Overarching message eludes Clinton campaign
SAN FRANCISCO - Only 3 1/2 weeks ago, Hillary Clinton met the cheering crowd in a small gymnasium in Manchester, N.H., with a radiant smile. Jubilant at having pulled her political career from the brink of an abyss, she declared to the people of New Hampshire, "I listened to you and in the process, I found my own voice."
Since that night, Clinton has slogged from Las Vegas to Charleston, S.C., to San Diego to ask Americans to validate her bid to become the nation's first female president. Yet nowhere along the way have voters heard with true clarity that voice she said she found in New Hampshire.
With her early monopoly on the political establishment, with all her years of political experience and native intelligence, Clinton all along has been tantalizingly close to grasping her party's nomination for the presidency. To get to that gymnasium floor in Manchester, she endured half her adulthood in the harsh public limelight; a year on the campaign trail trying to light up crowds on little sleep; dark, humiliating winter days in Iowa and New Hampshire when the whole enterprise seemed near collapse.
And yet with so much on the line as 22 states go to the polls Tuesday, the passion that has gotten her through all those years in Washington, all those months on the campaign trail, has not yet come across in the form of a clear message to voters.
"She has not found the campaign theme yet," said David Gergen, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government who has advised four presidents, including Bill Clinton. "There's that old phrase, 'a certain trumpet.' You have to sound a certain trumpet to be heard."
Hillary Clinton's campaign has continued to try on - and then quickly sweep out of view - various themes and tactics, whether it was offering in-depth policy details, criticisms of her main rival Barack Obama, or attacks on President Bush.
And up on a stage, even in a sea of thousands of cheering voters, Clinton continues to seem emotionally far away. She promises to get up every day in the White House and go to work for the American people, yet in place of soaring rhetoric or quiet inspiration, her most urgent, feverish applause lines remain small-bore, even disjointed promises, like "high-speed Internet access across our country!" or "enforce the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act!"
Clinton remains the leader in national polls. Many voters who meet her in person are surprised by how sincere, how devoted to her country they find her. They like her experience, her support from her husband, and her policy prescriptions focused on the middle class. Her debate performances have been strong, showcasing her encyclopedic knowledge of the issues.
By many measures, Obama has far less experience, and some of his stances - such as his less-than-universal healthcare proposal - are less popular with the Democratic base. But he has been steadfast in making a grand pitch, an optimistic call to rewrite the rules of American politics.
For Clinton, the most profound moment of the campaign unfolded in New Hampshire on the eve of what was predicted to be a huge loss, after a voter in a coffee shop asked how Clinton kept on going. With dozens of cameras trained on her, the sleep-deprived candidate's eyes welled and her voice cracked.
"Some people think elections are a game - they think it's like who's up or who's down," she said.
"It's about our country, it's about our kids' futures, and it's really about all of us together."
That stunning moment was clearly what Clinton was referring to when she said at her victory speech a day later that she found her voice. But she almost immediately undercut that authentic voice. In interviews in the following days, she once again showed her more usual public face, one that is official, proper, and a little distant. She suggested she had been moved solely by her passion for the voters, instead of acknowledging that vulnerable human traits such as exhaustion or a desire to win were part of what choked her up.
"For many voters they, you know, perhaps were looking so closely, and I was certainly, you know, looking back as intensely as I could, and we really connected," she said on the "Today" show. "There was just this extraordinary feeling that I had on, you know, in the incident you referred to where, you know, we were all in it together."
Clinton declared her candidacy a little over a year ago via a video on her website. It showed her in the cozy environs of her living room with a warm, solicitous invitation to "let the conversation begin." But she has spent most of the campaign in broadcast, rather than conversational mode, rarely taking questions from the audiences at her rallies.
At first, her campaign positioned her as the inevitable party nominee, unstoppable given her demonstrable ability to sew up political support and rake in donations.
When it became clear that Obama could not only captivate voters but also raise as much money as Clinton, the campaign turned to the experience argument. Her entire 35 years as a working adult, but above all her eight years as first lady, had groomed her for this role.
But Obama's continued appeal - and countless polls - showed voters wanted "change." So Clinton argued that she was the most electable, in large part because she had already proved she could withstand Republican attacks.
As she teetered in Iowa in late December, stung by criticism that she seemed cold and remote, Clinton rolled out a campaign ad called "The Hillary I Know." It featured a parade of friends, family members, and thankful constituents who told stories about her loyalty and compassion.
But then, after her Iowa defeat, she and her husband began portraying Obama as insubstantial, inconsistent, even cozy with a "slumlord," as she put it at a South Carolina debate two weeks ago.
Now, one of Clinton's most consistent themes is to hearken back to - and claim partial credit for - the economic success of the 1990s. Bill Clinton is a hugely popular figure among Democrats, but some believe he takes the spotlight away from the candidate herself.
Friday night at a fund-raiser in San Francisco, Mary Steenburgen, the actress and longtime Clinton friend, moved the audience with her poetic introduction of the candidate, waxing about how Clinton is "more" than people know, in every way.
"She's more disturbed by the injustices in the world," Steenburgen said. "She's more able to be silly - her belly laugh is more raucous and dirty than mine. She's even more human. She does get tired, and sad, and hurt, but she's more able to pick herself up and dust herself off and start all over again than anybody else I know."
When Clinton took the stage, she was gracious and energetic. And she gave the exact same stump speech she had given all day, from the need to create "green" jobs to getting out of Iraq.
There was no "more." 