HRC's Davenport Food Connections

[Posted by reader_iam]

Who knew? Now you do, thanks to a local newspaper columnist. (Don't stop skimming until the very end.)

Other local coverage about various events on Sunday:

General wrap-up. Note that Sen. Clinton is now pro-ethanol (natch!):

In the interview with the Times she said she is now an ethanol booster, despite her vote less than two years ago against a measure requiring 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol be mixed with the nation’s fuel system by 2012.

The mandate has created a greater market for the corn-based fuel.

Clinton said she opposed the measure because there were worries in 2005 that ethanol would drive up the price of gasoline in New York, as well as other concerns. She said Sunday those concerns have been alleviated.

“I am a very avid promoter of ethanol,” she said. “Balancing what my obligations to New York were and what the situation is now, I have no reservations at all.”

"A woman named Hillary" does church.

The service had a few more people than usual, maybe because word leaked out that she was going to be there, despite no official public announcement from the campaign and no press crews to see whether she dropped money in the collection basket, whether she sang.

I heard that "rumor" early Saturday evening from my husband, who had heard it a couple of hours before that, and I even mentioned it in my early Sunday morning post. Davenport (and the Quad-Cities, of which it is the largest) is not a small town, but it can indeed be a small world.

About that joke at the Mississippi Valley Fairgrounds ...

Which bad man?

Sen. Clinton tackled the gender issue head on with a pointed quip that drew laughs but befuddled some in the national press corps. At the fairgrounds event, Clinton talked about her credentials for global peace keeping. Some wonder, she mused, “what in my background equips me for dealing with evil and bad men?” She paused, letting the provocative line sink in. Her audience waited with her. Then Clinton smiled broadly, and the crowd let loose with a laugh. Most folks I spoke with afterward thought it a funny, pointed reference to her famous philandering husband. Two hours later at the Davenport Central press conference, three reporters tried to get her to identify the specific “evil and bad men” she’s dealt with. But the senator wouldn’t bite. She gave a standard answer implicating the usual international suspects. After the third inquiry,the senator brushed it off with a laugh. “You guys tell me to lighten up. So I do... and now I get psychoanalyzed.“

Though I don't "know him," I have run into Mark Ridolfi at a number of events and spoken to him once or twice. Based on what he wrote after those events, and what I've read of his work more generally, he tends to get the facts and impressions right. Also, the people with whom I've spoken with personally who were at the fairgrounds likewise thought it was a reference to President Clinton. So I think Sen. Clinton was quite mistaken if she really thought people in the MVFG crowd were thinking she meant anyone other than her husband.

That said, I personally tend to think that Sen. Clinton herself was, somewhat snarkily, making a joking reference to some of the powerful men/forces whom she feels have been out to get her and her husband, and perhaps other men she opposes more generally (...). That just plain makes more sense to me, politically and otherwise, and has since I first heard the story. I noted that last evening, on Brit Hume's show on Fox (the one program I try to catch fairly regularly there), that while Fred Barnes and Morton Kondracke seemed to think that Sen. Clinton was referring to her husband, Mara Liasson had the same take as I, with regard to a discrepancy between what Clinton meant and how it was taken. Of course, what anyone thinks is going on in someone else's mind is always nothing more than speculation, and therefore is unreliable.

A learning experience for the Clinton campaign, in any case. These are still very early days indeed.