Morganton, N.C. — “It’s funny,” says Bill Clinton, standing on the front porch of a gorgeous house on a gorgeous day in western North Carolina. “The people in the press who haven’t been particularly on our side anyway — they love their little jibes, you know. They say, ‘Poor ol’ Bill Clinton has been sent out to the country.’ Like I’ve been banished.”

“And one of these people who think that all of the superior people would obviously not be for Hillary, wrote a funny little column in New York the other day in a magazine. And he said, ‘The next thing you know, Bill Clinton will be taking Wal-Mart greeters to the polls.’ Now, that fellow thought he was putting me down. And I thought, he’s given me a good idea!”

Clinton has a few facts wrong — actually, the article, in The New Yorker, quoted a Clinton campaign source bringing up the Wal-Mart thing. But he’s generally right about those elite types who think Bill embarrassed Hillary one too many times and had to be sent out to the provinces, where he couldn’t do any harm.

But the fact is, at this point in the campaign, these are the most important places in the world for Hillary Clinton. If she is going to do well in North Carolina, if she is going to put a scare in Barack Obama in a state he should win pretty handily, it will be because of Morganton, population 17,310, and a lot of other places like it. So let the commentariat lament, or laugh, about Bill being sent out into the sticks; for Hillary, the sticks are where the votes are. Just look at the electoral map of any state she has won, with Obama winning a few big counties and Hillary Clinton taking the rest.

“We started having these front-porch rallies in Pennsylvania, as soon as it got warm enough to do it,” Clinton tells the crowd, “and in every place I did a front-porch rally, on Election Day, Hillary got more than 60 percent of the vote in those counties.” Bill isn’t on the outs in the campaign. He’s on the cutting edge.

You can also put aside the conventional wisdom you’ve heard about the former president being rusty. Yes, he was a bit creaky when he first started campaigning for his wife. But now he’s selling the product as slickly as he ever did. And he’s pushing hard. Morganton is his second of six stops today — not counting two morning church visits — in the western part of North Carolina. On Monday, he’ll make nine stops in the east, starting at 7:30 A.M. and ending at 10:00 P.M. Nine events — nine speeches — is a lot for anybody. The Clintons think they are closing fast in this state, and it is Bill who is doing most of the work.

When he was at peak form in his own campaigns, back in the 1990s, Clinton could at times sound like a televangelist. Today, he’s a car salesman — literally. “I grew up in the car business,” Clinton tells the crowd at his first rally of the day, at the train station in Marion, population 4,943.

He mentions his stepfather, Roger Clinton, who sold cars in Arkansas, as he launches into a story about the time two months ago when “Hillary called me and said, ‘Bill, I just met a guy who swears he’s driving a car that gets 100 miles per gallon. I sure would like to talk about it, but I don’t want to be embarrassed. You call him and find out if he’s telling the truth.’” So Clinton, drawing on his life in the car business, checks it out and tells the crowd that it’s all true. The only problem is that batteries for the car cost $10,000. But guess what? “Hillary’s energy plan would give a $10,000 tax credit, dollar for dollar, for everyone who bought one of these plug-in vehicles.” You can get the whole thing at no extra cost! But only if you vote for Hillary.


CONTINUED    1    2  Next >