Hillary and Chelsea: “Well, here we are!

Katharine Q. Seelye’s piece in today’s NY Times offers a moving tribute to Hillary Clinton’s campaign effort this past weekend.

Seelye begins:

“On Mother’s Day, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was not served breakfast in bed. She did not go to a fancy lunch, or get to be queen for a day.

“Instead, she rose early and spent a 16-hour day slogging through a cold rain in West Virginia, the next state on her to-do list.

“Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain took the day off.”

Seelye quotes Clinton:

“I’ve come to believe that hard work, determination and resiliency are encoded in our DNA,” she said of women. “We know that we have the ‘worry’ gene. We know we have the ‘put your coat on because it’s cold outside’ gene. But we also have the ‘stand up and fight for what you believe in’ gene.” This brought thunderous applause.

Seelye adds more words from Clinton:

In a reflective and conversational tone, she blended the experiences of everywoman, from “all these mothers who take whatever life throws at us,” and the mother who “gets up every morning, gets the kids ready for school, does the laundry, buys the groceries, cooks the dinners, helps on the homework and maybe works the dayshift, a nightshift or a double shift” to those who “dare to compete in the boardroom and the backroom.”

Finally, Seelye reported:

“Mrs. Clinton had her own Mother’s Day celebration on Saturday, with her family at home in Chappaqua, N.Y. Her husband gave her flowers, as did her daughter, and jointly, they gave her a vase and a small perfume bottle, both from West Virginia.

“The family also shared a meal together, aides said, a rare treat for this triumvirate of campaigners, who regularly make six or eight stops during the course of their separate 18-hour days.

“Asked at the Jarvis house on Sunday how she was celebrating Mother’s Day, Mrs. Clinton looked at her daughter.

‘“Well,” she said, and the two threw their arms around each other, beaming and saying almost simultaneously: ‘Here we are!”’