ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL

October 26, 1998
		With public opinion soaring over her handling of the Lewinsky matter, First Lady Hillary Clinton has been hitting the stump for her fellow Democrats. Margaret Warner reports on the first lady from the campaign trail.

Oct. 22, 1998: How has the Lewinsky affair played out in campaign ads. June 23, 1997: Mrs. Clinton must hand over Whitewater notes. Jan. 10, 1996: A panel discusses the First Lady's image problems. Jan. 15, 1996: A historical perspective on the role of the First Lady. Browse the NewsHour's Election 98 index     White House	HILLARY CLINTON: I'm proud of his leadership. I'm proud of his commitment. MARGARET WARNER: Hillary Clinton has never been more crucial to her husband's political survival than she is today. HILLARY CLINTON: And I'm proud to introduce my husband and our president, Bill Clinton.
	Hitting the campaign trail.
	MARGARET WARNER: Despite the humiliating public disclosures about the president's involvement with Monica Lewinsky, Mrs. Clinton is spending much of her time now fighting to keep him in office. Last month, she had Democratic congresswomen to the White House to talk about re-focusing the party on issues just days after independent counsel Kenneth Starr's report came out. DEL. ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON (D -Washington, D.C.): We have just come from talking to an incredibly energized first lady, whose energy has proved utterly contagious. MARGARET WARNER: Two weeks later, she took four Democratic congressmen with her to meet flood victims in Puerto Rico and lobbied them to not abandon her husband. Other Democrats who criticized the president publicly, like Virginia Congressman Jim Moran, got phone calls from the First Lady. Reporters asked then Press Secretary Mike McCurry if the president had asked his wife to defend him on Capitol Hill. MIKE McCURRY: I think that he's in no place to request that. I think that is something that she – being gracious as she is – volunteers to do – it would be consistent with who she is and what she's about. MARGARET WARNER: Then on the eve of the House vote to begin the formal impeachment process, Mrs. Clinton met with two dozen Democratic freshmen. She urged them to vote against the open-ended Republican inquiry but also told them the White House would stand by them and campaign for them whatever they did. Since then, she's maintained a public schedule of events like last week's ceremony to announce new breast cancer research funds designed to show that the White House remains focused on issues the voters care about. She's also spending a grueling four to five days a week on the road campaigning for Democrats in an election that could well affect her husband's ability to withstand a Republican drive to impeach him. HILLARY CLINTON: And I hope every American understands exactly what is at stake, because unless we send more Democrats to Congress, we cannot protect even the gains that have been made in the last five and a half years and we certainly cannot move forward together. MARGARET WARNER: Political strategists in both parties say her support is important symbolically and in practical terms. BOB SHRUM: By standing with him and by fighting to defend her marriage, I think it's send a very clear message to people that she wants to work this out in her life, and I think a lot of people's reaction is fine, that we don't to make this part of some kind of impeachment process.
	Supporting the president.
	BILL McINTURFF: What Mrs. Clinton brings is kind of a dual capacity: One, she is helping motivate the base, and number two, she doesn't have the same baggage as the president and she has a capacity to deliver a message to swing voters that is I think far more effective than the president's capacity as a political figure today. MARGARET WARNER: The president is appearing at invitation only fund-raisers for local candidates. But he's such a polarizing figure that party strategists are keeping his open to the public campaign events to a minimum. SPOKESPERSON: Hillary Rodham Clinton. MARGARET WARNER: There are no such limits on the first lady. She's very publicly campaigning and raising money for newcomers to national politics, like Wisconsin congressional candidate Tammy Baldwin and also for embattled incumbents like California Senator Barbara Boxer. She has made nearly 100 radio spots and a television ad as well for Illinois Senator Carol Moseley Braun. HILLARY CLINTON: (Ad) I hope you'll support Senator Moseley Braun. Illinois and America need her in the Senate. MARGARET WARNER: Local Democratic leaders like Wisconsin State Party Chair Terri Spring hope the First Lady can generate turnout among disillusioned Democrats TERRI SPRING: It makes a huge difference to have the First Lady here for us. It gives a boost to our candidates, to their campaigns, to our volunteers. MARGARET WARNER: On a recent Saturday in Madison, Wisconsin, Mrs. Clinton did her part with a rousing partisan speech to a crowd of party stalwarts. HILLARY CLINTON: I can tell you that the Republicans are counting on your not voting and people who care about the issues – we care about not voting. They want to keep power for the sake of power, and they want to be sure that nothing upsets their plans to be able to pursue their own agendas, which are very, very counter to what we care about – undermining public education, undermining health care availability, undermining Social Security. MARGARET WARNER: Party strategists say she's effective because she's so much more popular than she used to be. Her public approval rating began its upswing after she backed away from the high profile policy-making role she played in the administration's health care plan. But the current scandal has boosted her approval to new heights, to the mid 60's in some recent surveys. Republican pollster Bill McInturff explains. BILL McINTURFF: There is this sense that people have she is the wronged spouse; that she's been embarrassed and people feel this kind of protection towards her, and there's kind of an empathy for her that she's never really had before. She's been – in public at least – a pretty tough persona. And I think now people are feeling protective and trying to kind of be supportive of her in a way that's very different than they way they felt about her previously. MARGARET WARNER: Polls show many voters consider the Clintons' marriage as much a business partnership as a love match. And a majority also believe she must have at least suspected he was unfaithful. But, nonetheless, pollsters say, the voters empathize with her. TERRI SPRING: In our regular lives everyone knows a neighbor, a cousin, someone who has been through difficult problems like this. And situations change, and I think what this has really emphasized is that they're human beings