This is not the first image overhaul for Mrs. Clinton. During the campaign she submerged her careerist credentials and emphasized her role as wife and mother after focus groups showed that voters didn’t even know she had a child. White House strategists call the process an “evolution.”
But it is a very deliberate one, as Mrs. Clinton’s interview and travel schedule attests. She chose Parade, a low-risk, high-impact Sunday-newspaper supplement, as a forum to reinforce her thoughts about the need for accountability, social responsibility and self-discipline. At one point, the interviewer noted that her comments about social trends sounded like “awfully conservative stuff coming from a liberal Democrat supposedly to the left of her husband.” Mrs. Clinton laughed, happy to accept the conservative label. White House schedulers may have recalled that when Ronald Reagan wanted to dispel questions about his age in 1983, he was pictured pumping iron on Parade’s cover. Last week Mrs. Clinton traveled to Nebraska and Montana to talk about the need for health-care reform and “to assure people this is not some Eastern effete thing that’s been cooked up,” says an aide.
The clearest sign that Hillary is hitting the right notes comes from industry groups that will be affected by changes in the health-care system. Focus groups probing for weaknesses in administration strategy find significant majorities of voters supporting Hillary. “She confirms something the public is ready to believe about women in politics-that they are as smart as men, but likely to be more caring,” says Greg Schneiders, a Democratic consultant whose clients include pharmaceutical companies and health-care providers.
When her father suffered a stroke last month, Hillary set aside her professional obligations and flew to his bedside where she stayed for two weeks. Shortly before Hugh Rodham died, she revealed some of her personal anguish in a speech at the University of Texas. Instead of the usual jargon about health care, Mrs. Clinton talked about the need to confront the profound questions of when life begins and ends. The answers won’t be found in “guidebooks,” she said, but in summoning up “what we believe is morally and ethically and spiritually correct. . .“The way Hillary Clinton handled the recent death of her father may have done more for her image than anything she could have said.
