Clinton is ‘ready to come out of the woods’
SCRANTON (Pennsylvania): Hillary Clinton said she was “ready to come out of the woods” during a St Patrick’s Day speech on Friday night in Pennsylvania in front of an overflow crowd — an indication that she plans to shed the low profile she has kept since the election.
Clinton, the presidential candidate and a former secretary of state, made the comments at the end of a nearly 20-minute talk that she gave at a yearly St Patrick’s Day celebration held by a women’s group here in the northeast corner of a battleground state that made for one of her most surprising electoral losses in November.
Clinton, whose grandfather and father grew up here, spoke about her family’s connections to the area. But, at the end of the speech, given in the ballroom of a local hotel, her words turned, if only glancingly, to current affairs.
“I’m like a lot of my friends right now. I have a hard time watching the news, I’ll confess,” she said, according to a video of the event.
“I am ready to come out of the woods and help shine a light on what is happening around kitchen tables, at dinners like this.”
Clinton spoke to a crowd of nearly 700 people, according to Mary Clare Kingsley, a president of the Society of Irish Women, which held the event. About 500 people were in the ballroom and about 175 watched the speech via video in an overflow room.
She said it was the largest attendance for the event, surpassing the total when the group hosted Barack Obama during the presidential campaign of 2008.
The group hoped for years to land Clinton and sent her an invitation letter in December.
“We figured if anyone could motivate women, who better to have than her,” Kingsley said.
Taking the stage before dinner was served, Clinton spoke at length about her grandfather, who came to Scranton with his parents when he was 3, the sixth of an eventual 11 children from a family that left the coal mines in England “searching for a better life and more opportunity”.
She emphasised their connection to industrial prosperity in