As I listened to the speech given by Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton from the stage at Erie’s Mercyhurst College, my mind started drifting.
Not because the former First Lady can’t hold attention; indeed her skills as an orator nearly match her husband’s.
No, as I watched the candidate who is branding herself as the voice of experience between the two donkey contenders, my mind went back to 1992, when the shoe was on the other foot, when a little known couple from a little known town were branding themselves as outsiders, as an agent of change ready to tilt at the windmills of Washington.
They came from a place called Little Hope, meaning that the place was small and hopeful and not a site of literal little hope.
Bill and Hillary were young and energetic; the slight southern drawls might have been slow but the minds certainly weren’t.
And they had plans, big plans, for weaning America from its Mideast oil jones, for concentrating on the working stiff instead of the corporate titan, and most importantly, for finally and fully reforming health care.
They were full of promise and full of good intentions, but they learned quickly the price paid for slamming headlong into structures of entrenched power.
Lofty goals of building bright new futures faded in the webs of bureaucracies.
Youthful idealism lost in an inevitable axiom: In the end you really can’t fight City Hall.
It’s not lost on me that this time Senator Barack Obama is the agent of change, painting his opponent as the candidate of the entrenched.
This time it is Obama talking about getting away from the oil machine, creating green jobs for common folk and creating real reform to slow the health care premium juggernaut.
The cynic in me says that everything old is new again.
The idealist hopes for better.
But oh to be a fly on the wall, if one senator candidate would tell the other, what really happens when strangers come to Washington to rage against the machine.