Bill Clinton to shift gears, accent positive

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign will try to shift former President Clinton back into the positive, supportive-spouse role that he played before her loss in the Iowa caucuses, Clinton advisers said Sunday. Yet some of them expressed concern that Bill Clinton's aggressive campaigning in South Carolina already may have damaged Hillary Clinton and that he may be difficult to rein in.

In the aftermath of Clinton's loss to Sen. Barack Obama on Saturday in the South Carolina primary, Clinton advisers said recalibrating Bill Clinton's role was one of two strategy moves under way. The campaign is also shifting its sights to the Florida primary, on Tuesday.

Although no delegates will be at stake in the primary there, Hillary Clinton, her advisers said, is hoping she can win in Florida to put a buffer between her defeat in South Carolina and the coast-to-coast nominating contests Feb. 5.

Highlighting Florida is a far simpler matter than managing Bill Clinton, the advisers say. After his week of all-out campaigning in South Carolina, there is fresh concern among some advisers that his visibility has dented his wife's argument that she has the best experience for the job — leaving voters with the impression that hers would be a co-presidency, one that could bring back elements of the Clinton history that many Democrats would just as soon leave behind.

"The president is going to pull back — he's got to," said Rep. Charles B. Rangel of New York, a leading supporter of Hillary Clinton. "The focus has got to get back on Hillary. For all that he cares about his wife, this has to be her election to win, and it's become too much about his role."

Bill Clinton has had such a high profile lately that, despite his popularity among Democrats, he has emerged as a reminder of the scandals and tumult that weighed on the Clinton partnership in the 1990s.

Hillary Clinton has spent months building a base of support among women, but advisers say it is unclear whether her husband's prominence has dampened her appeal as a strong female leader. Some advisers said they feared as much after Obama won 54 percent of the women's vote in South Carolina, including 22 percent of white women and 78 percent of black women.

While advisers said they were confident Bill Clinton would "tone it down," in the words of one of them, some were still uncertain if that would happen, given remarks he made Saturday comparing Obama's victory in South Carolina to the Rev. Jesse Jackson's in 1984 and 1988.

Advisers said the remark was an off-the-cuff reference, but it was debated on the Sunday news shows and in the blogosphere as a possible effort by the Clinton camp to diminish Obama's success in South Carolina as simply the result of a black candidate drawing support from a heavily black electorate.