Hillary Clinton Gives a Speech

There’s Hillary Clinton, standing upright in the center of the screen, trying desperately to look happy in a racket-ball blue suit that makes her look as if she just organized a Smurf convention. “Full speed to the White House,” she says, as if she’s about to take the Acela down from New York. I don’t want to dash her hopes (okay, well, maybe a little), but trailing behind in a bitter multi-month primary is more like the Chinatown bus on a bad run.

Give more money, she instructs the audience, and then reminds the Indiana crowd of her tenuous links to the Midwest. Her mother was from Pennsylvania! That factoid only sort of made sense during the actual Pennsylvania primary (does anyone really vote for a candidate because he or she lives in the same state as the candidate’s mother?), and now it merely hangs there, awkwardly, like an out-of-fashion accessory worn two seasons past its prime.

Gas prices figure heavily into her speech, as she claims to stand “for everyone who holds their breath at the gas pump, waiting to see how much it costs today,” once again ignoring her own efforts to make filling up cars more expensive. She continues to champion a summer gas-tax holiday, and I half expect her to follow this by announcing that, as with leprechauns, she never really believed in economists anyway.

What does she believe in, then? West Virginia! And Kentucky! “I am running to be the president of all of America,” she says, despite the sad fact that she’s been rejected by more of it than has accepted her.

Yet she soldiers on anyway. “I will never stop fighting for you,” she declares, though somehow she seems to be talking not to the audience, but herself.