Opinion: Clinton, here for cash, stops by a school too
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Not exactly a hardball policy question for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton at King/Drew Magnet High School in Willowbrook today. But perhaps appropriate in the la-la land of Botox and nips-and-tucks.
A man stepped to the meeting room microphone and identified himself as a community college adjunct professor. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘you’re extremely attractive.’
‘And your question is?’ replied emcee Rep. Laura Richardson, as the candidate appeared to blush.
The moment soon dissolved into substance, with a question about the relative funding levels of prisons and education, which Clinton handled with a well-practiced laundry list of programmatic solutions like smaller classes, more funding, better teachers. ‘It takes a village to make sure every child gets an education,’ she said, riffing on the title of her long-ago book.
Like so many such outings in political years, the event was an excuse to get the candidate (Clinton) together in public with a celebrity (Earvin Magic Johnson). King/Drew was merely a stage and the crowd was there as props for the cameras to film listening and applauding as the basketball star effusively endorsed the wife of the man he endorsed for president in 1992.
Southern California is a long way for a candidate, even a longtime frontrunner, to travel in a ...
campaign without getting some free media exposure. And since Clinton’s evening was closed to the press, the school event was the day’s only publicity. It was closed because Johnson, who’s become in his post-player days a kind of business whiz and political endorser, and his wife Cookie are holding a Clinton fundraiser at their Beverly Hills home this evening.
As mentioned here previously, the night was Clinton’s dueling answer to Oprah Winfrey’s fundraising bash for her main man, Barack Obama. That event last Saturday in a meadow outside Winfrey’s Montecito estate, with guests following meticulous instructions on attire, raised a reported $3 million for the candidate from Chicago, despite the disappointing food fare. Then came word the talk-show diva may also hit the campaign trail with Obama.
If the Clinton camp does not announce dollar figures for tonight’s soiree, we’ll know she didn’t do that well.
For good measure today, the New York senator also received the endorsement of community activist Sweet Alice Harris -- no big surprise, given Harris’ ‘Run Hillary Run’ T-shirt with a first lady-era picture of Clinton on its front.
In the hour or so she appeared before community leaders and King/Drew students, Clinton took questions on the Iraq war, education, faith-based initiatives, discrimination, mortgage rates, election reform and a smattering of others across the issue landscape. Only once, on the subject of energy independence, did the expertise appear to leave the candidate.
There are all kinds of alternative forms of energy to explore, she began. ‘There are vacant lots,’ Clinton said. ‘We could put windmills up, then all of a sudden everyone in the area would get cheap energy. So then you’d get more people wanting to come and move their jobs there. We’ve got to start thinking creatively.’
Say what? To that, the audience only nodded. The Times’ Cathleen Decker has a full report on the candidate’s appearance here on this website now and in Saturday’s print editions.
--Andrew Malcolm