Clinton aims to win hearts, change minds

In Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s relentless mission to convert her doubters, every grasp of the microphone, every empathetic nod, every studied recitation of fact matters. In the hourlong span of a town hall meeting, an assured performance can bring a few more skeptics into the fold.

Onstage in a darkened Dartmouth College hall last month to tout her bona fides on stem cell research, Clinton slipped easily into talk-show-host mode, breezily orchestrating doctors, panelists and an audience of voters through a session aimed at promoting her as a champion of the cause. By the time it was over, Clinton’s agile turn had moved several Democrats closer to her column.

“I came in concerned about her reputation for not compromising,” said Tom Jacobs, who drove to the event in Hanover from the neighboring town of Lebanon with his wife, Robyn, a gynecologist, and their two sons. “I walked out thrilled.”

Robyn Jacobs emerged less certain. To her, Clinton had seemed stiff in her prepared remarks. “I wouldn’t be unhappy if she’s the nominee, but I haven’t done due diligence on the other candidates yet,” she said.

For Clinton, convincing doubters among Democratic primary voters is essential for her presidential hopes. Saddled with high unfavorable ratings in national polls despite her perch atop her primary rivals and her steadiness over three debates, Clinton has to change enough hearts and minds among Democratic voters to prove that she can do it on a nationwide scale in the 2008 election.

To that end, the Clinton campaign is already deep into a concerted, poll-tested effort to sway the public conversation about her in the primary states where it matters most, portraying her as both Midwestern family woman and accomplished national leader instead of a lightning rod for ceaseless political warfare. Former President Clinton will delve into his wife’s biography this week, aides said, as the couple barnstorm across Iowa for a series of high-profile Independence Day rallies.

Clinton’s carefully polished appearances on the campaign trail and her early reliance on biographical videos and networks of female supporters are all part of a larger strategy battle-tested in upstate New York during two winning Senate campaigns. The aim is to cut against the grain of the known Hillary Clinton, recasting her stereotyped reputation for polarizing harshness and political calculation, aiming at voters who are dubious about her but are not partisan enemies.

“Our experience in the Senate races was instructive,” said Clinton’s campaign spokesman, Howard Wolfson, a key advisor during the earlier races. “There was the same conventional wisdom that it would be difficult for her to change opinions. And she did it.”

Like a Rorschach test

During focus-group sessions early in Clinton’s first Senate race in June 2000, psychologists hired by Clinton’s campaign were startled by the intense anger she aroused among middle-aged and older suburban female voters. “She was like a Rorschach test,” recalled clinical psychologist and writer Shira Nayman, one of the analysts who oversaw the sessions. “These women were projecting their own internal issues on her.”

By the end of that campaign, Clinton outpaced her GOP opponent, former Rep. Rick Lazio, by 20 percentage points among female voters.

But now, unlike Clinton’s tailored targeting of New York’s upstate women, she has to mine converts among a broader, unwieldy primary mix of Democrats and even independents stretching from New Hampshire to Nevada. Tougher still is the numerical wall of her own high negatives.

Clinton has the highest unfavorable ratings of any Democratic candidate -- among surveys of potential general election voters and in polling among her own party’s likely voters. Even as she has solidified her standing in the Democratic race, her unfavorable ratings in recent national polls have teetered in the mid-40% to low-50% range among likely general election voters.

In a mid-April Gallup/USA Today poll, Clinton was rated favorable by 45% of American respondents and unfavorable by 52%. Clinton’s two main rivals, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, fared better, with 52% favorable ratings -- and with 27% unfavorable for Obama and 31% for Edwards. Clinton’s standing improved in May, when the same polling organization found her favorability rose to 53% and unfavorable dropped to 45%. But in June her numbers reversed, as 46% declared their approval and 50% found her unfavorable.

“It’s very hard to make a second first impression,” said Democratic pollster Peter Hart. “That’s where she is right now.”

Democrats are kinder to Clinton. The same April Gallup/USA Today poll showed Clinton with nearly identical favorable ratings to Obama and Edwards -- in the high 60th percentile of Democrats. But while her two rivals had unfavorable ratings in the mid-teens -- 17% for Obama and 14% for Edwards -- Clinton’s disapproval measure stood at 28%.

Hart, who works with Republican pollster Neil Newhouse for the NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey, notes that the national divide over Clinton as a candidate emerged as early as 1999, as she first moved toward running for the New York Senate seat. That year, Hart’s polling found Clinton admired by 42% of American voters and spurned by the same percentage.

“It’s not that the American public is suddenly looking at her afresh,” Hart said. “They’ve had her marked in their sights for a long time.”

