Hillary Visits Maker's Mark Factory in KY. Bill Says KY is Linchpin to Her Nomination.

K Gardner

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Sat May-17-08 03:00 PM
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Hillary Visits Maker's Mark Factory in KY. Bill Says KY is Linchpin to Her Nomination.

Edited on Sat May-17-08 03:39 PM by K Gardner

Hillary Begins KY Tour at Distillery - Bill Says KY is linchpin to Nomination

CAMPAIGN EVENTS

Sen. Hillary Clinton plans a two-day sweep through Kentucky in the final weekend before Tuesday's primary, her campaign announced yesterday.

Today, she will start with a 1:30 p.m. tour of the Maker's Mark Distillery in Loretto, where she will attend a "community picnic" on the grounds. She then will head for Frankfort for a 4:15 p.m. "Get Out the Vote" rally at Kentucky State University's Bell Gymnasium. Clinton will end the day in Covington with an 8:15 p.m. appearance at the "Mainstrasse Village Maifest" on Main Street.

Sen. Hillary Clinton can win the nomination, her husband told thousands yesterday at rallies in a fire station parking lot in Madisonville, a gymnasium at Kentucky Wesleyan College and a Paducah convention center.

Bill Clinton also stressed that Kentucky could be a linchpin in the presidential primary season.

"If someone tells you you can't win, it's because you can and they're afraid you will," Clinton said to cheers at Kentucky Wesleyan in Owensboro.

Results from a media poll released earlier this week show Hillary Clinton with a 27 percentage-point lead in Kentucky over Barack Obama. The Herald-Leader/WKYT Kentucky Poll of 500 likely Democratic voters showed 58 percent favoring Clinton, 31 percent favoring Obama and 11 percent uncommitted. The telephone survey conducted May 7-9 has a margin of error of 4.5 percentage points.

Hillary Clinton has won the endorsement of three of Kentucky's Democratic superdelegates. Obama has been endorsed by two, both Democratic congressmen representing the state's two largest cities. Three other superdelegates remain undecided.

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Hillary Presses on in Loretto

LORETTO, Ky. � The day of campaigning had barely begun and Hillary Rodham Clinton was already eyeing the whiskey.

The Democrat wasn't drowning her sorrows, she was touring Kentucky's Maker's Mark distillery as she soldiers on despite a difficult week. Her opponent, Barack Obama, continues to draw more Democratic forces into his camp and has largely ignored her while tussling with certain Republican nominee John McCain in a general election-style dispute over foreign policy.

But Clinton is acting as though the nomination is still within her grasp, beginning a multi-day swing through Kentucky on Saturday with a tour of the famous distillery in Loretto, where its first bottle of bourbon whiskey was created in the 1950s. Perhaps she is hoping for a replay in Kentucky of the election boost her much-publicized shot of whiskey gave her last month in Pennsylvania, where she won the primary.

This time around, Clinton put on gloves and safety goggles and joined the assembly line to dip a bottle of whiskey in Maker's trademark red wax coating, saving the drinking for later.

"There are some people who have been saying for months that this is over, and every time they say it, the voters come back and say, 'Oh no it's not, we're not ready for it to be over,'" Clinton told supporters as she stood on a stage in front of a stack of whiskey barrels.

As she began to sign her name on the wall at a cannoli bakery in Salem, Ore., on Friday, Clinton paused for a moment with her black marker in the air and turned toward the press crowded around her to ask what day it was. Later that evening, during a televised town hall meeting in Portland, she was asked to describe the high and low points of the campaign.

The best times, she said, are whenever her daughter Chelsea joins her on the trail. The low point, she said, "is just being sleep-deprived and trying to get to more places than there are hours in the day to possibly cover."

"But every day something happens that really convinces me how important this is, and energizes me," she added.

Clinton is hoping for a big win in Kentucky, and plans to campaign here every day until the primary, crisscrossing the state whose demographics resemble neighboring West Virginia, which gave her a much-needed victory last week.

Clinton has also adjusted her sights. Instead of criticizing her Democratic opponent, she's taken aim at the media and the political pundits who are counting her out.

Clinton dismisses them in a new television ad airing in Oregon. The spot features clips of political pundits as an announcer says: "In Washington, they talk about who's up and who's down. In Oregon, we care about what's right and what's wrong."

And in her remarks to her audience in Kentucky on Saturday, she portrayed pundits and press as out of touch elitists who have jobs and health care and no idea what it's like to worry about making ends meet.

"They're not the people I'm running to be a champion for _ I'm running to be a champion for all of you," Clinton said.

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