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Posted: October 15, 2007 4:12 PM
Clinton Embraces Her Role as the Female Candidate
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New York Sen. Hillary Clinton plans to focus on women’s issues this week, and will “highlight the decisive role women can play in this election, discuss
issues important to women, and celebrate the ways that women are changing America everyday,” according to a campaign press release.

Clinton will launch her efforts Monday with an appearance on ABC’s “The View” and a speech before the Eleanor Roosevelt Legacy Committee’s Annual Fall Campaign Luncheon in New York. Tuesday, Clinton plans to outline a new policy plan for working parents in New Hampshire. Clinton is scheduled to address a women’s financial summit Wednesday in Washington, D.C. And on Thursday she is due to take part in a Federation of American Hospitals and Families USA forum and participate in a conference call with female doctors and health care workers.

The Boston Globe’s Marcella Bombardieri writes, “On the campaign trail, Clinton often earns her biggest applause when she talks about how excited she would be to be the first woman president. Women who come out to see her cite her gender as a major source of their enthusiasm.” Chief campaign strategist Mark Penn agrees, predicting that women would be the group to cement Clinton’s victory in the voting booths, noting, “it is clear from the patterns we are seeing at the town halls, through fundraising and through the polls, that women may be the driving force behind changing America in 2008.”

However, Bloomberg’s Al Hunt is more cautious about Penn’s confidence in his strategy, noting that while, “He has an unsurpassed grasp of the many parts of the American electorate; not as clear is whether he understands the whole. And that’s the way he’s directing the campaign.”

The Clinton campaign released its second radio ad in South Carolina Monday, in which she focuses on education. The voiceover in the minute-long ad says “South Carolina’s children are struggling to get a decent education, a good job, a shot at the future,” and that Clinton would make the situation better if elected president.

In Sunday’s Washington Post, Krissah Williams
also focused on South Carolina, and the ways in which the rivalry between Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama is playing out in beauty salons across the state. Twenty-nine percent of primary voters are African American women, and the campaigns are aggressively courting them at the salons where, as Williams puts it, “They are escapes from a woman’s hectic life — places where the pulls of work, husbands and kids take a back seat to a new hairstyle and a good talk.” The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll found that nationally, 54 percent of black women support Clinton, while only 35 percent support Obama.

In an opinion piece for Sunday’s New York Times, Helene Cooper analyzes the fallout from Clinton’s vote to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization. Cooper points out that Clinton supporters note that their candidate “has already shifted from primary mode, when she needs to guard against critics from the left, to general election mode, when she must guard against critics from the right. That means she is trying to shore up her national security credentials versus Republican candidates like Rudolph Giuliani and Mitt Romney, and is trying to reassure voters that she would be a tough-minded commander in chief….By supporting the bill — sponsored by Senators Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Jon Kyl of Arizona — Mrs. Clinton is also solidifying crucial support from the pro-Israel lobby.”

Movie director Rob Reiner has a video out to urge Hillary supporters to aggressively court voters. Reiner intercepts volunteers as they go door-to-door and operate phone banks, and gives them tips on how to do their jobs more assertively. At the end of the spoof, the voiceover instructs viewers to “Make noise. Make signs. Make history. Everyone has a role.”