Hillary Clinton was within 500 feet of my house

Ok, so it was more like 550 feet according to Google Maps but who’s counting?

Earlier today Jessica, Cathy and I went to the Clinton rally at Mishawaka High School, which is across the street from the duplex. Jessica is a huge supporter of Hillary, and I’m always up for taking photos of famous people, so we decided to attend. Mike got us in as his guests. Instead of waiting outside in the bitter cold for at least a couple of hours, we sat in the library for about the same amount of time. The only real downside was that the librarians, being librarians, confiscated everybody’s cellphones, apparently on request of the Secret Service.

Once inside the gym, we grabbed really good seats on the left side of the stage about 5-6 rows back. After some more waiting, a few failed wave attempts and some sing-a-longs with the school choir of “Come Sail Away” for some reason, the show got started. A few local heads of Democratic groups and Hoosiers for Hillary spoke for a few minutes, then the head of the local College Democrats chapter introduced the first real speaker, a person very near and dear to Hoosier hearts. After a failed guess of “Jesus” from the crowd, the one and only Sean Astin made his entrance.

Being a recent transplant to Indiana, I had no idea how much Hoosiers love Rudy! (Imagine if him and Guilliani had hooked up…) The place went nuts for this guy. He spoke for about 10 minutes about how much he loved Hillary, made a few self-deprecating Rudy jokes and smiled a lot. I had no idea that he was as politically involved as he conveyed himself to be.

After that, Hillary came out to huge applause. She spoke for a good 30-45 minutes on the economy and some broad points of how she would fix it. Interspersed in her speech were points about health care and how horrible the current president is for the country. Afterwards, she took some questions from the audience. Most of them weren’t really questions, but people blurting out names of hot-button issues, followed by her talking point response. One girl asked to sing “God Bless America,” which was talked about but never happened, and another question was completely sidestepped because it was more or less a 30-second ramble of words that really never really collected into a single thought.

Her talking points for the day were pretty spot on. Her unexpected bright spot was her thoughts on how to deal with undocumented immigrants. It made me sad that she started to describe an unreasonable solution of hiring thousands of law enforcement officers and giving them broad powers to knock on everybody’s door to rustle up immigrants as an example of what a terrible idea it was, but people in the crowd started cheering anyway.

When she was leaving, Hillary circled around and greeted those around the stage. Jessica made her mom proud by shaking her hand right before Hillary left. I tried to get a decent shot of it, but ended up getting a great blurry photo of the back of Clinton’s head. *sigh*

Other thoughts:

• Despite the lengthy post, I don’t plan on voting for Hillary during the primary. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think she’d be terrible at the job. She’d be a vast improvement over what we’re working with now. Plus, she’s an excellent speaker and has some great ideas on how to better our country, especially with health care.

  However, I don’t want her for president for a couple of reasons. First, if she gets elected and serves a full two terms, 24 years would have past since the country has been lead by somebody who’s last name isn’t Bush or Clinton. I don’t like the idea of an American aristocracy, or at the very least such a blatant show of one.

  Second, Hillary seems to have a very similar “my way or the highway” attitude that drives me nuts about how the country is ran today. Because of her polarizing persona, she seems to have alienated many of the people she’ll have to work with once elected. While there’s nothing wrong with being strong and aggressive, one shouldn’t do that at the expense of colleagues who helped you along the way.

  Also, during today’s speech, I didn’t appreciate the overemphasis she placed of the defense department’s role in the government. I’m willing to let that slide, though, since the whole area pretty much survives on manufacturing of Humvee’s and steel production, and to not talk it up would most likely piss off the audience.

  Early on in the primary season, I really liked Richardson and Obama. While I agreed with with Richardson’s policy points a bit more, Obama seemed just as capable. His 2006 speech on the intersection of religion and politics really worked for me. Since Richardson’s out, Obama’s going to be my guy in the primary and hopefully the general election. If he picks up Richardson as a VP nomination, all the better.

• As noted here, Mishawaka High School was not the campaign’s first choice in venue. Originally, the rally was supposed to be at Washington High School in the South Bend school district. The school board (named the South Bend Community School Corporation. Really, a corporation? You’re just dooming the kids to terrible 9-5 jobs that they’ll hate for the rest of their lives.) decided that the rally couldn’t be held at one of their schools because it would disrupt class.

  Whoever decided to not let Clinton come to the rally is a complete and utter bonehead. Yes, school would have been hectic to say the least today for them. I know firsthand: my own workday was pretty much toast after attending the rally. Jessica had to skip (with permission, of course) her own morning classes today. And despite the sob stories being passed around about unemployment rates in the area, I doubt that there wasn’t a sick day or two called amongst the 4,000 or so people that showed up.

  However, when a potential and still somewhat viable candidate for the role of LEADING THE FREE WORLD comes knocking at your door asking to speak for an hour, you let her come. Looking at it at it’s blandest, it’s an invaluable civic lesson for all the students attending. It’s a great launching point for classrooms for the rest of the day to discuss a huge number of potential lessons on history and citizenship. If nothing else, it’s an experience that the student body as a whole would never forget.

  I mean, really, I got to listen to the guy who saved Frodo’s butt in Lord of the Rings. How awesome is that?

• I’ve come to the conclusion that, although I absolutely love my camera, it sucks indoors in gyms. I can’t get the ISO on it high enough for those low light situations without having ridiculously blurry photos 80 percent of the time, and flashes are for suckers.