to getting Bill back. So in Pennsylvania Clinton is presenting herself as the safe choice, the comfortable choice, the familiar choice -- playing to a big bloc of blue-collar voters who don't like taking risks, didn't do so well the past eight years, and aren't interested in gambling that the new guy can fix things. Exit polling in other states has already shown that Clinton's voters are more worried about their own families' financial situation than Obama's voters are, and that her supporters think the economy is more important than other issues like the war in Iraq.

"Obama, I don't know," said David Bunda, 44, a letter carrier from Yardley, Pa., whose union is backing Clinton. "I've never heard of him until last year. Then all of a sudden everybody wants to vote for him. We need change, but not to him. I think we need Hillary." After one of her rallies at a wind-turbine factory in Fairless Hills, Pa., in a massive Bucks County industrial park just across the river from New Jersey, Bunda said he'd always liked the Clintons. "I liked Bill, yeah," he said. "Even though he lied, I still liked him because the economy was pretty good."

The Clintons have always had plenty of friends in Pennsylvania, though Hillary's recent focus on her childhood in the Scranton area didn't get quite as much play until her campaign came to depend on winning the state. Ed Rendell, whose success as Philadelphia's reform-oriented mayor in the 1990s became the model for some of Bill Clinton's national urban policy, and who went on to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee under Clinton, is now the state's popular two-term governor. He's practically taken the month off from his day job to help Hillary, bustling around in her motorcade and introducing her to all his fans. Rendell feeds the Clinton nostalgia, as well, reminding voters in the Philadelphia suburbs how well the city did during Bill's administration (and, ahem, Ed's).

But like all hazy, soft-focus memories of better times, Clinton's version of the '90s is a little airbrushed. The union crowds she's playing to didn't like NAFTA; here, as in Ohio, voters suddenly learn that she didn't, either. "Anybody who tries to hang it around her neck is hanging it on the wrong neck," Gerry McEntee, a Philadelphia native and the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, told the AFL-CIO convention, recalling a conversation "she may not even remember" in which Clinton called him to sympathize when her husband's administration finally lined up the votes to pass the trade deal. (Meanwhile, AFSCME probably had less to fear from NAFTA than any other union besides the NFL Players Association.) Clinton says she fought against NAFTA in internal meetings, but had to fall in line once Bill Clinton decided to push forward with it. But she told reporters after her speech here that was the only major economic policy matter where she disagreed with her husband's administration. She also acknowledged one reason she had opposed the trade deal was that she preferred to save political capital for her healthcare legislation.

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