It's Still About Bill

Imagine you are running Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. You start with some great advantages: a smart and knowledgeable candidate, twice elected by the voters of the nation's third-biggest state. She wears one of the most famous names in American politics: the most popular name among Democrats. She is a prodigious fundraiser, works hard and the very idea of her candidacy inspires large numbers of women voters.

On the other hand, your candidate is also one of the most polarizing figures in American life. She is a dreadful speaker: boring, grating, often condescending. The left wing of her own party despises her.

Your job as her campaign manager is to find a way to humanize her. But since she cannot relate to ordinary people in an easy, natural way, your humanizing options are tightly limited.

What you want to do is present her to the public in a warmly lit, tightly edited, carefully controlled setting, that simultaneously seems spontaneous and informal. A tough proposition!

But Hillary Clinton fields the best team in American politics, and they have proven themselves up to the challenge.

They have produced a series of campaign spots: the candidate speaking directly to the camera from a warm living room. But rather than broadcast these spots on the airwaves--where their carefully constructed artifice would be obvious--they posted them on the candidate's Web site.

I don't know how much longer this will remain true, but for now, the Internet is seen as somehow less commercial, less contrived, less manipulative than TV. Hillary's spots, in fact, resemble nothing so much as those famous "New Nixon" ads crafted by Roger Ailes in 1968.

Like the "New Nixon" ads, Hillary Clinton's spots work. She seems sincere, approachable, thoughtful. Effective as these ads are, however, they still fall short of their ultimate goal of making the candidate likeable. With Hillary Clinton talking, you still bump up against the hard fact of . . . Hillary Clinton.

If you want to make Hillary Clinton likeable, you have to find a way to introduce her to people--without actually letting them see very much of her. Over the past two weeks, Hillary Clinton's team has devised an ingenious solution to the problem--through the seemingly silly mechanism of a campaign song.

Campaign songs go back to the earliest days of the Republic: William Henry Harrison had one in 1840. Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" has served as an informal Republican anthem since the 1980s. Bill Clinton and Al Gore campaigned to Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop" in 1992.

Instead of choosing a campaign song, the Hillary Clinton campaign decided to hold a contest. People who logged on to the candidate's Web site could nominate their choice of song, even send in their own YouTube style videos.

The candidate then recorded an Internet spot introducing these videos. She was no less wooden than ever, but the videos were so absurd and silly, that simply by appearing alongside them, Hillary seemed lighter too, almost charming.

Last week, this approach came to its culmination in an Internet spot announcing the contest winner: Celine Dion's "You & I" (Ugh!). The spot spoofed the final episode of The Sopranos, with Bill and Hillary Clinton sharing a plate of carrots rather than onion rings. It's all very well crafted and very clever.

It is also unintentionally and unexpectedly revealing.

Even in a video taped by Hillary's employees, Bill crackles with charm while Hillary just takes up air.

More ominously for Hillary, the ad demonstrates why the questions about the Clinton marriage are never going away. Hillary must surely wish to campaign as her own person, out from under Bill's newly slenderized shadow. The trouble is that, in her own right, she is not a very appealing person. Her only way to the presidency is with Bill's help.

That help has been flowing for some time now, on screen and off, but it raises the question: Why? The thought is bound to occur to people that he's helping her to atone for his past marital sins. But few Americans are likely to be comfortable with the idea of the presidency of the United States as a kind of consolation prize for wronged wives.

To squelch that thought, the Clintons have to pretend that they enjoy something like a normal marriage. Hillary tells Bill that she ordered carrots rather than onion rings because "I'm looking out for you." Very domestic! Also very obviously phoney. Phoniness invites questions--and in Hillary Clinton's case, questions provoke only stonewalling.

Here then is the Democratic dilemma: Their best organized, best credentialed presidential candidate also happens to be the least personally attractive presidential contender since Tom Dewey. Will the Democrats really go for that? Can they possibly avoid it?