You Don't Have to Tell a Clinton Twice

Washington:

When a 35-year-old Bill Clinton, famously the nation's youngest former governor, set out in 1982 to reclaim the job he had lost two years earlier, he began with a remarkable televised confessional.

"My daddy never had to whip me twice for the same thing," Clinton told Arkansans in a campaign commercial, acknowledging voters' anger over his having raised a hated vehicle fee and vowing to listen better if they gave him another chance as governor.

There has been no such explicit mea culpa from Hillary Rodham Clinton in the first days of her second try at the White House. But her actions have sent the same message her husband delivered more than three decades ago: lesson learned.

An almost otherworldly resilience has characterized the 40-year arc of the Clintons' political lives, a well-documented pattern of dazzling success, shattering setback and inevitable recovery. But what their admirers call grit and critics deem shamelessness can overshadow another essential element of the Clinton school: a willingness to put on the hair shirt of humility to regain power.

Just as Bill Clinton began a comeback with a down-home plea for forgiveness, Hillary Clinton now seems determined to prove - perhaps to the point of overcompensation - that she will not repeat the mistakes that plagued her 2008 campaign.

When she used a video message to enter the Democratic presidential race in early 2007, she sat alone on a couch, used some variation of "I" no fewer than 11 times and proclaimed an uninspired theme: "I'm in it to win it." This time, she started with a film featuring miniature portraits of an array of voters, appeared on-screen only after 1 minute 18 seconds, and emphasized "your vote" and "your time."

In 2008, she was at times criticized for being detached from voters, insulated in a bubble of staff and security and avoiding spontaneity. She began her 2016 campaign by riding 16 hours in a van from New York to Iowa, making unannounced stops at gas stations and fast-food restaurants, before arriving for what were billed as a series of low-key conversations with a handful of voters.

Her first campaign was characterized by a contentious relationship with the news media; she recently spoke at a banquet celebrating political journalism and brought on a new cadre of news-media-friendly aides who held olive-branch get-togethers for reporters days before Clinton declared her candidacy.

And having been outflanked on her left in the last campaign, she is showing signs of moving from the 1990s-era defensive Democratic politics on social issues that was associated with her husband to an unapologetic embrace of such modern cultural markers as same-sex marriage, single parenthood and bilingualism.

The contrasting approach, advisers say, grew out of long conversations Clinton had soon after leaving her post at the State Department. She asked what she had done wrong in 2008, how politics had changed in the years since, and solicited suggestions for the best books on the changes.

If this latest reinvention seems forced, that could be beside the point. The line between genuine regret and conveying contrition for the purposes of political rehabilitation may be blurred for the Clintons. But the impulse is unmistakable: Do what it takes to correct flaws, real or perceived.

"The three most important words in a relationship are 'I hear ya,'" said Paul Begala, a longtime Clinton adviser. "This is a relationship. So when she does a different kind of video or holds different types of events, she's saying: 'I hear ya, I get it and I'm going to show you that I've learned and will be a better candidate and president because of it.'"

It is an approach both Clintons have mastered in ways small and large, starting with that formative loss in the 1980 governor's race. Not only did Bill Clinton begin his next campaign with an apology, but Hillary Clinton also signaled that she knew what tradition-minded Arkansas expected from its first ladies: She adopted her husband's last name.

Bill Clinton delivered a disastrously long convention speech in 1988, so he went on "The Tonight Show" to make fun of himself. Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994, seeming to imperil his re-election as president, so he admitted he raised taxes too much and declared that "the era of big government is over." The pattern goes on, down through the years and up to embracing his 2012 campaign role as President Barack Obama's prized "Secretary of Explaining Stuff," four years after he seemed to damage his reputation by bitterly criticizing Obama.

But it is not only Bill Clinton who has adapted. After she spearheaded an ambitious health care overhaul as the first lady and then descended on New York, where she had never lived, to seek a Senate seat, Hillary Clinton offered modest policy proposals and set out on a "listening tour" similar to the one she is on now to defuse charges of entitlement.

When she arrived in the Senate in 2001, Clinton seemed on a mission to humble herself and to prove to Republican skeptics that she was no 1960s radical.

"We watched her go from having this heavy footprint right after her election to seeing her mellow and really become part of the old boys club," said former Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah.

When it became clear that other senators were irritated with Clinton's Secret Service retinue, Bennett said, she would let the "senators only" elevator door close on her guards and flash a grin. She even accommodated a senatorial sartorial tradition, wearing a seersucker suit with her colleagues to mark the start of summer.

She acted with similar deference to members of New York's congressional delegation, going to visit Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, the senior Republican in the state delegation, in his House office rather than making him walk to see her on the other side of the Capitol.

"Usually senators, no matter how junior, just summon House members to the Senate," Boehlert said. "But she came over with her senior staff and for the next two hours, I was completely mesmerized. That was the beginning of a very positive relationship. I find her to be as smart as any person I've ever encountered."

On policy, Clinton often found Republicans to team with, which could help her seem bipartisan before an eventual presidential run. Bennett recalled that Clinton came to him to co-sponsor his bill to criminalize burning the U.S. flag, a compromise measure aimed at pleasing veterans but stopping short of making the act a violation of the Constitution.

Clinton's Senate tenure, however, also demonstrated the risks of overcompensation: Not wanting to give Republicans fodder to portray her as soft on defense, she voted to authorize President George W. Bush to use force in Iraq and handed Obama a political cudgel to use against her in their primary.

But her 2008 setback would only prove, once again, the Clinton capacity for self-enforced humility. After putting Obama's name in nomination at the convention that year, she agreed to become his secretary of state, traveling 956,733 miles and reinventing herself as a stateswoman in the process.

Now she is seeking a reintroduction in Iowa, the state that so harshly rejected her approach last time - mingling in coffee shops and leaving little doubt that she will not tempt being lashed for making the same mistake twice.