I’ll give Hillary a little bit of credit, in that I think this exchange with Jay Leno is absolute catnip for the working-class voters she’s hoping to carry by a wide margin in Pennsylvania:

JAY LENO: Well, that’s really true because I ‑‑ this is a pet thing of mine. I have some scholarships that I set up for kids that want be to be mechanics. HILLARY CLINTON: Good for you. JAY LENO: Because you can make a lot of money working in mechanics. In our society unless you’re working on a computer, oh, if you’re a transmission specialist, these guys make $150,000 a year about. Somehow that’s looked down “Oh, you got your hands dirty.” That seems so wrong. HILLARY CLINTON: Boy, Jay, I wish you would talk about this on your show all the time. It’s one of my causes because, you know, try to find, you know, a plumber, a carpenter ‑‑ we have so devalued and disrespected the work that a lot of people don’t go into it, and these are not only good jobs, these are really important jobs, and the more we look at how we’re going to have to retool the economy and move towards clean renewable energy, we’re going need a lot of people who are installing solar panels and putting up the wind turbines and doing the work that’s going to make us energy independent. Those will be good jobs that can’t be outsourced. So we’ve got to talk about it and then act on it.

Everybody likes hearing that their work isn’t appreciated enough, and it may contrast well with Barack Obama, who, while putting up better ads for this demographic, still doesn’t do a great job of looking and sounding like a “regular guy.”