Midwestern roots

If those divides hold, growing numbers of Democrats could begin to question her electability -- a prospect raised by campaign veterans working for Obama and Edwards. Obama’s team notes that Clinton’s unfavorable ratings nationally remain higher than similar numbers for both former Democratic presidential candidates John F. Kerry and Al Gore during their failed campaigns.

“There’s still a lot that voters don’t know about Hillary,” counters Mark Penn, Clinton’s top pollster and strategist. “I always ask people where she’s born and most people don’t get that right.”

Her suburban Chicago birthplace is one item among a carefully selected trove of biographical talking points that will be used to nudge fence-sitting Democrats toward a second look. Penn points to recent rises in Clinton’s poll numbers in New Hampshire and some national surveys as evidence that a reassessment is underway.

The Clinton campaign has salted bullet-points from Clinton’s biography into mailers and website promos, all aimed at recasting the New York senator’s image. It is a delicate task for her and her handlers -- humanizing her edges without blurring the campaign’s simultaneous effort to portray her as a super-capable, seasoned centrist, an inevitable front-runner.

Public service highlights

Tucked into a mass e-mail fundraising appeal sent last month by her husband was one element of her campaign’s emphasis on biography -- “the Hillary who turned down high-paying jobs out of law school to help children.”

Clinton’s public service is also a main thread of a Web video narrated by her husband that has been viewed more than half a million times since its appearance on Clinton’s campaign website in mid-May. The theme was echoed in a mid-June “urgentgram” sent by EMILY’s List President Ellen Malcolm to the women’s fundraising group’s donor base.

“Her biography has been out there, but our supporters are well-served by reminders of everything Hillary’s done for women and families,” said Ellen Moran, the group’s executive director.

Another well-worn thread is the New York senator’s reference to herself as a heartland pragmatist, “born into a middle-class family in the middle of America.” The stump-speech line is more than boilerplate -- it was carefully tested in below-the-radar phone polling conducted with Democratic voters since April.

Left-leaning activist bloggers and Democratic Party officials in Iowa and New Hampshire have reported contacts from phone poll workers probing for opinions about the Clinton-as-Midwesterner theme in recent weeks.

Wolfson and other Clinton campaign officials declined to detail their research methods. But one prominent Clinton supporter who asked not to be identified because of proximity to the campaign confirmed the use of the polls and added that voters responded well to the Midwestern, middle-class themes.

“We found that people just don’t know her real biography, and once our phone people read that paragraph about her Midwest background, people responded more,” the supporter said.

Biography will also be a strong feature in her coming wave of television ads, Clinton intimates said. A video team reporting to Clinton media advisor Mandy Grunwald filmed the candidate during a recent Iowa swing. Wolfson declined to say how the footage would be used or when it would run.

In New Hampshire, phone banks, door-to-door canvassing and visits from the candidate have provided most of the campaign’s efforts to corral Democratic doubters.

Wendy Thomas, a design consultant from Merrimack, N.H., wears a “Hillary” pin in public to spark conversation. She had backed Edwards until she was “blown away” by a Clinton speech in Hampton, N.H. “She just seemed so presidential,” Thomas said.

Tom Jacobs saw little evidence of presidential qualities in Clinton before he settled into his seat inside Alumni Hall on the Dartmouth campus in Hanover. The New York senator had seemed “unyielding and stiff,” Jacobs said -- qualities that made him feel she could not compromise in pushing for federal aid for stem cell research.

The issue is paramount for the Jacobses, whose 9-year-old son, Isaac, has Type 2 diabetes. Robyn Jacobs, who served as a physician in the U.S. Navy, came to the session less skeptical of Clinton than her husband was. But the candidate’s stiff opening about “this very important issue” left Jacobs cold.

The doctor’s attention wandered during the remainder of Clinton’s remarks. “She had that 1,000-yard stare instead of relating to her audience,” Jacobs said later. But when Clinton began taking questions from the audience, Jacobs perked up.

“Suddenly I got to see what she was like thinking on her feet,” she explained. “It was the exact opposite of her speech. Her intelligence, her knowledge of the issues, the ability to synthesize complex issues in human terms -- she sounded like she got it completely.”

By the time the lights came on, the Jacobses had been moved. Tom Jacobs, a stay-at-home dad, “was just about in her corner.”

Robyn Jacobs was less certain, still insisting on “going to listen to the other candidates” in the coming months.

“It’s too early to say she made the sale,” the doctor said. “But I like the merchandise.”

steve.braun@latimes.com