Sitting a mere foot or two away from the eloquent challenger who has eclipsed her, Hillary Clinton reached back to her travels of the week to push forward policy points about health care and immigration.

Just the evening before her Austin debate with Barack Obama, Clinton made an impassioned plea for her candidacy at a boisterous Wednesday night rally at the University of Texas at Brownsville/Texas Southmost College. At the Austin debate, Clinton first spoke of a woman at the UT-Brownsville rally who had “pulled me aside” to speak of struggles to find adequate health care coverage. A few minutes later, she spoke of the lunacy of the federal government’s original border fence plan that would have put a portion of the UTB/TSC campus on the “Mexican” side of the fence.

It’s heady stuff for a mid-size U.S. community when a major presidential candidate mentions the city’s name twice in a nationally broadcast presidential debate. In fighting to keep her presidential bid alive, Clinton has made the South Texas rounds over the last week, with two stops in McAllen, one visit each to Brownsville, Robstown and then San Antonio, and then on to Laredo the morning of her Thursday debate with Obama. It is telling that other than traveling to Austin for the debate, Clinton has not ventured beyond South Texas in her Lone Star political travels leading up to the March 4 primary.

She surely knows that her struggling presidential bid depends heavily these days on a huge amount of support from Mexican-American voters in South Texas. Clinton’s husband, Bill, the former president, said this week while campaigning in Beaumont that his wife must win Texas on March 4, or face the likely inevitably of losing to Obama. It won’t happen for the Clintons without a strong South Texas showing.

But for all of the vaunted Clinton familiarity with the Rio Grande Valley and South Texas, how much of this vote will she actually get? Lots of it, to be sure, but not as much as was once thought, or so it seems to me. It would appear that the same sort of generational divide that has hurt Clinton nationally will take root here. Younger Mexican-Americans, say those between 18 and 35, are going to go for Obama in a major way. They have none of the historical ties and affections to the Clintons that hold sway with their elders. For younger South Texans, Bill Clinton is a guy who was president during their grade school and middle school years. Barack Obama is the now, a voice speaking to them.

“My wife and I support Hillary,” said Juan Ruiz, a retired 58-year-old firefighter who attended one of the Hillary rallies in McAllen. “But our kids are for Obama.”

Ruiz made those comments to the Chicago Tribune, one of the various national media species that has discovered the Valley and South Texas in search of the exotic Mexican-Americans they’ve heard so much about. One fact unearthed in all of the reporting is this: 40 percent of this state’s 8.5 million Hispanics are of the ages 18 to 40. In that Tribune article, one of the Valley’s Democratic Party gray beards, Juan Maldonado, the current Hidalgo County Demo chairman, spoke of days gone by.

“We are guilty to some degree in assuming that because the leadership leans one way, the rank-and-file are going to follow,” said Maldonado, whose roots in politics go back to the La Raza Unida days of the 1960s when young Mexican-Americans of his generation were making their mark in Texas politics. “But the old patron system where the boss would tell everyone how to vote, that’s gone.

“It’s obvious,” Maldonado went on to say, “that Obama is real attractive with a lot of the younger generation.”

So, for all of the breathless reporting on local TV about how all of the local Valley political officialdom is backing Hillary, here’s a simple push back: Who really cares? Surely, not the younger generation Maldonado speaks of. Congress people like Ruben Hinojosa and Solomon Ortiz and the local political types of their 50-plus age range are just talking to themselves when they yell on their microphones for Hillary.

On Friday morning, when Obama made his first Valley visit, bounding on stage at an outdoor rally at UT-Pan American in Edinburg, the kids went nuts. They got more than a glimpse of the future. Barack Obama represents the first wave of the sort of multi-racial candidate that will populate American politics for generations to come. Hillary put up a good fight, but it’s hard to fight a future that has arrived in the fierce urgency of the present, a candidate on the glide whose flight path is now beginning to cover South Texas.

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