When Hillary Clinton sweeps onto the stage Saturday for the first major rally of her campaign, she will set aside her family’s presidential legacy and concentrate on a chapter of her life she rarely speaks about: the Depression-era story of her mother, Dorothy Rodham.
As she seeks to present herself as a candidate who will fight for the middle class, aides say Clinton will turn to lessons learned from her mother, who was abandoned by her parents as a child and was forced to bring herself up. She will argue that her Rodham roots have made her the person she is today, a subtle concession the power of the Clinton legacy alone will not carry her into the White House.
“She is a well-known figure but when you’re asking the American people to support you as president, even if it is for the second time, there is no skipping of steps,” said Jennifer Palmieri, the campaign’s communications director. “If you want to understand Hillary Clinton, and what has motivated her career of fighting for kids and families, her mother is a big part of the story.”
The rally on Saturday at Roosevelt Island in New York, which will be awash in symbolism of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, offers a moment for Clinton to reset her candidacy. She intends to offer a more expansive rationale for why she believes she should be president, an argument that some Democrats believe she and her campaign have failed to clearly articulate.
That was among the conversations at a dinner Clinton attended early last week at the home of Sen. Dianne Feinstein in Washington, where several other Democratic women senators gathered for an intimate discussion about her candidacy.
They urged Clinton to present herself as more of a fighter, participants said, who is passionate about improving the plight of everyday Americans.
Two months after she launched her candidacy, Clinton remains in command of the Democratic nominating fight. Yet she has struggled to rally excitement among some liberals in her party.
It’s an open question whether there will be enough substance to satisfy critics who have said Clinton has been short on specifics, particularly on trade and other liberal priorities.
While the calls for Sen. Elizabeth Warren to enter the race have cooled, the long lines of Democrats waiting to see Sen. Bernie Sanders on the campaign trail underscore that she cannot take anything for granted.
The opening chapter of her second presidential bid has been far rockier than she and her advisers expected, more than a dozen Democrats close to the campaign told CNN this week. She enters the summer facing far more questions about her long-term prospects than when she first jumped into the race.
A CNN/ORC poll last week found that 57% of Americans thought Clinton was not honest and trustworthy, which was up from 49% in March. And less than half of people feel she cares about people like them, 47%, which is down from 53% last July.
Campaign aides familiar with the speech on Saturday say Clinton’s chief goal will be to outline her rationale for running, providing voters with a reason to elect her and responding to those who have said her run is based on nothing more than inevitability.
The entire day will focus on Clinton, aides said. Although both Bill and Chelsea Clinton will attend — the first time either will appear at a campaign event — they will not be the focus and will likely not speak.
The speech will be centered around the story of Rodham, aides said, far more than the legacy of Clinton.
“The example she learned from her mother’s story is critical to knowing what motivated Hillary Clinton to first get involved in public service,” Palmieri said on Thursday. “And why people can count on her to fight for them and their families now.”
Clinton’s speech will not be a detailed policy rollout. Instead, the former secretary of state will preview a list of critical policy issues, aides said, but will wait until later in the summer to outline the details of each policy proposal.
Aides said that Clinton’s speech will be a mix of her biography and vision, with the former first lady arguing that the guiding principle in her campaign will be how America’s families are doing, not those at the top. Clinton will repeatedly use the phrase “it is your time,” aides said, to hammer home that Americans who help bring the country back from recession now deserve to enjoy the benefits.
Campaign aides are producing a biographical video documenting different points in Clinton’s career, including her work as a lawyer for the Children’s Defense Fund. The Clinton campaign used Hillary Clinton’s Twitter account to tease the video that is expected to be released after Saturday’s rally.
And Clinton’s speech, of course, will not be without partisan politics. Aides said she will argue Republicans are a repeat of their predecessors and will ensure voters that she will offer a clear choice in 2016.
While the first two months of her candidacy have been intentionally downsized — small roundtable conversations over big rallies — Clinton has spent considerable time appearing before small groups of donors.
Clinton has personally headlined 37 fundraisers in 13 states. It is likely, given the attendance of each event, that more than $16 million has been raised from Clinton-headlined fundraisers. Her top aides and operatives have headlined dozens more.
Clinton aides have said they hope to raise $100 million by the end of 2015.
In the weeks after her campaign kickoff, CNN has learned, Clinton will headline four more fundraisers in California, three in Massachusetts and one in Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York and New Hampshire. Before June 30, the final day of the first fundraising deadline, Clinton will have personally headlined over 50 fundraisers.
“She has to raise a lot of money,” said former ambassador Edward Romero, who hosted a Clinton fundraiser in New Mexico earlier this month. “Every candidate has that pressure.”