Wow, that was pretty boring but then again, I wasn't exactly the target audience. This was clearly targeted at women -- not only was it on The Hallmark Channel but for the first half hour she answered questions in "soft" Hillary mode, which only gave way to the much more appealing tough Hillary when the horrendous Carole Simpson started getting on her nerves.
Being there live, it was surprisingly low key. It was a really small space in Downtown LA but it was packed; at first, it was a pretty small crowd, under 100, but as the start time approached they had to break out more folding chairs to fit everyone. And I continue to be surprised how people react to a large screen image of someone. This crowd applauded her and was rapt with attention as though she were in the room. They also broke into a Hillary! chant unprovoked, so it seemed, but I don't know how many of these folks were volunteers instructed to do so. Clearly there was some element of political theatre to the proceedings but the enthusiasm you saw when the LA crowd went live certainly seemed real.
Seems to me this was an attempt to reach out to women, particularly casting Hillary as "the Mom," the sort of caretaker of the country. This event was just as much about calling that girl up onto the stage (which got "awwwwwwwws" from the live audience by the way) and showing Hillary interacting with Chelsea as it was delivering policy proposals and showing Clinton's toughness on the Bush administration. Watch out for the female vote tomorrow. This event plus an anecdote from one of the morning shows yesterday that a woman received several Hillary mailers while her husband received none -- seems to me the Clinton campaign is counting on overperforming among women tomorrow. I predict the turnout among women will be astronomical and the gender gap large -- they always seem to come through for her when she's threatened and Barack certainly is an electoral threat to her. This is going to be a very interesting day.
Update [2008-2-4 23:54:30 by Todd Beeton]:I should add that this was also an invaluable opportunity to sort of let Hillary into people's living rooms, something everyone needs to be comfortable with in any president. She certainly passed that test. And also it was a chance to allow people to see, who don't get to go to these sorts of events, just how impressive she actually is in this setting; I'm a little jaded having seen her do this sort of thing live so I'm no longer surprised by it, but to those that haven't, it's probably quite eye-opening.
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