Clinton ready to shed low profile

Hillary Clinton said she was “ready to come out of the woods” during a St. Patrick’s Day speech 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 former secretary of state, made the comments Friday at the end of a talk that she gave at a yearly St. Patrick’s Day celebration held by a women’s group in Scranton — 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 in Scranton, spoke about her family’s connections to the area, including many summers she spent at a nearby lake as a child. But at the end of the speech, given in the ballroom of a local Hilton 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 to help shine a light on what is already happening around kitchen tables, at dinners like this.”

Clinton spoke to a crowd of nearly 700 people, according to Mary Clare Kingsley, co-president of the Society of Irish Women, which held the event: about 500 people in the ballroom and an additional 175 who watched the speech via video in an overflow room. Kingsley said it was the largest attendance for the event, surpassing the total when the group hosted Barack Obama in 2008.