Turning It Around

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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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But the rest of her team resisted, especially in Iowa. "They were like, 'She can't go negative, she can't go negative, she can't go negative,' " recalled another person familiar with the debate. Those in Iowa thought it would turn off voters, recalling how they walked away from Howard Dean and Richard A. Gephardt after they savaged each other in 2004. Other strategists worried that Clinton as a woman had a harder time going negative and would look "shrill or bitchy," as one put it.

"Hillary Clinton in the role of attack dog only plays into the most negative of the caricatures people have about her," said Mickey Kantor, the 1992 Clinton campaign chairman and former commerce secretary who advises the senator. "It's not fair, but life's not fair."

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As soon as she finished talking, her staff knew it was a problem, though they could not imagine just how much of one. Clinton's confusing and contradictory answer during an Oct. 30 debate in Philadelphia to a question about granting driver's licenses to illegal immigrants touched off the beginning of what Kantor calls "the trough period" of the campaign.

Advisers quickly huddled about what to do and decided that the image of all those other candidates pounding on Clinton would backfire on them the same way Republican Rick Lazio was panned for walking close to her during a debate during their Senate race in 2000. To drive that home, they cobbled together a video called "The Politics of Pile On."

But it was not a repeat of Lazio. Instead, the response seemed to fuel the impression that Clinton tries to play it both ways and the campaign's efforts to draw sympathy for her flopped.

During a speech at her alma mater, Wellesley College, Clinton talked of competing in the "all-boys club of presidential politics," and Bill Clinton a few days later compared the criticism of his wife to the Swift-boat attacks on Sen. John F. Kerry in 2004. Suddenly, the "tough woman" looked as if she were playing the gender card.

The streak of bad news continued. An Iowa college student reported that the Clinton campaign gave her a question to ask at a campaign event and Obama received strong reviews for a powerful speech at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Des Moines.

Clinton's confident performance in the next debate, in Las Vegas on Nov. 15, earned her little bounce, while Obama's own confused answer to the same immigration question went largely unnoticed. When The Washington Post published a poll Nov. 20 showing Obama up by four percentage points in Iowa, it sent a shock wave through the campaign and Penn argued furiously to colleagues that the survey was off base.

Hillary and Bill Clinton became increasingly angry about the cascading events. At an off-the-record dinner Dec. 1 with members of the Des Moines Register staff they got an earful from the Iowans about their lack of understanding of the state. The Clintons were told that their field operatives were not armed with talking points about their candidate or, for that matter, about Obama.

That led to the tense conference call the next day with the Big Five and a handful of mid-level aides. Clinton went on the offensive after the call. At a campaign stop in Cedar Rapids a few hours later, she articulated for the first time what she and her husband saw as Obama's greatest weakness -- that he is all talk and no action. Voters in Iowa, she told reporters, must choose "between someone who talks the talk and somebody who's walked the walk."

Aides, meanwhile, scrambled to produce the talking points she demanded. One file they assembled against Obama disputed his assertion that he had not had lifelong ambitions to be president. An opposition researcher found anecdotal evidence that, on the contrary, he had said he wanted to be president when he was in kindergarten. No one questioned whether that detail might come across as overkill. And in the end, it proved the butt of many jokes and shook the campaign into retreating again from a direct confrontation.