All Politics Is Local
Hillary Clinton turned a Washington Park bungalow into the backdrop for the filming of a series of campaign ads this afternoon, the Journal‘s Michelle Johnson reports.
The ads are aimed specifically at North Carolina voters ahead of the May 6 primary.
The commercial campaign will feature about 12 North Carolinians who had submitted questions to Clinton’s Web site, www.ncaskeme.com, to be part of the ads, some of which could be run in the state as soon as next week.
The participants were chosen “for a variety of reasons,” said Carly Lindauer, the campaign’s communications director for North Carolina, but their questions revolve around issues that have come up frequently with North Carolina voters, such as health care, gas prices, the economy and veteran’s issues.
She said she wasn’t sure how many ads would be produced from the taping session or exactly what they would look like. Clinton taped the ads this afternoon before appearing at Wake Forest University with Maya Angelou.
The owners of the house, Debra Taylor and Amy Wingrave, are ardent supporters of Clinton’s presidential bid.
They were volunteering at the local Clinton headquarters Tuesday night when a call came in: Does anyone have a house we can use for a campaign ad while Hillary Clinton is in town? Yes, they said. Does it have a porch? Yes. (A recently renovated porch, in fact, something Taylor and Wingrave are very proud of.) Better still perhaps that Washington Park is a funky, friendly mix of people who live in big houses and small houses, old houses and new houses, owner-occupied houses and rentals.
Lindauer said that the house and the neighborhood were chosen because they convey a sense of place.
“When you’re in any state, it’s nice to look like you’re in that state,” she said.
Taylor said she supports Clinton in part because “she has an opinion and can back it up,” and because she was the first presidential candidate to come out with a plan to rebuild New Orleans. Both Taylor and Wingrave grew up in New Orleans.
They were asked to keep Clinton’s visit to the neighborhood a secret, but it’s hard not to notice Secret Service agents, a phalanx of shiny SUVs and a pack of police motorcycles on a street that’s just one block long and in a neighborhood where news travels fast on foot.
Shortly before 5 p.m. Clinton came out of the house and settled into her seat on a picnic table in the back yard. By then, a group of neighbors had gathered across the street to watch.
A woman drove by in a Honda adorned with Jim Neal and Barack Obama stickers, rolled down the window and called out “All the Democrats are here to party!”
Others wandered down the street with their dogs and children, cell phones and digital cameras in hand. On a warm Carolina spring day, presidential politics was a beautiful side show in beautiful Washington Park.
Pictured above: Clinton shakes hands with some of the people chosen to ask her questions for the ads.
