SCRANTON, Pa. - Hillary Clinton tapped a sentimental vein in the anthracite of northeastern Pennsylvania, describing yesterday's visit to her paternal clan's ancestral seat as a homecoming - much as she did when the Illinois-born senator from New York and former Arkansas governor's wife campaigned recently in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Texas.
"This is such a big part of my life, and when I go back there I think about all those memories," Clinton said at Scranton High School, mentioning a local pizzeria, an ice cream shop, a church, a dry goods store, a now-defunct restaurant, and a variety of other landmarks - each reference eliciting a crescendo of knowing cheers from the crowd.
"My only regret is that my late father isn't here - but he's buried here and I have a feeling that he's here in spirit," she said, looking up at a banner that said "Welcome Home Hillary."
In an era when the average American moves a dozen times over a lifetime, according to US Census data, the presidential candidates look like the peripatetic country they want to lead. All three senators running for president live in states other than the ones in which they were born, and none even represents one in which they lived most of their lives - leading to an endless series of campaign-season homecomings for favorite sons and daughters.
Clinton's great-grandfather emigrated to Pennsylvania from Wales in the 1880s and settled in this coal town north of the Pocono mountains. Her father, Hugh E. Rodham, was born in Scranton and played football at Penn State University before moving to suburban Chicago.
Raised in Illinois, Hillary Clinton returned to Scranton for her christening at the family's Methodist church and regularly spent girlhood summers at a cottage on Lake Winola, 20 miles north.
"She wasn't literally born here, but she was here every year of her life until she went to college," Tony Rodham, 53, Hillary's brother, said at the high school while awaiting her arrival, holding Fiona, his 14-month-old daughter who was recently baptized in the same gown as her Aunt Hillary.
"You might already know the famous Robert Frost quote: 'Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,' " said Howard Chudacoff, a Brown University historian who has written about mobility in American society. "In Senator Clinton's case, I guess she wants Scranton to let her in."
The remaining presidential candidates have embraced their peripatetic lives more eagerly than their predecessors: Ronald Reagan was an Illinoisan who became famous as a Californian, and both presidents Bush were native-born New Englanders who reinvented themselves as Texans. Clinton, Obama, and McCain have all been immodest about trying to stake electoral claim to states where they have even the most tenuous ties.
When Obama, the Hawaii-born Illinois senator who was educated in California, New York, and Massachusetts, visited El Dorado, Kan., the hometown of his grandparents, prior to that state's caucus, it was described as a homecoming - much as it was when, in 2006, he visited Kenya, where his father was born and much of his family still lives - even though he has lived in neither place.
McCain's campaign is planning a "bio tour" - including a visit to Annapolis, where he attended the Naval Academy - to ground his itinerant career in a sense of place. McCain was born in the Panama Canal zone and spent his childhood between Washington, D.C., and a variety of naval bases where his father, an admiral, was stationed. He lived in Florida after serving in Vietnam, and moved to Arizona, the home state of his wife, Cindy, only after deciding he wanted to seek office there.
Clinton's ties in Pennsylvania, which holds a showdown primary April 22, will probably have little electoral impact outside this part of the state, said Jim Baumbach, a Pennsylvania political consultant who credits "Scranton parochialism" for the potential strength of those appeals in Scranton. "They're more than happy to bask in the reflected glory," he said.
Clinton has expressed a similar sense of patrimony on campaign visits throughout New England. A November visit to Wellesley College reminded her of years there that were among her most "exhilarating and formative," according to Clinton, who also lived in Cambridge and worked in New Bedford after graduating. When in February she visited New Haven, Conn., where she attended Yale law school, Clinton declared herself "nostalgic" about arriving "in an old beat-up car with a mattress roped to the top."
Clinton claimed a Proustian attachment to San Antonio, where she lived three months while campaigning for George McGovern in 1972 and "where I became addicted to Mexican food," she said on a stop there a few weeks ago.
"You may have heard I eat a lot of hot peppers," she said. "They keep me healthy . . . and they remind me of south Texas."
But Clinton's campaign appears intent on using her Scranton tie to a different advantage: evidence of a connection to blue-collar, industrial America.
"They're the hardest-working, most honest, most deserving people on earth," Tony Rodham said of the city's residents.
Sasha Issenberg can be reached at sissenberg@globe.com.
