SHAMOKIN, Penn. — Sen. Hillary Clinton, watching her lead shrink in the final weeks leading up to Tuesday’s crucial presidential primary in Pennsylvania, took desperate measures on Saturday to convince rural Pennsylvanians that she was just a regular, working-class gal like them. She went to a roadside bar and got wasted, then hit a deer on the way home.
“Woooooooooooo!” Clinton announced after her sixth bottle of Bud Light.
“I said, WOOOOOO!” she later reiterated.
“Clearly, Mrs. Clinton is a woman of the people,” campaign spokesman Mo Lyes said. “You can see it in her eyes when she gets around good-ole, average Americans like they have right here in…um…Shamokin! And you can see it in the way she proudly wears her favorite old Steelers jersey, the one she just happens to be wearing now, and which we totally did not just buy for $129.99 at a local sporting goods store on the way here.”
Clinton regaled the crowd with stories of her husband’s days as president and tales of her exploits as a Navy SEAL. And although she got so drunk she began singing the chorus of “Puff the Magic Dragon” when someone asked her a question about health care reform, she stayed remarkably on-message.
“That’s the kind of discipline you want in a president,” Myrtle Closson, a local hairdresser, said. “My husband can’t remember his own name after five beers, and there she was after seven still going on about Sen. Obama’s taste for white wine and arugula, whatever that is. If she can keep her focus while throwing back Buds with Springsteen blasting in the background, then somehow I feel OK with her finger on the nuke button.”
After her third beer, Clinton told the crowd that if elected, she would secretly slip a provision into her health care plan “to provide free beer during every overnight hospital stay.”
“That gal’s all right!” said Jim Reinholdt, a local machinist. “She might be worth more than this entire town’s infrastructure put together, but I’ll tell you what, I don’t see that fancy-pants Obama guy tossin’ back any cold ones in a bar that has sawdust on the floor, do you?”
Sen. Clinton’s exploits in this rural, working-class bar came the night after her daughter, Chelsea, who shares the same name as London’s toniest neighborhood, rallied support for her mother by going barhopping at a string of gay bars in Philadelphia. In case anyone brought up Chelsea’s trip to the gay bars, Sen. Clinton had been instructed by an aide to immediately run to the jukebox and play Lee Greenwood’s “I’m Proud to Be an American.” Three times.
After closing time, Sen. Clinton insisted she was OK to drive, and on the way back to her hotel she hit a deer on Route 220, “just as virtually every Pennsylvanian of driving age has done,” Lyes said. Clinton then held an impromptu press conference on the side of the road, at which she promised to post “deer snipers” in the trees every five miles along each state and federal highway in Pennsylvania.
“Let’s see Barack top that one!” she muttered just before her Secret Service agents slipped her quietly into the rear of the car and threw the keys to an aide. “I bet he’s never even shot a deer before, like I used to do all the time when I was four, or skinned it, cooked it over a campfire, and made a loincloth with its pelt!” she shouted out the window as the car pulled away.
