Hillary's Dilemma

[Ron Burgundy]

U.S. News & World Report - ROCHESTER, N.Y.-If Hillary Rodham Clinton wins the White House, it will be thanks to voters like Barbara Paris. A conservative Democrat who has nonetheless supported Republicans as far back as Ronald Reagan, Paris hated Clinton when she first ran for U.S. Senate from New York in 2000. The 58-year-old tax adviser considered the first lady to be a carpetbagger, and, worse, a political opportunist for sticking with her husband after the Monica Lewinsky affair. So she supported Clinton's Republican opponent.


Last week, though, Paris was one of the New Yorkers who sent Clinton back to Washington with 67 percent of the vote. "It was a long shot, but she's proven herself," Paris said while attending a Clinton speech here just before Election Day. "She's spent lots of time in Rochester." Paris has become such a fan that she begged her daughter to let her take her granddaughter out of school to see Clinton, whom Paris now calls a role model.


Across the Empire State, voter after voter tells a similar story, of deep skepticism toward the former first lady giving way to admiration during her first term. They cite her forays to all corners of the state and her focus on local issues, including staving off closure of the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station and securing $20 billion after 9/11. But with Clinton now having to decide whether to seek the White House in '08, she faces a familiar dilemma: Can she overcome the nation's entrenched views of her-and her husband-in a presidential campaign? For the presumed Democratic front-runner, the answer is unclear. A Gallup Poll this year found that 17 percent of Americans would definitely back her and that 49 percent would definitely not, but that less than 1 percent had no opinion.


Converts. To be sure, Clinton has converted plenty of skeptics in the Senate. "Older members had this 'We're going to put her in her place' attitude," says Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (news, bio, voting record) of South Carolina. "But she has the power to change minds. Those who stereotype her don't know what they're talking about."


So far, though, Clinton has changed minds by countering that stereotype in person, with audiences much smaller than the national electorate. Having difficulty winning support from women in New York in 2000, she organized informal meetings with groups of a few dozen women, then let the positive reviews spread by word of mouth. Replicating that operation even in the four early primary states-Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and South Carolina-would be daunting. And unlike her husband, former President Bill Clinton, Senator Clinton has had trouble winning converts through TV ads and interviews.


Of course, Clinton also has major assets. "She's got a huge fundraising base, a campaign team of die-hard Hillary lovers, and has rock-star status," says a Democratic strategist. "Plus, she's very smart and has been down this [presidential] track a few times." Clinton's money machine, which raked in $38 million for last week's election, has other candidates asking donors to consider them as backups, should Clinton decide not to run.


And Clinton has strong support in the polls. A CNN poll released this month found that 28 percent of Democrats chose her as their favorite candidate, 11 points ahead of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. The problem is how many people won't vote for her: A June 2006 Harris Interactive poll found that 47 percent said they would definitely not vote for Clinton-compared with 34 percent who said the same about John McCain. Those numbers will have centrist Democrats vying for the '08 nomination arguing that, to keep the momentum of last week's Democratic gains, the party should avoid such a polarizing figure. There's already been enough of a "Hillary can't win" drumbeat in Democratic circles to provoke two of her closest advisers, James Carville and Mark Penn, to run a Washington Post op-ed last summer noting that Clinton's unfavorables were in line with those of John Kerry and Al Gore. "The difference with Hillary," they wrote, "is the intensity of her support."


The opposition stems from her White House years. "When you think of the eight Clinton years, there were some very nasty attacks," says Ann Lewis, the spokeswoman for Clinton's sprawling organizational network, popularly known as Hillaryland. "People in the Senate who didn't know her were surprised that she is a nice person with a sense of humor."


Many Americans still associate her with the failed 1993 plan to nationalize healthcare, but Clinton has built a Senate career around bringing her celebrity to bear on legislation that otherwise has little chance of passage, which often involves partnering with Republicans. She worked with Senator Graham to extend government health insurance to members of the National Guard and Reserves, which the Pentagon had opposed. On the campaign trail this year, she rarely mentioned other Senate Democrats but often invoked Graham's name, along with those of other Republicans she has teamed with, like Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. Clinton's recent cosponsorship of a flag-burning ban was interpreted by some as a further attempt to moderate her image. But advisers insist that Clinton, raised in a Republican home in suburban Illinois and having spent 12 years as first lady of Arkansas, has never fit her liberal caricature.


Ironically, a suspicion that she's not liberal enough could cause her trouble in the '08 primaries. Unlike possible presidential contenders Kerry and John Edwards, Clinton has not renounced her Iraq vote. "The activist wing believes the Democratic Party has become capitulationist," says a top party strategist. "The question is whether Hillary is doing enough to pacify them or whether she becomes the symbol of capitulation." If she does, a Democratic star like Obama or a lesser light could use the Internet to close Hillary's fundraising advantage. At a Rochester rally for antiwar congressional candidate Eric Massa before Election Day, Tara Anacker, 35, tells why she won't back Clinton for president: "She has moved far to the right on the war."


Clinton has condemned Bush's conduct of the war and his refusal to talk directly to North Korea, making the case for a new internationalism. Rather than argue that Democrats have the solution, however, Clinton said last month that the key was "risking a new bipartisanship." Her boosters say last week's Democratic congressional takeover, due largely to the election of party moderates, shows the popular will for that approach. "We can't afford to be the antiwar party in the war on terrorism," says Bruce Reed, president of the Democratic Leadership Council, which has strong ties to Clinton. "We need to make the case on what we would do differently." To do that in the general election, Clinton may first have to convert her most skeptical audience yet-her own party.