Clinton: Finding her voice, but too late?
Posted: Tuesday, May 20, 2008 9:13 AM by Mark Murray
Has Clinton become Al Gore? She found her voice too late? Still, the fact remains: Clinton has re-made her image and created a distinctive brand from her husband. Frankly, she has accomplished a lot, it's just come a bit too late, just like Al Gore. (It also came with a favorable post-February primary calendar.) Maybe, Hillary and Gore have a lot more in common than they realize; it takes years, not months, to grow out of Bill's shadow.
The Washington Post's Romano writes: "No one is quite sure when Clinton hit her stride, when she stopped caring about the polls, when she took her campaign to the people and gave voters a window into her soul. She said she found her voice in New Hampshire, but then all we heard was Bill's. Some say it was when senior strategist Mark Penn was forced to leave the campaign; he did not put a premium on the personal side of politics. Or it could have simply been when she was losing and so had nothing to lose by being herself.”
“‘The irony is that candidates often find their voices once the pressure is off,’ said Peter D. Hart, a Democratic pollster and strategist. They are comfortable with ‘who they are and what they are. It comes at a point in the campaign when the candidate says this is what I want to say and this is who I am. For Hillary Clinton, as you stripped away all the varnish, the core person is the most attractive of all.’”
The New York Times’ Nagourney, in a fascinating online look at individual dominoes in the Clinton collapse, pulls back the curtain on the Drudge effect: “In October, The New York Times published an article examining the relationship between Mrs. Clinton and the Drudge Report. The article related how the Drudge Report, which historically had tormented the Clintons, had begun routinely posting items boosting Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, at the prompting of an intermediary between Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and the Web site. For the Clinton campaign, things changed almost overnight after that: The Drudge Report returned to being a vehicle driving negative stories about Mrs. Clinton, bad news about the Clinton campaign got extensive attention, and Mrs. Clinton’s war room spent many hours trying to tamp down rumors and suspect information being trumpeted on the site.”