just like the rest of us. MARGARET WARNER: Yet, Democratic consultant Bob Shrum says Hillary Clinton hasn't lost her image as a strong, independent woman. BOB SHRUM: I don't think anybody has a sense of her as victim or, you know, some helpless person. And I think it's that she does this from a position of strength, not weakness, that actually makes it much more credible to people, makes it much more real to people. MARGARET WARNER: Long-time liberal activist Carol Doeppers, who attended the Madison event, believes even some staunch feminists have come around. CAROL DOEPPERS: There were some feminists early on in particular, I believe, who felt that she should not have sort of stood by her man; that she's strong and articulate enough for her to strike out on her own. I do think, however, that has slowly changed with time. We've watched how she has dealt with what must be a very stressful period in her life. And she's simply risen above it and is looking at the larger pictures of what direction this country is going in. MARGARET WARNER: Mrs. Clinton's current effort is different in tone, however, from her fierce defense of her husband during the Gennifer Flowers controversy in the 1992 campaign. HILLARY CLINTON: You know, I'm not sitting here as some little woman standin' by man like Tammy Wynette. I'm sitting here because I love him and I respect him and I honor what he's been through and what we've been through together. MARGARET WARNER: It's also different from her response when the Lewinsky scandal first broke in January, when in an interview she blamed it on a vast, right-wing conspiracy out to get her husband. Today she isn't granting interviews at all. Reporters aren't allowed on her plane. Her airport arrivals and departures are closed to the press. Camera crews are kept away when she works a rope line to avoid the chance of an overheard comment. She isn't publicly professing the love for her husband. She doesn't mention Ken Starr. And she refers only obliquely to the impeachment controversy. HILLARY CLINTON: We need every quiet voice of reason we can get in Washington, D.C., I must remind us. MARGARET WARNER: Three University of Wisconsin students at the Madison event applauded Mrs. Clinton for separating her private life from her public role.
	Student reactions.
	RACHEL ZAIDEN, Wisconsin student: And she has her own personal issues to deal with and conflicts and the public shouldn't be involved in that. MARGARET WARNER: But they quickly picked up on the way she now refers to Mr. Clinton. MICHAEL SHMAGIN, Wisconsin student: She tended to speak about the president as "the president" and not as my husband, which I think was her way of showing that separation between a personal and the political lives that they each lead. RACHEL WIMPEE, Wisconsin student: She didn't say my dearest husband, Bill. She was referring to him as the president who is a Democrat and who has brought about change. MARGARET WARNER: Hillary Clinton's friends say – whatever her feelings about what her husband has done – and she keeps those very private – her anger at Independent Counsel Starr is still strong and helps drive her efforts to help the president. Pollsters say her determination to keep those feelings private fits particularly well with suburban swing voters, many of them women, like Chicago area secretary Michelle Steacy She voted for Mr. Clinton but is now angry about his betrayal. Yet, she brought her two daughters to an elementary school education event where Hillary Clinton appeared with Sen. Moseley Braun. HILLARY CLINTON: We have the economic progress that we have enjoyed the last five and a half years because we have people like the Senator who voted for the president's economic plan. MICHELLE STEACY: The media wanted her to come out. You know, I don't know what they expected her to do – if they expected her to come out and say something horrific against her husband. She's not going to do that. She's maintained her dignity. MARGARET WARNER: Do you see any contradiction between Hillary Clinton who in 1992 said I'm not some Tammy Wynette standing by her man and what she's doing today? MICHELLE STEACY: I don't think so. I think she's doing her job. And, you know, part of her job – her job is being First Lady of the United States. I wouldn't want her to stand up and say, oh, he's just wonderful and I forgive him for everything and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, because you know that's not honest. She needs to support the country and all the issues that they've campaigned so hard for all along the way, and I think she's done that. MARGARET WARNER: Yet, the first lady's campaigning didn't eliminate Steacy's doubts about Moseley Braun. MICHELLE STEACY: I can't say that it really affected me. I'm still undecided. MARGARET WARNER: The candidates Hillary Clinton is campaigning for say she doesn't raise the impeachment issue now, but if the past few weeks are any guide, the winners may well be hearing from her later. Congressman Moran wasn't surprised to hear from Mrs. Clinton last month after he said the only way to stop the hemorrhaging among Democrats might be for the president to resign. At first she heard him out.
	REP. JAMES MORAN, (D -VA): I – told her how disappointed I was and how her husband had let down the people who really believed in him most strongly, that there had been eight months of deception. And not only did that affect our personal loyalty to him and to his legislative agenda, but it really undermined our own credibility. I said that if she had been my sister, given how she had been humiliated – then I would have just taken him out and punched him in the nose – something worse than that. But her response was just remarkable. She said some very complimentary things -- about you emotional Irish Catholic type guys. And she mused a bit on what it might have been like had she had a big brother like that. But then she segued into a defense of her husband and said that, "He's been my best friend for more than 20 years." And she believes in him. She believes in what he's trying to do as president. She feels that he is making a difference. She did not feel that these were impeachable offenses, as serious as they were, that this should not derail the presidency that was as important as this was to our country. MARGARET WARNER: After her call, Moran stopped criticizing the president in public, but he still voted for the Republicans' impeachment inquiry. Moran says not all of his colleagues would welcome a call from Mrs. Clinton lobbying for her husband. Still, he says, she's a formidable ally for the president. REP. MORAN: The fact that she has stuck with him, I think has -- it may prove to have saved his presidency. It certainly has kept it alive and revived him in many ways, and I mean – he owes her big time – there's no question about that.