Hillary, We Thoroughly Knew Ye

The likability campaign started out promisingly enough. In Johnston on Monday, lifelong friend Betsy Ebeling spoke about how Hillary was "the captain of the crossing guards" in sixth grade. "Do all of you understand she's a mom, she's a daughter?" Ebeling asked the crowd. "She takes care of her mom."

Clinton followed with a very human story of how, in junior high school, she had "really thick glasses" but took them off while walking in the hallways because "there was always some boy or another that I was hoping would notice me."

The videos, likewise, give hints of a private Hillary. With soft piano music playing in the background, we hear from her dress designer ("Hillary came into the store and bought one of the dresses"), a former law partner ("I remember helping them paint their kitchen . . . this real ugly orange") and the woman who hosted the Clintons' wedding reception ("It bothered me the other day to hear somebody say that she doesn't have any religion").

Yet even these private reflections of the candidate frequently centered on public policy: "Senator Clinton was one of the first people to realize that the air was toxic. . . . She wants a good education for everybody. . . . She helped set up the system to provide services to indigent clients." Even the candidate's mother, Dorothy Rodham, noted how "she's been very active with social justice causes."

Maybe, then, The Hillary They Know isn't so different from the Hillary everybody else knows: She's a public-policy savant whose idea of a good time is reading white papers into the wee hours. It was only a couple of weeks ago, after all, that she described as "fun" her now-abandoned plans to attack rival Barack Obama.

By the time Clinton arrived in Ottumwa, the slogan on the backdrop ("Working for Change/Working for You") suggested she had already moved beyond The Hillary I Know. Aides promised that she would continue to talk about the personal -- and for a brief moment, she did. "My dad," she said, "believed in people fending for themselves and taking whatever they could to get a better life. And my mother believed in reaching out and helping people and being compassionate, and so I was lucky that I got all those values."

But enough about me, she decided. In a flash, she was proclaiming: "Thank goodness for the children's health insurance program!" Moments later, she whipped out a piece of paper to list her specific proposals. "I'll have a moratorium for 90 days on foreclosures," she said, "then I want to have a five-year freeze on the mortgage rates."

Still consulting the paper, she pledged her fealty to "the program called LIHEAP."

The speech reached its climax when she promised "to fully fund the VA, to make sure that we clear the backlog of compensation claims."

Now, that's The Hillary We Know.