For years, when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton talked about her family, it was usually her famous husband or their well-known daughter. Who? But Clinton has recently been discussing a more elusive figure in her life: her mother."She didn't have a very easy time of it as a young child," Clinton (D-N.Y.) said during an address to Democratic Party activists in California, describing the journey Dorothy Howell Rodham made in search of a home after her teenage parents divorced in 1920 and sent her away.
Drawing attention to her low-profile mother -- who is in her late 80s and lives with the Clintons on Whitehaven Street in Washington -- is one of several ways Clinton is seeking to give voters a new perspective on her biography. Armed with extensive polling data and an image road map tested in Upstate New York, the Clinton campaign has embarked on an ambitious effort to present the candidate the way they want her to be seen: as a pragmatic Midwesterner with a compelling life story of her own, rather than just the famous, and sometimes polarizing, senator and former first lady most of the country already knows she is.
Clinton tells crowds at the opening of virtually every speech that she was "born into a middle-class family in the middle of America, in the middle of the last century." One of the least-known facts about her, according to campaign operatives, is that she is a native of suburban Chicago, not Arkansas or New York.
Park Ridge, Illinois, I believe, on Northwest Highway at Touhy Avenue, on the C&NW Northwest suburban railroad line. But I was always into "least-known" facts. I briefly dated a Hillary from Park Ridge, almost forty years ago. Fortunately, there were at least two of them in Park Ridge. More at link, but this was enough for me.
