Inside The Charm Offensive

Ben Smith at The Politico, reports on the internal battle inside camp Hillary over the sudden change in direction for her campaign. She has, as reported earlier today, launched a charm offensive to prove what a swell person she is, deemphasizing the policy issues and turning up the human side. Or something like that.

The shift began, unheralded, when 88-year-old Dorothy Rodham picked her way onto stage at a Des Moines, Iowa, high school on Dec. 7. It continued with an ad in which Rodham, Clinton’s rarely-seen mother, testified that her daughter is a “good person.” And it intensified Monday with the release of a set of videos in which old friends talk about her personality and her foibles under the rubric, “The Hillary I know.”

The shift in emphasis from head to heart is the latest stage in a running argument inside Clinton’s camp that stretches back to her 2000 campaign, one that pits the voters’ need to know their politicians against the comfort zone of a very private woman and the theories of her data-driven pollster.

Clinton’s communications director Howard Wolfson — himself a key player in the dispute over how to run the campaign — portrayed the change of gears as a result of the campaign’s success on policy issues.

“Voters know Sen. Clinton will do the best job reforming health care and getting us out of Iraq. They know she has the most experience,” he told Politico. “Now they want to know what motivates her.”

But in fact the shift is a victory for those around her — like Wolfson — who have been arguing since her 2000 campaign that she must be humanized, and it reflects an acknowledgment even among those aides who prefer to have her talking about policy that her personality is very much in play.

“You have to be responsive to the situation,” said Mark Penn, Clinton’s longtime pollster and chief strategist, who has long argued against emphasizing the personal side, believing that the specific concerns of small groups of voters are more important than emotional ties or media story lines. “It’s about opponents who attacked her and it’s about showing that those attacks are false.”

Yeah, this from Penn, who made sure the smear job by the now departed Billy Shaheen was repeated several times while supposedly saying it was a bad thing. Yeesh. That this new direction pops up when the polls head south just indicates even more internal disarray in the Clinton campaign and smells more than a little panicky on their part. I don't think there is any way the campaign can change the minds of people who see Clinton as cold and calculating – which includes a lot of hardcore Democratic voters. Sending Hillary to a sort of advanced charm school is simply not going to work. The simple fact is that if she wins the nomination, a lot of Democrats will vote for her.

But they won't ever like her.