Saturday I marched in the St. Patrick's Day parade in Harrisburg, PA with former U.S. Senator Harris Wofford. The forecast called for rain, but the sky was clear as I left DC. A pair of hawks circled above the still-bare trees and an owl, blinded by the sunshine, sat with its eyes squeezed tight on an exit sign. At a stoplight, I rolled down my window, hung my head out the big old Ford escort, and breathed in spring.
Once on the highway, my traveling partner, Josh, and I put on the Oldies station on the radio. Josh, a twentysomething man who met Wofford a few months ago in New Hampshire and now serves as his de facto aide, wanted to sing along. I could feel him bouncing in the seat next to me, and every now and then a little "doo-doo-doo" escaped his lips; but, as we had just met, Josh tried to forebear.
Instead, he pointed out his favorite passages in Of Kennedys and Kings, an account of the senator's service to JFK, RFK, and MLK. Wofford had come in as a speechwriter for Kennedy and was eventually an adviser for King. In his book, he tries to make sense of the sixties, especially the mood of the public. It was this that I wanted to ask Wofford about: what was different about then and now?
As is Josh's wont, we arrived early. Despite the modern Hilton Hotel at the corner of town and the green domed capitol on the hill, Harrisburg--the capital of the state and its fourth-largest city, with a population of about 50,000--has a sleepy, industrial feel. Save for a Dunkin' Donuts, downtown Harrisburg does not have chain food stores. The main street is a swath of awnings and bricks and calico curtains and hand-lettered signs. A block away, the Susquehanna River sidles along the city like a well-fed stray.
Josh and I stopped first at the new Obama office, sprung up just this week in three-story house with a wooden staircase and bay windows. Wofford is a surrogate for the campaign, and amid the green and white balloons and the signs that said O'Bama, the field organizers were waiting for him.
Wofford was the day's big gun. With the Pennsylvania governor, Ed Rendell, and Harrisburg's own mayor, Stephen Reed, endorsing Clinton, and the senator from New York herself scheduled to appear in the parade, the Obama campaign was scrambling for some representation from a higher-up. Wofford, who inherited John Heinz's senate seat in 1991 and lost a re-election bid to Rick Santorum in 1994, would presumably be familiar to some parade-goers. Just in case, one of the field organizers had made a sign for the politician to hold: "Senator Harris Wofford," written in magic marker and decorated with shamrocks.
Josh spotted Wofford first and lifted his arm high above his head to wave. Wofford did not seem to see him. His attention was entirely on the crowd: college kids in green foam hats, former football players in Fightin' Irish t-shirts, mothers with toddlers on blankets spread over the sidewalks, teenage girls in emerald and silver Mardi Gras beads, big-bellied men in top hats and cigars, shopkeepers with thumbs tucked into the belt loops of their jeans, waitresses scurrying under platters of beer.
Wofford offered his hand to all of them. "Harris Wofford," he said, moving down the sidewalk like he was working a rope line. "Harris Wofford." If startled, most people shook back.
At 81, Wooford has been in politics for 56 years. He remembers listening to FDR's fireside chats as a little boy although his family were not Roosevelt supporters; Wooford had to come into his Democratic sensibilities on his own. When he was ten years old, Wooford began the Student Federalist club in his basement. As a young man, he fell in love with Washington, DC.
Today, he looks elderly but energetic. He wears glasses with large lenses and has a worrying, irregular blemish at one temple. Gravity has tugged at his ears and his eyebrows are furry caterpillars. For St. Patrick's Day, he was decked out in a mint green v-neck sweater, with a copper tie knotted at the throat and a matching suede jacket that sailed behind him as he walked. He has a peculiar high step, exacerbated by shoes that appear to be too big and pants that are too short. When he saw Josh and me, his eyes lit up and he lurched over and grabbed my elbow. For a second I thought he had started to fall, but then I saw he was simply making contact. In an instant he had moved me to one side, let go, and seized someone else.
