Humanising Hillary: Selling a public figure to the public again

Bill Clinton may have offered an enthusiastic and deeply personal sales pitch to the American people on Tuesday night presenting his wife as "the best darn change-maker I have ever known."

But even after proving herself an unprecedented agent of change in US politics by becoming the first woman to lead a major party into a presidential election, Hillary Clinton and her team have much more to do to accomplish the biggest change: elect her as the first woman president.

Struggling with negative ratings that are almost as high as those of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, the former US secretary of state came to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia with many Americans still needing to be convinced that she is the best person for the White House, despite her victory in the party's primary election.

Mrs Clinton has the worst favourability ratings of any major-party nominee (besides Trump) who has run for the Oval Office in modern US election history.

Trustworthiness

A CNN poll released on the first day of the convention showed that a startling 68 per cent of respondents said that they believe Mrs Clinton was not honest or trustworthy.

The poor view of the second-time candidate came just weeks after FBI director James Comey found that, while her use of a personal email as secretary of state was not so egregious as to merit a criminal prosecution, her handling of classified information was "extremely careless" and "negligent".

To counter this storm of negativity at a critical time in her campaign, Mrs Clinton’s husband offered the most intimate testimonial of the candidate, serving as her closest character witness in his address on Tuesday night.

He aimed to introduce and remind voters of his wife’s four decades of work as a lawyer, first lady to an Arkansas governor and US president, as a senator for New York and as US secretary of state and to crack the public stereotype.

“In the spring of 1971, I met a girl,” Mr Clinton (69) started in a well-received speech that mixed romantic and family reminiscences with references to her professional achievements.

Adopting a new role as political spouse and would-be First Gent, the 42nd president, in a bid to make his wife the 45th, presented her softer side in an effort to dispel the hard public image of his wife and the Republican caricature of “Crooked Hillary”, as Trump likes to label her: a law-breaking rogue politician who should be locked up over a long and checkered history of scandal.

“I married my best friend,” he said in a speech laced with the characteristic warmth and folksiness that made him one of the most skilled orators of his generation.

He rejected hard-hitting attempts by Republicans at the party convention in Cleveland last week to paint an ugly portrait of her, contrasting it with her record in public life.

“What’s the difference in what I told you and what they said?” he asked. “One is real and the other is made up . . . you just have to decide which is which, my fellow Americans.”

Mr Clinton dismissed the Republican attacks as a byproduct of flawed policies and a reaction to his wife’s over-qualifications to be the US president, seeking to create “a cartoon alternative” of Hillary Clinton and to run against that.

Personal anecdotes

The most effective parts of his address were not the regurgitated lines from his well-worn stump speech, but the personal anecdotes about his rejected marriage proposals, their private family time and her role as the Clinton family’s “designated worrier” and “the best mother in the world.”

The image of Mrs Clinton “on her hands and knees” helping her daughter pack drawers into her new university dorm will help humanise a candidate whose steely and measured, bulletproof persona, built from four decades in the public spotlight, is perceived as being aloof and cold.

"He wanted people to know the real Hillary," her campaign chairman John Podesta says by way of a postmortem of Bill's speech at a convention-related event yesterday.

“It is going to take work – she has taken a lot of incoming left, right and centre for a very long time,” Podesta adds, acknowledging the task ahead over the coming four months.

Further testimonials from Barack Obama and Joe Biden last night – and her daughter Chelsea tonight introducing Hillary for her acceptance of the nomination – continue this long sales pitch to win over many sceptical Americans.