Hillary Clinton gets serious

A week before the Iowa caucuses, Clinton's "Big Problems, Real Solutions" tour reminds voters the world is dangerous -- a message tragically reinforced by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

By Mike Madden

Read more: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Politics, News, Barack Obama, 2008 election, Mike Madden

REUTERS/John Gress

Hillary Clinton speaks during a campaign stop in Pella, Iowa, on Dec. 26.

Dec. 28, 2007 | MOUNT PLEASANT, Iowa -- Hillary Clinton arrived here the day after Christmas with a simple message for Iowa caucus-goers: The fun is over, and now it's time to get serious. The world is a scary place; the economy feels as though it's ready to collapse, healthcare bills keep going up and up, the country is mired in wars, and the government just doesn't seem to work right. And that's only the trouble we knew about Wednesday -- as Benazir Bhutto's assassination on Thursday made starkly clear, unexpected crises cross the president's desk every day.

"On Jan. 20, 2009, someone will raise his or her hand to take the oath of office in front of our Capitol," Clinton said as she launched her final bus tour of Iowa. "And then that person will go to the Oval Office. And on the desk in the Oval Office will be a stack of problems."

That's what Clinton's campaign is about now, right down to the clunky official name of the tour, "Big Problems, Real Solutions -- Time to Pick a President." Forget the polls, and the horse race. Forget the flashier rhetoric from the other guys. Forget the tactical differences among the Democratic candidates about how they'd accomplish the policy goals most of them share. Clinton is confronting voters with a much starker question -- which candidate can walk into the White House and get right to work fixing the mess we're in?

Sixteen years later, Bill and Hillary Clinton are reviving the "buy one, get one free" theme of the 1992 election, making their time in the White House into a co-presidency, so the other leading Democrats look like rookies in comparison. Even the failed effort to reform healthcare that Clinton led has become a talking point. "When I went to the White House with Bill, we tackled some very tough problems," she said Wednesday. "One was trying to get healthcare for every single American. I like to say that problem tackled me back."

That line notwithstanding, most of the laughs her consultants once hoped would warm her public image are gone. (For that matter, so is most of her earlier talk about making history as the first woman president.) Everything's weightier now, and the atmosphere at Clinton's events seems intense even by the standards of the last week of a campaign. Her newest ad, which hit the air as her bus tour began, mixes troubling images with a stirring but somber instrumental soundtrack and no narration. It's called "Stakes," and -- no surprise -- she thinks they're high.

"You have an awesome responsibility," she tells Iowa Democrats. "The entire country and even the world will be watching." She'll broadcast a two-minute taped message statewide next Wednesday, the night before the caucuses, that hits the same theme. At rallies, where she constantly draws crowds of 200 or more, she leads voters through a recitation of the dangers facing the country, then ticks through her experience, from Little Rock to Washington, solving the same kinds of problems. "We need someone on day one and every day after, to be prepared for all that we know awaits and to be prepared for whatever comes our way," she said here. "We've had seven years of a president who I believe has turned our country backwards." At this point in the campaign, even the Mount Pleasant high school marching band stayed on message -- when they kept the crowd entertained before the rally, they opened with "The Final Countdown."

If voters don't get the point from one Clinton, maybe they can get it from her husband. Before breaking off to cover more ground by holding his own rallies, Bill Clinton introduced Hillary in Mount Pleasant Wednesday. "Being president under the best of circumstances is a challenging job," he said. "All the easy decisions get made by somebody else -- that's what you have help for." (Still a big draw, the former president had to leave the stage once Hillary started speaking -- the people closest to him were paying more attention to getting autographs than to the candidate's stump speech.) Or from their daughter, Chelsea, who's also on the trail this week. ("Are you going to caucus for my mom?" Chelsea asked anyone who approached her after rallies.) Or from longtime family friends and political allies, who are touring Iowa this week in clusters the campaign calls "Hill's Angels" to make the same pitch.

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