Everyone knows Hillary Clinton has to overcome many obstacles if she is to win the White House in 2008. There is her image as cool, distant and elitist, the persistent doubts about having a woman as president, her Senate vote for the Iraq war and, for some voters, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.
Clinton set out on the long presidential campaign trail at the weekend, holding her first rally in Des Moines, Iowa. Although the election is still 23 months away, it was the first of the full-blown rallies, complete with a 12 piece jazz band, hundreds of placards reading ”Iowa Welcomes Hillary For President” and more than 1 000 people, nearly all Democrats or undecided, crammed into the East high school gymnasium.
A few of her entourage had flown in from New York in high heels, appropriate for the metropolis but awkward in the icy wastes of Iowa. First campaign lesson: different shoes needed for hopping from state to state.
Clinton needs to do well in Iowa, traditionally a key state. She is ahead of Barack Obama, the party’s rising star, in national polls, 41% to Obama’s 17% and the 11% of John Edwards.
But in Iowa she lagged as far behind as fourth place, behind Obama, Edwards and the former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack.
At the rally, Clinton conceded there were problems in being a woman candidate and that more would be written about her hair and clothes than the other candidates. ”I think you’ve got to move beyond that,” she said. ”I am going to be asking people to vote for me based on my entire life experience. The fact that I’m a woman, the fact that I’m a mom, is part of who I am.”
She presented herself as a mid-westerner, middle-class, brought up in a household committed to traditional American values. She lacks the charisma of her husband but she is sound and serious, and is building a formidable, well-funded campaign team, one capable of surviving the trail slog.
Watch the rally on television and it looks like a love fest, the waving campaign placards, and a chant. But listen to the audience, predominantly women, before and after, and the doubts about Clinton are there. Her husband’s sexual encounter with Monica Lewinsky still resonates. Women in the audience animatedly discussed it before the rally began, insisting it was not a factor in how they would vote, but citing friends who disliked her because she had remained loyal to him.
The big issue is the Iraq war. Responding to the strong feelings of Democrat activists, Clinton on Sunday shifted towards a tougher position, calling for the first time for a deadline for the withdrawal of US troops. She told a town hall meeting in Iowa it would be ”the height of irresponsibility” to pass the war along to the next president. Bush leaves office in January 2009.
She has to persuade Democrats such as Angela Thompson, a health care worker who had gone with her mother and sister. Thompson was enthusiastic about the idea of a woman president, but said being a woman candidate was not enough: the candidate had to have the right personality and politics. She described herself as ”not 100% committed” to Clinton. She wanted to hear not only her but Obama and Edwards before making up her mind.
Thompson’s assessment was that Clinton had ”come across just fine” on most issues and her views on education were ”fabulous”, but she was ”bothered” that she had shirked the war question. ”What is going on in Iraq is really important and I am interested to know what she is going to do about it. The war will make or break the candidates,” Thompson said.
Iowa matters. Its caucus in January next year is traditionally the first formal test of party opinion in the fight for the nomination. A good showing can provide the momentum for mavericks and leave a front-runner fatally wounded.
As she flew into Iowa, the man who might yet top her was slumped asleep in economy class on a flight from Washington to Chicago, travelling home after a week in the Senate. By Obama’s side was a biography of a Democrat with the same ability to rouse crowds with passionate speeches, Robert Kennedy.
What was remarkable was not just that he was travelling economy — but that the man with a chance of becoming US president had no entourage with him. No aides, no press secretaries: just another Joe going home. It was a powerful image, one Clinton needs to worry about. – Guardian Unlimited Â