Heeding the Past As She Looks To the Future

Stories of Hillary Clinton's occasionally fierce temper have led to perceptions that she is privately shrewish. Yet very few people who have worked closely with her over the years regard her that way. To the contrary, she has inspired a loyalty among staff that has kept many top aides by her side for more than a decade.

Even as she has gradually modulated her public image, her political team is a composite of people from different chapters of her political life. From the 1992 presidential campaign, longtime aide Patti Solis Doyle and consultant Mandy Grunwald retain central roles. So, especially, does pollster Mark Penn, who was brought into the Clinton fold during the Morris era and is her chief strategist. Two veterans of the 2000 Senate campaign, Howard Wolfson on communications issues and Neera Tanden on policy, are important advisers. Longtime friends Harold Ickes, Ann Lewis and Maggie Williams remain in the fold in either formal or advisory roles.

The Sincerity Question

By the time of her 2000 campaign, Hillary Clinton had long since recognized, along with her husband, that Democrats needed to temper their ideology and modulate their message.

There were two questions at stake as she sought election in her own right -- both of which would re-emerge on a national scale if she sought the presidency. One was whether a woman who, early in her days in the public spotlight, was branded -- some advisers say unfairly -- as being far more liberal than her husband could reintroduce herself as a pragmatic creature of the center.

The other was more delicate. Her polls consistently showed that people were skeptical about her authenticity -- doubts that were often inspired by speculation about her marriage and her ambition.

In a typical 2000 strategy memo, Penn warned the Clintons, "Jewish swing voters feel a strong sense of cultural distance from the first lady, which leads them to question her motives and assume she is motivated primarily by personal goals." She answered the doubts in part through relentless personal exposure. The effort paid dividends in surprising places. She won only 11 of the counties outside New York City but ran competitively in many of them. Combining that with the overwhelming Democratic vote in New York, she trounced Rep. Rick Lazio (R).

The speculation about the Clinton marriage is not confined to ordinary voters. In the White House years and since, it has been a common topic of discussion among Clinton friends and aides. With few exceptions, most of these people concluded that the marriage is a genuine, if turbulent, romance, powered by a shared sense of mission about politics and government. The role reversal between husband and wife in 2000 strengthened the marriage, some friends say.

The unseasoned Senate candidate once confided to Ickes, "I never realized how good Bill was at this until I tried to do it."

Keeping Her Options Open

Still uncertain is whether Hillary Clinton can prove her husband's equal in presidential politics. In interviews, she insists the question is not on her mind -- only next year's reelection. "Oh, I'm not even, you know, remotely considering that," she said on CNN last week. "My view is that, you know, life unfolds at its own rhythm."

Privately, her advisers say she may not have decided to run but she has definitely decided she wants to do everything necessary to keep her options open and allow her to launch a campaign if she decides to after 2006. Her out-of-state travel is increasingly strategic, including trips to swing states such as Ohio.

In 2000, she repeatedly pledged that she would finish her term without seeking the presidency. Aides say she will not issue such a pledge this time. To emphasize her centrist credentials, her Senate office regularly touts her willingness to sponsor legislation with Republicans, including conservative Sens. Rick Santorum (Pa.) and Sam Brownback (Kan.). In her first years in the Senate, she focused largely on New York issues and carefully rationed national publicity. Now she regularly accepts such publicity and takes assertive stands on national issues.

An example was a speech last winter on abortion. Although reasserting her longtime view that abortion should be legal, she argued that more should be done to make abortion rare. Her political team was thrilled with the publicity the speech got, though Bill Clinton said he was irked by the widespread analysis that she was expediently changing her stripes for political reasons.

"Give me a break!" he said at a recent talk at the Time Warner corporate headquarters in New York. Clinton said he did not know whether his wife would run but asserted that the key for Democrats to win in Republican-leaning states is not to change views but to "change the way we talk about" issues so as not to cede the values debate to conservatives.

Hillary Clinton would have ground to make up. In Ohio, polls by John F. Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign showed her among the most unpopular Democrats with swing voters.

Penn, while emphasizing he does not know Hillary Clinton's presidential plans, pointed to a CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll last week finding that for the first time a majority of voters say they are likely to vote for her if she runs in 2008. "She's demonstrated in New York and in the years she's been in the Senate that she has the will, the ability and the seriousness to overcome all the obstacles that the Republican Party threw at her and continue to throw at her," he said.

Will Marshall, president of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute, said Clinton's challenge in 2008 would be to have the public see her on her terms, rather than the Republican portrayal of her history and values: "She needs to dramatize the contrast between who she really is and what she really believes and what the stereotype is."