POLITICS

Hillary Clinton Will Evoke Roosevelt and Try to Ease Fears on Trust in New York Speech

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Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered a speech on voting rights last week in Houston.Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times
Hillary Rodham Clinton, at a major outdoor rally planned for Saturday, will directly address concerns that have emerged in the early weeks of her candidacy, telling voters they can trust her to fight for the middle class and stressing that she cares about their problems, several people briefed on her plans say.
The speech, at an event shaping up to be the most ambitious public gathering undertaken by the campaign since Mrs. Clinton began her quest for the White House in April, will be shaped by symbolism as she seeks to make the case for why she should be president.
It will be held in New York City on an island named for Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the shadow of diverse middle-class neighborhoods, as Mrs. Clinton tries to evoke the legacy of the New Deal and lay out her vision for a federal government substantially engaged in lifting American families that feel economically insecure and increasingly left behind.
And she will channel her personal hero, Eleanor Roosevelt, in emphasizing women’s and civil rights and her assertion that the Republican Party is out of touch with an increasingly diverse electorate. Her plans were described by people briefed on the speech who were not authorized to discuss it for attribution before the campaign officially released details.

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Mrs. Clinton has yet to put forth a clear rationale for her candidacy since announcing in a brief online video that she would run for the Democratic nomination.
“She has to articulate an authentic, compelling rationale for her candidacy, a cause and vision that is larger than her own ambitions,” said David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Obama.
But the large outdoor event, complete with a marching band and a space for an overflow crowd to watch the speech on giant monitors, must also counteract some signs of decline in Mrs. Clinton’s personal appeal, with polls showing that a growing number of Americans do not trust her or think she understands their lives.
A CNN poll released June 2 showed that 57 percent of Americans thought that Mrs. Clinton was not honest and trustworthy, up from 49 percent in March, and that 47 percent of voters thought that Mrs. Clinton “cares about people like you,” down from 53 percent last July. Publicly, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign aides have shrugged off such polls as evidence that voters distrust Washington and politics in general. Privately, they are strategizing about how to reframe the conversation.
Rather than defend attacks on Mrs. Clinton’s trustworthiness regarding her use of a private email address at the State Department while she was secretary of state or foreign donations to her family’s philanthropy, the campaign will seek to turn the trust issue on its head. “But who do you trust more to fight for you when they get in the Oval Office?” the Democratic strategist, Steve Elmendorf, said, repeating a line often used by Mrs. Clinton’s senior advisers.
The campaign will try to turn another one of Mrs. Clinton’s challenges, her tendency to incite strong and divisive reactions from people, to her advantage, emphasizing her perceived toughness. Her campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, often refers to Mrs. Clinton as a “tenacious fighter,” a theme that will echo throughout the speech and her campaign.
Mrs. Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, and daughter, Chelsea, will appear with her at the rally, the first time the family will make a joint campaign appearance since Mrs. Clinton became a candidate.
Saturday’s event will signal the end of the first phase of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, which mainly featured the former first lady holding round-table discussions with small groups of voters. Mrs. Clinton has said that she has learned a lot from those meetings, but they could come across as scripted and lacking in energy, especially as one rival, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, has already drawn large crowds. In the coming weeks, Mrs. Clinton will present more specific policies, speak to larger audiences and appear at town hall gatherings.
The staging of Saturday’s event has been meticulous. Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to Mrs. Clinton and vice chairwoman of the campaign, and Greg Hale, an Arkansas-based consultant who has handled events for the Clintons for years, have taken a lead on planning. Jim Margolis, the news media consultant behind both of Mr. Obama’s inaugurations, and Mandy Grunwald, the longtime Clinton adviser who helped choreograph the appearance of Mr. Clinton and his family at the 1992 Democratic National Convention in New York, have also been involved.
For weeks, aides weighed various locations. Rather than choosing Iowa or New Hampshire, they settled on New York, where Mrs. Clinton served as a senator and where a friendly crowd of supporters was simple enough to summon.
Looking at a map of New York, aides in the campaign’s Downtown Brooklyn headquarters settled on Roosevelt Island, the 2-mile-by-800-foot strip of land on the East River between Manhattan and Queens. The event is open to the public, and the campaign has received several thousand requests to attend, though the forecast of scattered thunderstorms could affect turnout.
The campaign angered some island residents after a community day for children had to be rescheduled. Others have grumbled that the national news media has, in terms of accessibility, compared Roosevelt Island to the nearby jail complex of Rikers Island. (Roosevelt Island is reachable via public transportation as well as a tram that has in the past stalled, leaving passengers suspended over the murky brown waters of the East River.)
But what the location lacks in logistical ease it makes up for in imagery.
Mrs. Clinton will deliver the speech at Four Freedoms Park, a memorial with a grassy tree-lined mall, named after the four tenets that Roosevelt presented in his 1941 State of the Union address: freedom of speech and worship, and freedom from want and fear.
She has defined her campaign as taking on “four fights,” including strengthening the economy, helping families and communities, getting unaccountable money out of politics and protecting the country from foreign threats.
She is expected to evoke Roosevelt’s policies to reiterate her belief that government is needed to help lift wages, create jobs, make college and health care more affordable, and rebuild antiquated infrastructure.
“It’s important for the campaign to demonstrate the sense of energy and excitement,” the Democratic pollster Geoff Garin said. But what is more important, he added, “is laying out an agenda that makes people feel thatHillary Clinton will be a fighter for them.”
Mrs. Clinton’s message will reflect the Democratic Party’s leftward shift and stand in sharp contrast to the new covenant of personal responsibility that Mr. Clinton preached when he announced his candidacy in 1991 at the Old Statehouse in Little Rock, Ark.
“Government’s responsibility is to create more opportunity,” Mr. Clinton said in that speech. “The people’s responsibility is to make the most of it.”
Dan Schwerin, a policy adviser to Mrs. Clinton, is among the aides who have helped her shape her speech. Mrs. Clinton has already tested many of the main themes, including a populist critique of Wall Street excesses. She has called for equal pay for women, an overhaul of the criminal justice system and voting rights policies that would make the process easier for young people and minorities.
Framing all of this with the pomp and celebration of an official announcement speech can serve not just as an introduction for a candidate (or in Mrs. Clinton’s case, a reintroduction), but also as a crucial chance to counteract negative opinions more than a year before a general election.
In 2000, Vice President Al Gore’s campaign tried to reposition his wooden and cerebral demeanor as an advantage against the more affable George W. Bush.
“At the end of the day, with critical decisions impacting your family, do you want someone you know is smart or not?” was how Chris Lehane, an adviser to Mr. Gore, summed up the strategy. Or, in shorthand: “You date Bush and marry Gore.”
With Chelsea nearby, Mrs. Clinton will remind voters about her years as a working mother, her experience working for the Children’s Defense Fund in the 1970s and her record of as an advocate for women and children as a first lady, senator and secretary of state. The campaign also has a biographical video in the works.
“You can become a caricature of how the press has determined who you are,” said Thomas R. Nides, a friend and adviser who worked for Mrs. Clinton at the State Department. “But the good news about Hillary Clinton is that she has a long history of who she is and what she stands for.”