Turning It Around

Gallery

Hillary's Big Comeback

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton narrowly won the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary on Jan. 8, 2008, a surprise victory for the onetime front-runner that reenergized her campaign and reshaped yet again the fight for the party's nomination.

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The campaign buses rolled past the Main Street Cafe and Bob's Barber Shop before pulling into the Jackson County Fairgrounds in Maquoketa, Iowa. Onto the stage bounded a woman who in many ways would be unrecognizable to those who had known her only as first lady.

The Hillary Clinton of the 1990s gave smart but turgid speeches, a little distant or condescending, and rarely engaged an audience in an emotional way. While her husband would enthusiastically shake every hand after an event, she sometimes went to wait in the car.

The Hillary Clinton of Maquoketa, Iowa, however, pumped up her crowd with rousing rhetoric and eagerly hit the rope line, posing for pictures, signing autographs and telling stories about singing to daughter Chelsea when she was young or banning smoking in the White House.

It is sometimes easy to forget the transformation Clinton has undergone in the seven years since Bill Clinton left the Oval Office. Once she railed about the "vast right-wing conspiracy"; now she boasts about working with Republicans in the Senate. The implausibility of a former first lady running for her husband's old job has evaporated. The main goal as Clinton began her campaign a year ago was to make it seem like the most natural thing that she would be the next president.

"I'm in to win," she said in her kickoff speech, her first real slogan of the campaign. But if the quotation on her Web site and in headlines nationwide signaled determination, it said nothing about why she was in beyond her own ambition. It did not say she was in to remake the country or ensure health care or end the war in Iraq. She was in to win.

And for the next nine months, she seemed to be succeeding. She deflected calls by the antiwar left to apologize for her 2002 vote to authorize the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, overcame Obama's initial fundraising edge and easily dispensed with every debate. Heading into fall with a lead of 33 percentage points in national polls, she was being described as "inevitable" even as aides insisted that they did not have an "inevitability strategy."

Her campaign team blended loyalists from both her White House and Senate days. At the top were the Big Five -- Penn, the pollster and strategist who helped orchestrate Bill Clinton's reelection in 1996; Grunwald, the admaker who worked on the original 1992 campaign; Solis Doyle, who has been at Hillary Clinton's side since the beginning; Wolfson, a key adviser since her first Senate campaign; and Neera Tanden, a policy aide in her White House and Senate offices. The five formed a de facto governing council without a clear chain of command, an organizational structure that chafed at several of them.

Others in the inner circle included campaign chairman Terence R. McAuliffe, former White House aides Harold Ickes and Sidney Blumenthal and others. But many veterans of her husband's team were kept at a distance. "There were a lot of us revolving around the perimeter, but I don't know if anyone really penetrated the perimeter," said one former Bill Clinton aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid alienating her. "We got spun like everybody else got spun."

Penn's strategy was to make Clinton look presidential -- "one tough woman," as the campaign put it. He looked to the model of Britain's "Iron Lady," Margaret Thatcher. But behind the scenes, a debate raged over whether to go after Obama.

"We should have taken Obama out earlier," a rueful campaign adviser said last week. "We should have taken him out when we were in a position of strength. We would have taken some flak, but we should have done it."

Bill Clinton argued the same thing, venting in private that the media were giving Obama a free pass and that the young senator was not what he was presenting himself to be. Penn, too, pushed for highlighting contrasts with Obama, as did some outside advisers who sent in e-mails and memos. "I don't understand how she let him walk off with Bill Clinton's message" of hope and change, said one former White House aide. "You can't beat him if you don't hit him, and you can't just nick him, you really have to beat him."