Cross-posted at Open Left -- James Adomian
Hillary Clinton has gone to great lengths in the last week to show that she is more in touch with working class voters than rival Barack Obama. Cameras recently caught her enjoying a few beers with a shot of whiskey back, and shortly thereafter she recalled her childhood spent duckhunting in Scranton. Here are some scenarios I imagine in which Clinton might continue to publicly identify with working class and rural voters ahead of the Pennsylvania primary:
* Senator Clinton introduces America to her colorful old friend and sparring partner, Rusty, and goes a few rounds against him at a Philadelphia gym.
* During a midnight poker game with local reporters in an Erie newspaper office, Senator Clinton curses, smokes unfiltered cigarettes, belches and farts, going on to win the $50 pot.
* On an Appalachian hunting trip, she spares the life of a young Black Bear cub, solemnly informing reporters that it has been her lifelong policy not to bag any game that's not full-grown. She then slaughters several other, older bears.
* Hillary gives a speech inside a Schuylkill County anthracite mine. When the supports start to buckle and the ground begins to cave in, the senator reaches up and grabs a sagging beam, holding it up until every miner and campaign aide has scrambled to safety. Emerging from a black cloud, she calmly finishes her speech and strides away, waving wearily as the miners shout her praises.
* She delivers a premature foal at a horse farm outside Harrisburg. When its newborn lungs fail, the senator removes her glove, wipes one tear and then shoots it in the head, silencing its infant pain. She then whispers some unknown words of consolation to the farmers, and leaves them with one gold coin to ease their troubles.
* Hillary schedules a meet-and-greet at an Amish outhouse, and takes an old-fashioned, honest-to-god shit in the sweltering noonday heat, AP cameras snapping away. Afterwards, she chats with the owner, informing him how great an improvement it is over the splintery old shacks she used back when fighting forest fires in Oregon.
* When one of her campaign mules stumbles upon a rattlesnake on an Allegheny Mountain trail, she crushes the snake's head with a canteen and sucks the poison out of her pollster's bitten leg. She suffers her own snakebite during the scuffle with the serpent, but refuses treatment on account of a tolerance to the toxin worked up on previous journeys.
* At the Gettysburg battlefield, Hillary leads a re-enactment as a Union officer, where through some common sense know-how, she succeeds in repulsing the Confederate advance two days ahead of the historical outcome. She then leads a chorus of blind children in reciting the Gettysburg Address.
* In Pittsburgh, Hillary Clinton unlocks the gate to a shuttered steel mill and begins smelting iron ore. She forges a new era of American industry on the shores of the Allegheny River, the flames of Progress licking at her cheeks as the hardy people of the Keystone State report to work once more -- this time for good.