Hillary Clinton sees ugliness, and joy, in race’s closing days

By Matt Flegenheimer, New York Times News Service

Friday, Nov. 4, 2016 | 7 p.m.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Hillary Clinton stood beneath the strobe lights, her back to the palm trees — hoarse, but hiding it well, at least for a moment.

It was the third event of an endless Tuesday, well after 10 p.m., and an occasion, again, for Clinton’s ritual plea: begging Americans to care enough about themselves to vote for her.

“Any issue you care about — anything — is at stake,” she began. “I get sometimes a little overwhelmed by the fact ...”

She lost the crowd midsentence. Something was stirring on the lawn in front of her, a man with a neon green sign and a chant to match: “Bill Clinton is a rapist!”

She glared back at him, raising her index finger and thinking.

This is Clinton’s view the week before Election Day: a final national slideshow as she trudges to the White House, or to the most stunning loss in modern American political history, produced amid the blur of “Hello, (Insert City Here)!” rallies and bewildering political headaches that have consumed her final sprint.

Perhaps on a different day, at a different hour, she would have resisted the urge to engage. She had seen such protests before — and especially lately — goaded by the far-right, Donald Trump-supporting website Infowars in attempts to highlight Clinton’s treatment of women.

But this time, Clinton did not pretend not to hear.

“I am sick and tired,” she called out, off-script, pointing toward the man, “of the negative, dark, divisive, dangerous vision and behavior of people who support Donald Trump.”

Her supporters roared. The candidate collected herself. It was time to discuss income inequality.

Clinton’s period in public life — undulating, pathbreaking, exhausting — has spanned more than a generation. The portrait feels complete. The surprises are few. It can seem as though she has faced down every kind of moment there is.

This — tugging her bid to the precipice of history, four days out — is a new one.

It is also familiar, delivering her political career to its logical climax.

So she campaigns in contradictions: alternately high-minded and scorched-earth, inspirational and deflating, triumphantly reveling in her gender identity but still subjected to the impulses of men.

She speaks of the need for “positive energy” — “I Believe in Love + Kindness,” read a sign behind her head Wednesday — and of the obligation to oppose a man known for “demeaning, degrading, insulting and assaulting women.”

She has smiled through speeches from Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, the civil rights icon, and Alicia Machado, the former Miss Universe whom Trump once called “Miss Piggy.”

She has ventured to Arizona, typically safe Republican turf, to present her opponent as a singular threat to immigrants, and has repeatedly asked voters to really, truly, thoroughly consider the specter of Trump in the Oval Office.

“Imagine, with me, what it would be like,” she said in Las Vegas, setting off on the thought exercise at a training center for plumbers and pipe fitters.

Aboard her campaign plane, aides project relative confidence, thumbing through text messages but not, they insist, stolen emails about themselves. (They appear to believe that nothing less than the fate of the Republic is at stake, which tends to focus the mind.)

Still, her events can crackle with the anxious hum of people who read too many polls, their attendance swelling some but remaining shy of Trump’s standard, both in head count and volume.

“Lock him up!” a man shouted in Dade City, Florida, as Clinton relayed Trump’s history of disparaging women. No one echoed his call.

In Raleigh, North Carolina, on Thursday evening, Clinton led supporters in something resembling group therapy, taking stock of the election’s physical toll.

“I’ve had people say that they can’t sleep,” she said to nods, “that their stomachs are bothering them, that they have headaches.”

It is by now electoral gospel that Clinton can struggle to generate passion with the Democratic base, particularly young people. But among some admirers, there appears to be less an enthusiasm gap than a personality distinction, a class of voters reflecting its candidate.

The intensity is quieter, the moments less conspicuous to a television audience.

There is the woman in her wheelchair, sitting on one Clinton sign and holding another, propelling herself briefly onto two feet as the candidate took the stage in Florida; the boy with a “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” sweatshirt, shifting on a parent’s shoulders, waving as Lewis held forth on the “precious” voting right he nearly died in Selma, Alabama, to defend; the teenage girl, snapping pictures from the back and repeating after Clinton.

“I will defeat ISIS,” Clinton said sternly.

“I will defeat ISIS,” the girl mouthed with a giggle, turning to her friends.

Not long ago, Clinton seemed eager to end her campaign with soaring optimism, a prospective luxury of the sturdy polling lead she had built after the presidential debates.

Last week, before her latest brush with the FBI, she was exultant. Voters serenaded her on her birthday. Staff members surprised her with a cake, which she later shared with the traveling press corps that she had earlier often avoided.

She made an impromptu stop at an Adele concert in Miami, joining aides, including Huma Abedin, who were indulging in pizza and power ballads.

She sat for a series of increasingly madcap television and radio interviews, twirling to salsa music with a television host named El Gordo (“The Fat One”) and proposing a remedy for a politics-weary nation. “I think we need a big national dance,” she said.

The moment passed.

Now, there is mostly urgency, insistent and raw.

In Sanford, Florida, on Tuesday, Clinton seemed to hit upon a guiding principle of sorts, as she parried Trump’s ubiquitous “Make America Great Again” with the kind of rhetorical Q-and-A that can breach the bumper-sticker character limit.

“Do we have problems? Of course we have problems!” she said. “But we’ve never not had problems in America’s history.”

Imperfection was inevitable, she suggested, as surely as progress was achievable.

By Wednesday evening in Tempe, Arizona, where some 15,000 people greeted her, the message was simpler.

Trump, she said, had insulted immigrants. African-Americans. Muslims. Prisoners of war. Pope Francis. Carly Fiorina.

“All I ask is that you really think about the kind of person he’s shown himself to be,” she said.

In an overflow space beyond a barricade, a small protest rippled. One heckler held a sign bearing an offensive four-letter term for female genitalia.

Clinton pressed on. “Sometimes,” she said, “sometimes the fate of the greatest nations comes down to single moments in time.”

She implored the people to protect themselves against that irksome inner voice, festering top-of-mind after Election Day, that would wonder, “Ohhhhhh, if only I had done a little more.”

She did not want that for herself, she said. She did not want that for anyone.