Hillary Clinton Comes to Town

I covered Hillary Clinton's visit to Muncie last night. It was a pretty neat experience. Every local and regional media outlet was in attendance along with the travelling national media so it was a big stage for a college kid.

My photographer and I arrived around 6:30 to the Muncie Central High School gym. Clinton was scheduled to arrive at 8:45 so we had some time to kill so we set up our stuff and waited...and waited...and waited. Finally, around 8:30 we heard that the Clinton train was running about an hour late. So we decided to do a few quick interviews with some of the crowd members and get that part out of the way.

Finally, around 9:30 Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in Middletown, USA. The crowd was very energetic as Clinton arrived. In fact, the entire crowd stood for the first 20 minutes of her speech.

Clinton touched on issues that affected nearly every person in attendance. She hit home with the laborers (Muncie has many although many of those jobs have been lost in the last 5 years) as she promised to stop tax breaks for companies that outsource to another country.

Clinton hit home with the college audience (I would estimate between 300-500 BSU students) by promising to lower interest rates on college loans. She also mentioned a plan to forgive the college debts of those who will go into public service such as the millitary, teaching, public safety. (A lot of good that does me! Let's forgive their debt and push it off on the Tcom majors!)

Ultimately it was a good experience. The speech finished around 10:15 and we headed back to the newsroom to edit our material. The completed package will be done sometime today while a 2 minute clip of Clinton's speech is now available on newslinkindiana.com.