Give it up for Hillary! I thought her speech this morning in McAllen at a festive rally was quite good as Hillary speeches go. The Rio Grande Valley in general adores the Clintons and the crowd at the McAllen Civic Center was dishing out plenty of love for their candidate.

I’m guessing Sen. Clinton was feeling it because it seemed as if she spoke with more emotion and sincerity than is normally the case. It didn’t seem that Hillary refocused or honed her standard stump speech much from ones she has given for some weeks now. The pundits keep saying she needs to retool her message to catch up with the galloping Barack Obama, but it seemed like the usual lines today in McAllen, but they were said with a bit more oompfh.

Clinton did throw in a couple of Valley-oriented lines in her stumper today. She promised to bring a veterans’ hospital to the region, which is such a shop-worn pledge at this point that the locals just clap without thinking because we know that, yea, of course they have to promise the vets a hospital. It’s like a prez candidate going to south Florida and promising to boot Castro out of power.

The senator also promised to push immigration reform that would bring humanity for the undocumented, (but no drivers’ licenses, por favor), as well as added border security. Good, we’re all for that, so those are popular points to tout here. She went back in time a bit to recall her days as a young political organizer who registered voters in South Texas, (including McAllen, she said), for the 1972 presidential campaign of George McGovern. In fact, you know those “35 years of experience” Hillary is always promoting, well, one of those places where it all started was right here.

Anyway, watching the Hillary rally on TV was good fun, although you have to wonder how much structural reinforcement those event platforms need, what we all of the local politicos crammed like tamales in a cacerola to get on stage with the presidential candidate. Hey, I want to give a shout out to my Tio Polo the JP who somehow got a space up there behind Hilaria. I got so excited that I thought of calling my dear tio on his cell to confirm it was really him, but I refrained because it would be embarrasing, after all, to have someone lip read JP Polo saying, “Si, mijo, it’s me,” while Hillary talked about bringing universial health care to America.  

And how about Valley congressman Ruben Hinojosa, who shared mike time with Clinton. Rep. Ruben got so caught up in the moment that when he announced Hillary would be back in the Valley next week for an even bigger rally at the McAllen football stadium, he blurted out: “And we’re going to have 50,000 people there!”

What, we have the Rose Bowl here now? You know, back in the 1990s when I went to a huge Weslaco-Donna football game at the McAllen stadium and all the fans were crammed in there like tamales in a cacerola, I recall the attendance being announced at 15,000. Looks Rep. Ruben was only off by 35,000 or so in anticipating the McAllen stadium crowd next week for Hilaria.

It’s all in good fun. We await for The Obama to come to our neck of the mesquite woods by month’s end. Tiene que. Barack has his two slices of bread in the toaster warming up, but Hillary isn’t toast just yet, and won’t be unless Obama can get to around 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in Texas in the March 4 primary, and that ain’t happening unless his campaign tries bery, bery hard in the Balley.

Maybe Barack can do a rally at Brownsville’s Sams Stadium. I bet we can cram 50,000 people into that joint.

Joaquin Tijerina, Chisme Blogger