'Bill Clinton First Lady's Man'

DAVENPORT, Iowa, Jan. 28 -- Bill Clinton didn't join his wife on her debut trip to Iowa. But his presence loomed.

"Bill Clinton First Lady's Man," read a sign in the audience in Des Moines on Saturday afternoon.

"You know, Bill didn't compete in the 1992 Iowa caucuses because Tom Harkin was running for president," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton told supporters during a house party in Cedar Rapids on Saturday night. "This is the only political experience I will ever have that he had never had."

In a town hall meeting in Davenport on Sunday, she referred to him both as "Bill" and as "this guy from Arkansas." The crowd loved both.

How to exploit her husband's popularity among Democrats without raising the specter of his affair with a White House intern is a dilemma for Clinton, who has said she is running as her own person but did not hesitate, in her first two days on the Iowa campaign trail, to take joint credit for the successes of the Clinton administration.

But when she took a question about tyrants around the world, she gave a pointed reply toward her husband's gender, if not him, specifically.

"What in my background equips me to deal with evil and bad men?" she said wryly, in response to a voter's question about how she would handle menacing international dictators. The audience laughed. Clinton smiled and gave a knowing look.