Younger women are sliding towards Hillary’s experience and competence

Cindi, who hasn’t yet hit 40, would never have been part of the cohort of women behind Hillary from the start.

The core Hillary vote is made up of women in their late 50s and in their 60s. On the other hand, Cindi’s just old enough to remember the good times at the end of Bill’s presidency, and wants those good times back.

WHEN she was a kid, sitting in the back of her father’s car, listening to her parents talking, Cindi would look out at the passing scenery, craning to see the tops of office blocks, and thinking “When I grow up, I’m going to own buildings like those”.

Not your average toddler’s ambition. Not the ambition of the beautician she later became. But in America , you can be anything you want, and as soon as she had enough money saved, and enough of a track record with a bank to justify them trusting her, she bought a building. Not much of a building. A residential building, into which she put renters.

The way she says “renters” says it all. There’s people who own their homes. There’s people who rent their homes. She may value them as customers, but she has no time for what she calls “renter mentality.”

In 1995, she bought her first office block. Her husband’s company specialised in refurbishments and remodelling, so whenever she bought a property, he and his guys moved in to make it beautiful.

As well as buying property, she bought land.

“Not makin’ any more of it,” she would shrug, having bought a plot of land out in the boonies. It would take years, she knew, for suburbia to subsume that area, but the purchased land could sit, untended, for the duration. Sooner or later, because this was Florida, people would come.

Three-quarters of the aging population up north wanted to spend their latter years in a warm place, and as they moved south, the young service industry people would move in, too. Even if she did nothing with the land, it would grow in value with every passing year. Just sitting there, it would make her richer.

Two thousand and five saw the first slowdown in that growth. 2006 ground it to a complete stop. Nobody was buying. Nobody was moving. Ergo, nobody was developing or selling. When the first quarter of 2007 saw no improvement, she put a name on the situation. Recession.

“Soon as economists begin to talk about ‘averting’ or ‘minimising’ a recession, you’re already three to six months into an actual recession,” is how she puts it. “When it started, I figured it would last to end 2009. Lately though, I figure 2011, minimum.”

Now, here’s a woman with no economics education. Her only qualification is as a permanent make-up artist, tattooing eyebrows on men and women who have permanently lost all their hair as a result of chemo or some other trauma.

“I sat down and thought it through. In a recession, folks stop buying big stuff. But they don’t stop buying little stuff. In fact, they’re more likely to buy little stuff to compensate for not being able to buy big stuff. So I bought a pewter factory.”

The pewter factory makes ornaments, mazes and charms for bracelets. Pewter is light and cheap compared to more precious metals, but does not rust or tarnish, so it’s grand for letter-openers — why anybody would want one boggles my mind — sports trophies, corporate desk gifts and Christmas tree ornaments. She learnt everything that could be learned about pewter, started to attend gift and ornament shows, and parlayed her wares into several international gift catalogues. Between now and 2011, she and her husband will re-model the properties they’ve bought, holding them against the day when the recovery begins. In the meantime, the little pewter items will keep the cash flow going.

What’s interesting about Cindi’s responses to the economic situation in the US is that a) she spotted the signs early, b) she demonstrated flexibility in identifying an alternative to what she normally does, and c) she laughs out loud at the idea that by describing a recession as a recession, you’re being somewhat treacherous to the national interest and certainly going to make the situation worse. When I talked to her last week, she gestured at the newspaper open on the desk beside her. Bright graphic displays demonstrated all the indicators of an economy juddering to a halt – like our own, like Britain’s, like many across Europe .

“Subprime lending can’t be blamed for all of that,” she said. “Some of it, yes. All of it, no. Recessions are sent by God to remind us that financial experts know nothing. Look at Merrill Lynch. What did they lose in 2007? $15 billion. And they’re global experts. What can I tell ya?”

Cindi’s scepticism about experts is permanent. But the scale of the recession is changing her views in another area: the presidential election. Republican by instinct, she nonetheless cannot wait to see the back of George W Bush, speaking of him with a venom borne of an earlier faith that, coming from a rich family, and connected as he was to big business, he would put even more bounce into the bouncy economy he took over. Instead, in her view, he punctured it. Aided, of course, by overconfident amateur investors and banks so eager to get in on the property boom that they would lend millions even to lads with no fixed abode, job or prospects.

When Hillary Clinton launched her presidential campaign, Cindi wanted no part of her, mainly because Cindi, as an employer, expects her workforce to be where they’ve contracted to be, delivering the labour they signed up to do.

“So who’s takin’ care of New York, then?” she asked. “If I’d voted her into the Senate to serve my state, I’d be pretty antsy by now about her absence without leave. Say one of the troops out in Iraq said ‘you know what? I’ll be away for the next 18 months running for president.’ He’d be court-martialed for desertion. She’s deserted the state that elected her.”

Of course, Cindi, who hasn’t yet hit 40, would never have been part of the cohort of women who were behind Hillary from the start. The core Hillary vote is made up of women in their late 50s and in their 60s. The ones who came through the peace movement, through desegregation of the South, through student activism and through women’s liberation. Cindi inherited all the results of those exciting times, but doesn’t identify with them. Instead, for months, she was enthralled by the fresh cleanness of Barack Obama. By his oratory. His personification of change. His charm. His humour.

On the other hand, Cindi’s just old enough to remember the good times towards the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency, and she wants those good times back. So, in recent weeks, she has been looking at Hillary Clinton with more tolerance. Not particularly turned on by the idea of a woman in the White House (as older women voters are), she is, nonetheless, beginning to weigh charm against competence, creativity against experience. As she does so, she exemplifies a broad section of the voters who will decide what happens on Super Tuesday.

And demonstrating that it’s time for the Clinton camp to stick that old Carville sign right back up on the wall in HQ: IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID!