Hillary, Guacamole, and Tortilla Chips

Hillary Clinton packed up her new found voice and went to Las Vegas today.

Clinton campaigned door to door in a predominantly Hispanic and black neighborhood, with a slew of cameras, trucks, buses, and police in tow.

She was in rare form.

From the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

Gilberto Santana, 38, sat on the edge of a chair as Clinton sat on the brown leather sofa in his living room next to his wife and two young children.

Santana told Clinton how his wife, Elizabeth, a housekeeper on the Strip, was barely supporting the family single-handedly while he was unable to work for two months because of an operation.

"We're sort of struggling," he said. "We're getting there, but you have to be strong to make it."

Clinton asked the couple questions about their mortgage and his disability payments, and answered his questions about immigration and the war and health care costs.

Stroking the 4-year-old girl's head, Clinton said, "I feel so strongly that if we don't take care of our children, we don't take care of our future."

Santana said, "We are going to do everything we can to make sure that everyone in Las Vegas votes for you."

That is the warm, earnest, human side of campaigning, politicians comforting people with detailed explanations of how they will solve their problems and flattering them with their presence.

There was nobody who didn't know who the Democratic presidential candidate and former first lady was, even if they didn't speak English or weren't old enough to vote. They flocked to her for camera-phone pictures, and she posed in tableaux of adorable multicultural children.

Hillary as the warm, caring, comforting, nurturing mother -- What a photo-op!

Her message: It takes a village, but first it takes a Hillary.

...Clinton and her busload of traveling press moved from there to the popular local Mexican restaurant Lindo Michoacan, where a "roundtable" that was actually square passed a microphone around to tell her people's concerns about the mortgage crisis and foreclosures. She took notes and munched on tortilla chips.

In broken English, one woman told Clinton how she wasn't making money as a broker anymore.

"I have no income at all," she said. "So how will I survive?"

Choking up with emotion, the woman said, "In my neighborhood, there are brand-new homes, but the value is nothing. I'm glad you are here so I can tell you, because you're going to be the president, I know."

A man shouted through an opening in the wall that his wife was illegal.

"No woman is illegal," Clinton said, to cheers.

Does that mean that ILLEGAL undocumented immigrants should be able to get driver's licenses?

No woman is illegal. Is Hillary planning amnesty for all or just women? Is no man illegal?

Hillary really doesn't want to revisit her Kerry-esque moment of being against New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's plan to issue ILLEGAL immigrants licenses after she was for it after she was against it after she was for it.

Summing it up at the end, Clinton said, "We've only talked to a few people, but each of them talk about some part of the problem we are confronting. This is a problem that is only going to get worse if we don't address it."

Clinton said unscrupulous lending leads to bad mortgages, which lead to foreclosures, which lead to people with nowhere to go and vacant neighborhoods that can go rapidly downhill.

"We treat these problems as if one is guacamole and one is chips, when ... they both go together," she said.

Guacamole and chips???

Now she's using food to connect. Emotional mother Hillary is not only Oprah; she's also Rachael Ray.

Is her guacamole/chips comment pandering to Hispanics or is it stereotyping and condescending?

What's next?

Bagels and lox?

Brats and beer?

Fried chicken and watermelon?

I doubt Hillary would want to go there. Inappropriate.



(h/t Dave)