Their star having arrived, Obama campaign ferried Wofford to the back of the capitol, where supporters were getting organized. Some politics were already at play: the Clinton contingent was marching at the front of the parade and indeed had already left; some Obama-ites grumbled about being stuck in the back, wedged between a float for an Irish restaurant and a troupe of clowns.
As well, half a dozen law school students occasionally wafted back and forth with a sign for their school. While Wofford tried to register a few (to cast a ballot for Clinton or Obama in the Pennsylvania primary, voters have to be registered Democrats by March 24), one of them confided boozily to me that Obama didn't have a chance in Harrisburg. The information was in direct contradiction to what I'd heard from an Obama volunteer at headquarters: Harrisburg couldn't but swing for Obama. The tension, goes the conventional wisdom, is between the political establishment and the popular vote. While it seems clear the local political establishment supports Clinton, the issue is that both sides claim the popular vote is on their side.
Judging at least from the St. Patrick's Day parade, it would be hard to determine which way the city will go. When the high school band started up, Wofford led his group around the corner and some teenage girls lifted Obama signs high in the air and cheered. Adults seated on the curb looked either cheerful or blank-faced; some turned down their thumbs and scowled. The children mostly ran for the candy.
Despite Pennsylvania's late spot in the primaries--meaning the presidential race has likely not figured prominently in the Harrisburg St. Patrick's Day parade--well over half the crowd had some kind of campaign paraphernalia. Perhaps in part because the Obama campaign had printed theirs in green, the majority of people seemed to be sporting for him; however, in the distance, a team of Clinton supporters had claimed a wide piece of real estate, and they held their blue signs with both hands, beating the cardboard against the wind.
As luck would have it, the parade slowed just as the Obama group approached the Clinton supporters, then stalled to a halt. For a good ten minutes, the two groups shouted in counter tempo: "O-BA-MA," and, on the down beat, "Hillary!"
Josh nudged my elbow and pointed to a woman on the sidelines. She was eighty-five if she was a day, sitting in a wheel chair and wearing a bright yellow rain slicker and a smear of hot pink lipstick. Every thirty seconds or so, she turned her head and said in a sharp voice like a parrot, "McCain."
Later, I pinned down Wofford and asked him my question: for all the rhetoric about Obama being the new JFK, how does the electorate compare then to now?
The short answer is that, according to Wofford, in 1960 the country simply had a sense that things had slowed down under Eisenhower; Kennedy's slogan was, "Get America Moving Again." Now, says Wofford, the country has an urgent sense that it is on the wrong path.
But the longer answer is perhaps more interesting.
At the end of their lives, Wofford reminded me, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams exchanged letters re-hashing the Constitutional Convention and the founding of the republic. One of the themes they hit on over and over was the quest for the common good. Certainly they had been concerned with an individual's happiness when they wrote the Constitution; however, the ability to participate in the common good was primarily the happiness they meant when they wrote "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
Happiness is not a theme that has come up much during this election season -- and certainly not now, when the banks are tanking and we are coming on the five-year anniversary of the war in Iraq and the campaigns have taken on an acrimonious taste. Yet, as the Democratic primary season extends through the spring and into the summer -- the weather getting warmer and the days getting longer and more and more people coming to the polls -- there is an undercurrent of the "public happiness" of which Adams, Jefferson spoke.
At the end of the parade, the Obama contingent came slowly to the cobblestone plaza where the mayor and public officials were announcing each entry. "This group calls themselves 'Friends of Obama,'" said a woman at the microphone, and then diplomatically declined to add anything else. Wofford broke out of the line and approached the podium, pulled to the dais as if by a magnet. He and the mayor shook hands, and Wofford paused like he might say something, changed his mind, and shook hands with the mayor a second time. Meanwhile, the thirty-odd Obama representatives waved their signs and eyed the crowd. The crowd, who after all had no more or less reason to be on the sidelines than in the middle of the street, stared back. Although the marching had stopped, this moment seemed to be the point of the parade: an occasion for strangers and neighbors to come outside and take a good look at each other before resuming their course.
Loading comments… 
