“We’re bringing Hillary to the ‘hood,” said 21st Ward Alderman Antonio French.
French, the Hillary Clinton campaign’s deputy director of communications in Missouri, was leaking to The St. Louis American that he was working on an unscheduled campaign spot in North St. Louis. Clinton was scheduled to speak in Affton – 94 percent white in the 2010 census – on the morning of Saturday, March 12. French wanted to sneak her into the O’Fallon Park YMCA in his very black 21st Ward as a surprise just before.
The tone of the surprise event was evident from the moment the candidate entered the small meeting room at the Y.
Aldermanic President Lewis Reed, who was standing near the door, grabbed Clinton with a hug.
Stare Senator Jamilah Nasheed, who was sitting near the door, jumped up and grabbed her for another hug.
Then Clinton kept hugging. Next she hugged French’s aunt, Katherine Bennet, who was sitting in the front row. Then veteran North St. Louis political operator Rodney Hubbard Sr., who was sitting next to Bennet, got his hug.
The cadre of Secret Service agents traveling with Clinton looked like they had put in a full day before Clinton took to the lectern. They had much more hard work to do in the 21st Ward before they would get her out of the building.
After a 10-minute campaign speech – where she branded Donald Trump, the leader in the Republican primary, as a political arsonist and her Democrat rival, Bernie Sanders, as an angry but unrealistic dreamer – Clinton stepped into a selfie throng that outlasted her speech.
Anyone who wanted a selfie with the candidate got one. Clinton many times grabbed the phone from her admirer and took the picture herself before handing it back. Once she got going, she began to point out elder citizens or especially young children and ask for the picture herself.
“Hillary, I love you!” one man called from the edge of the selfie throng after he had his own picture taken with her.
The Secret Service agents did their best to maintain a perimeter around the candidate, and to keep people penned in the meeting room after she moved into the hallway towards the exit – and found herself engulfed in another selfie gaggle.
But it was more or less hopeless. North St. Louis wanted to get their hands on Hillary Clinton and get their picture taken with her. And Clinton – often derided as cold by her opponents – seemed to want that intimacy just as much.
There was, of course, calculation behind the event and its intimate nature. French very deliberately asked people to capture the moment in social media, and even provided the campaign’s preferred hashtag when someone yelled out a different term of affection.
And with Missouri’s presidential preference primary just three days away on Tuesday, March 15, the campaign was trying to energize the base to canvas and get people to the polls on election day.
“We vote – people who come to events like this – we vote,” French told the crowd before Clinton arrived. “But that’s not where our responsibility ends. We need you to go out there and knock on doors. The stakes are too high. This ain’t no time to be playing around.”
