NEWS ANALYSIS : First Lady Aims for Heart in New Health Reform Pitch : Agenda: Evoking images of distraught mothers, strapped retirees, she leads campaign-style rallies. Gone are the details and the tough talk.

She talks about the cash-strapped woman with a suspicious lump in her breast who postpones a biopsy because she lacks health insurance. She recalls the elderly man who makes his costly medicine last longer by taking half-doses.

She knows hundreds of people like that. Maybe thousands.

“I have so many stories,” Hillary Rodham Clinton says, “it’s like a movie in my head.”

As the First Lady travels across America to drum up support for health care reform, she has embarked on a new approach. She has become a riveting storyteller, citing tale after tale of Americans suffering from insufficient health care.

Gone are the strident attacks on the insurance and pharmaceutical industries and lengthy discussions about details of President Clinton’s plan. Instead, Mrs. Clinton is appealing to the conscience. The debate over health reform, she says, ought to be an exercise in national soul-searching.

“This is really a challenge to what kind of people we want to be and how we help other people,” she says.

The anecdotes vary, but they all make the same point, often in a heart-rending way that can instantly silence a crowd of thousands, even evoking a tear or two. Mrs. Clinton’s message, of course, is that the nation’s health care system is badly broken and needs an overhaul.

But with the President’s massive reform agenda, which she helped develop, facing tough going in Congress, the First Lady this week hit the campaign trail like a candidate running for office, speaking animately at gatherings that are all but indistinguishable from campaign rallies, right down to the bands, the bunting, the signs, the cheering throngs. Even the choice of stops seems designed to evoke happy memories.

On Monday, she revisited the University of Colorado in Boulder, where she had drawn 9,000 people in a solo appearance during the 1992 presidential campaign. This time she drew a crowd only half that size, but it was no less enthusiastic. Gone were the Clinton-Gore signs, replaced by a sea of placards demanding “Health Care That’s Always There” that overwhelmed the few Whitewater signs held by detractors.

Mrs. Clinton spoke Tuesday at a rally in the Washington University sports complex in St. Louis. It was here that the first presidential debate in 1992 was hosted. A jazz band of medical students, “The Hot Docs,” warmed up a crowd of 2,700. “I feel like I’m back in the campaign,” said a sleep-deprived, but smiling aide to the First Lady.

Mrs. Clinton has been speaking out for health care reform for more than a year.

But with the White House mired in questions about the Whitewater investigation, even Administration supporters are wondering about the First Lady’s ability to get her message out.

Such concern may be misplaced, judging by the enthusiastic receptions she received this week in more than a half-dozen appearances in Colorado and Missouri. Upon entering the Boettcher Concert Hall in Denver for the Colorado Health Care Summit, for instance, the audience of several thousand people rose to give Mrs. Clinton a prolonged ovation.

It was “a resounding vote of confidence in the leadership of our First Lady in health care reform,” said Orval Hansen, head of the Columbia Institute, which organized the meeting.

Throughout her two-day outing, at least in public, Mrs. Clinton appeared energized and upbeat. But some who saw her at close range or in private said she looked fatigued.

“You can see the strain in her face,” said Princeton health economist Uwe Reinhardt.

Mrs. Clinton this week also was testing a simplified stump speech in which she merely enunciated the broad principles of health reform while shunning the messy details--even when such opportunities arose during question-and-answer periods.

That is a deliberate strategy based on the Administration’s growing realization that the public, already nervous about change, thinks Clinton’s plan is just too complicated.

No doubt the First Lady will continue to fine-tune her message as Congress searches for a consensus on health care reform. What is unlikely to change is Mrs. Clinton’s starring role as the Administration’s chief saleswoman, one who is driven by the conviction that the President’s plan faces such stiff opposition largely because the Administration has not done a good enough job selling the plan’s virtues.