Photo: Getty Images
While Barack Obama is waltzing around New Hampshire cracking dirty jokes, Hillary Clinton is up there crying. It happened during a chat with a gathering of women at a coffee shop in Portsmouth. Sixty-four-year old Maryann Pernold told Hillary that as a woman, she knew “it’s hard to get up every day and get ready and get out of the house in the morning.” She asked Clinton how she did it every day on the campaign trail. The Wall Street Journal was there and caught the moment:
“It’s not easy, it’s not easy,” Clinton said shaking her head. Her eyes began to get watery as she finished answering the question, “I couldn’t do it if I didn’t passionately believe it was the right thing to do. This is very personal for me. I have so many ideas for this country and I just don’t want to see us fall backwards. It’s about our country, it’s about our kids’ future,” she said softly crying, her voice breaking. The group of 15 women sitting around a table at the Cafe Espresso nodded understandingly. Clinton continued, her voice still cracking: “We do it each one of us because we care about our country, but some of us are right and some of us are wrong, some of us are ready and some of us are not, some of us know what we’ll do on day one and some of us don’t,” she said.
The Journal wonders whether this may be Clinton’s Edmund Muskie moment (Muskie appeared to tear up in 1972 after a New Hampshire newspaper attacked his wife, and the image managed to derail the popular Maine senator’s candidacy). But we have to wonder, like Bob Shrum before us, if this isn’t exactly what her campaign needs. Finally, proof that Hillary is human. Even though the campaign is ravaging her physically and emotionally, she’s still fighting because she cares. What better testament to someone’s character as a candidate?
Either that or she faked it, which would also be totally stellar.
Emotional Moment for Clinton in N.H. [WSJ]
Video: Teary Hillary [ABC News]
