A Chance Encounter with Clinton
I followed Clinton during a recent bus tour across Iowa, when she and her entourage pulled into a Maid-Rite, a greasy spoon famous for its loose-meat sandwich. Clinton settled into a red stool at the counter, ate a sandwich, chatted with her waitress and then was on her way.
The scene gave Clinton perfect fodder for her next few stump speeches. Turns out her waitress was a single, working mom — just the kind of voter Democrats are courting aggressively this year.
Clinton recalled the meeting for an audience up the road in Boone. "The woman waiting on us — it was her first day," she said, adding, "She was a little nervous. Single mom, raised two boys, works at a nursing home and always has a second job."
If she's elected president, Clinton promised, people like her waitress will have it better.
The way Clinton eased the waitress into her rhetoric is something repeated day after day, by all the campaigns. But in the process, people like the waitress don't always have their stories told.
'Nobody Got Left a Tip'
"I wished I would have been asked first," the waitress, Anita Esterday, said of Clinton's decision to insert her in a speech, adding, "I wish she would have asked if she could talk about me later. I didn't like it when someone called me up and said Hillary Clinton is talking about you. It's like, what'd I do now? What's she saying?"
When I returned to the Maid-Rite a few weeks later, Esterday said the senator had caught her off guard. But once they got talking, she was honest with Clinton about her need to work two to three jobs.
"I've been doing it all my life. Why should it change now that I'm old?" Esterday said.
Esterday does not think Clinton got it. "I don't think she understood at all what I was saying," Esterday said, adding, "I mean, nobody got left a tip that day."
Clinton may have decided not to tip. She was also never given a bill — her meal was on the house. Still, Esterday said Clinton might have left her something: "Maybe they don't carry money, I don't know."
Turns out the visit hurt Esterday in another way. The local paper ran photos of her with Clinton. She said her supervisor at the nursing home isn't a big Hillary Clinton fan, and she thinks that may be related to why her hours were almost totally cut.
Now, Esterday is looking for a different second job. Still, she said she's not upset that Clinton visited the restaurant...
But as far as the attention she's received? "It hasn't helped me. It's made things worse."