DUBUQUE, Iowa — If there is a single symbol to sum up the standard Hillary Clinton stump speech, it is, perhaps, the enormous 3D printer she first encountered at a technical training center in Waterloo, Iowa.
Mrs. Clinton stumbled upon the printer — the largest in North America — in December while touring Cedar Valley TechWorks. She watched as the contraption molded sand and resin and spit out a two-foot three-dimensional replica of her "H" campaign logo.
The director of the job-training program then told Mrs. Clinton that the material was made of discarded corncobs. She was impressed. She was excited. "Oh, come on! Come on!" Mrs. Clinton said, putting a hand on his arm.
Now, several weeks later, as Mrs. Clinton tells the story over and over on the stump, she mistakenly puts the 3D printer at a community college in a different city, and in a state that is not Iowa, which may or may not have a 3D printer.
"I was at the Black Hawk Community College," Mrs. Clinton said at a rally in Des Moines on Monday, in her standard lead up to the 3D printing story.
"They bought the biggest 3D printer in North America because they're thinking about the future," she added. "They're training people about how to use that."
The only problem: Black Hawk College is in Moline, Ill., which borders Davenport, Iowa, and which Mrs. Clinton did not visit.
But somewhere between Waterloo, the breakneck schedule of campaigning across Iowa and the can-do spirit of Mrs. Clinton's policy-laden stump speech, the details became muddled along the way. A campaign spokeswoman said that Waterloo was in Black Hawk County and that is what Mrs. Clinton was referring to.
In Dubuque on Monday afternoon, Mrs. Clinton, standing in front of a giant American flag, told the standing-room-only crowd, "I was up at Black Hawk Community College," and called the printer, which is actually at Cedar Valley, "a job magnet for Iowa and for the Midwest."
The details may have been mixed up, but Mrs. Clinton's point speaks to her stump speech as a whole. It's a mix of policy details and American exceptionalism (particularly during the period when her husband was president) and it intersperses examples of real-life Iowa.
"I just don't buy this argument some folks made that we're not going to build anything American anymore," Mrs. Clinton told a crowd in Newton on Wednesday. "One of the things that has convinced me is traveling around Iowa, seeing what is happening at your community colleges."
Again, bringing it all back to that 3D printer.
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