A nice little piece from earlier this week that helps explain why Clinton won Ohio:

Sen. Hillary Clinton arrived before dawn today to greet the morning shift at the Jeep factory plant in Toledo, Ohio.

It was 5:30 am and still dark outside as she shook hands and smiled at the workers during their shift change.

This is nothing, you may be tempted to think. It’s only a line in the newspaper, another little photo op for a political candidate.

Think again.

Working people reward those who are willing to share their hours and address their issues. I know this because when I read that story I thought about my Mom, and I remembered my childhood.

My mother, Beatrice, who never finished grade school, worked for 15 years on the assembly line at Grayson Heat Control in Long Beach, California. And when she saw photo ops of politicians in the `swanky’ places as she called them, she would laugh with derision because no politician ever got up early enough to greet her.

My mom left our apartment in Lynwood, California at 4:30 am to catch a ride and get to work on time. My Dad who worked nights at General Motors in South Gate got home at 8 a.m. No politician ever greeted his shift change, either.

I got up to the buzzing of an alarm clock. I dressed myself in clothes my Mom had set out the night before– and I better not think of switching anything either! Once I put on the ’stupid dress’ which I hated as I was the original tomboy, I added milk to the shredded wheat my Mom left in a bowl on the kitchen table. Then I grabbed my denim notebook and set off for a mile walk through the empty lots full of horney toads and wild flowers to reach the Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School.

Disdain of one sort or another almost always greeted me there because both the teachers and all the other kid’s mothers regularly scrutinized me for signs of ‘working mother’ derangement. How could the kid be okay when her mother worked?

After school I would put three potatoes in a dutch oven for the evening meal, the one time my family came together. Nobody saw our life as hard or different or even unusual. We were a working class family making our way in the world and proud to do so. In our neighborhood my Dad’s job was considered a “plumb.” And the fact my Mom worked was just fine since everyone understood that my parents wanted me to have it better than they did.

And so I walked to a school with kids who came from “estates.” Those kids would pull homemade chocolate chip cookies out of their lunch pails as I would look on wild with envy. I never could convince the chocolate chip kids that a couple of Hydrox wrapped in waxed paper would make an equitable trade. But I sure tried.

Working people are going to the polls in Texas and Ohio in record numbers tomorrow, and they are going to vote for Hillary Clinton. They will do so because she is the only democratic candidate who understands their lives and appreciates their aspirations for a better life for their kids.

Lots of candidates since my Mom worked at Grayson Heat Control have visited plants with assembly lines.

But they still don’t often do it at 5:30 am. And that’s because they don’t really know about shift changes and the nitty gritty of factory life.

But I do! And so when I first began working on the issue of the sexual harassment of women on the job I showed up at the early shift change at Ithaca Gun in Ithaca, New York, home of Cornell University. And 30 years after my Mom’s assembly line days, the women who worked there were bowled over when a bunch of us showed up in our `Sunday best’ to hand out leaflets. Not one of our handouts was left on the ground. And a few of those women cried because someone cared enough to get up and greet them as the sun rose.

There are a lot of shift workers in Toldeo today who are smiling because Hillary Clinton cared enough to come to them and ask for their vote.

She is going to sweep Texas and Ohio tomorrow. I have no doubt about it. Working people are going to vote, and they know who will remember them on Day One.