WP,pg1: Clinton Makeover Accents Her Midwestern Roots (and her Mom)

[DeepModem Mom]

Clinton Makeover Accents Her Midwestern Roots
By Anne E. Kornblut and Perry Bacon Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, June 3, 2007; Page A01

For years, when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton talked about her family, it was usually her famous husband or their well-known daughter. But Clinton has recently been discussing a more elusive figure in her life: her mother.

"She didn't have a very easy time of it as a young child," Clinton (D-N.Y.) said during an address to Democratic Party activists in California, describing the journey Dorothy Howell Rodham made in search of a home after her teenage parents divorced in 1920 and sent her away.

Drawing attention to her low-profile mother -- who is in her late 80s and lives with the Clintons on Whitehaven Street in Washington -- is one of several ways Clinton is seeking to give voters a new perspective on her biography. Armed with extensive polling data and an image road map tested in Upstate New York, the Clinton campaign has embarked on an ambitious effort to present the candidate the way they want her to be seen: as a pragmatic Midwesterner with a compelling life story of her own, rather than just the famous, and sometimes polarizing, senator and former first lady most of the country already knows she is....

***

"There are a lot things about Hillary you may not know that occurred in her life before she ever became a United States senator," former president Bill Clinton intones in a biographical video on his wife's campaign Web site. The segment goes on to show a montage of early photographs as Clinton describes his wife working for poor defendants while studying at Yale Law School, turning down lucrative job offers to work at the Children's Defense Fund and chairing the national board of the Legal Services Corporation when she was 29 years old.

"When I saw that video on the Web site, I thought, 'This is "The Man from Hope" all over again,' " Democratic consultant Peter Fenn said.

"The Man from Hope," of course, was the moniker Bill Clinton assumed in 1992 and the title of his biographical film at the Democratic convention that year, when he relaunched himself as an up-by-the-bootstraps populist from Hope, Ark., rather than the silver-tongued governor his rivals were portraying....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/02/AR2007060201257.html?hpid=topnews