Hillary Clinton did best when she showed a side of herself that only insiders had seen previously: smart and tough, but also funny and warm, writes Denis Stauntonin Manchester, New Hampshire.
After Hillary Clinton's stunning upset victory in New Hampshire, pundits and pollsters spent much of yesterday puzzling over how Barack Obama's double-digit lead vanished overnight. Some put it down to hidden racial prejudice that saw voters telling pollsters that they would vote for the African-American before changing their minds in the privacy of the polling booth.
Others suggested that last Saturday's debate, which saw Clinton portraying Obama as all rhetoric and no reality, had hit home with working-class voters who decided that she was best placed to make the changes that could improve their daily lives.
Ann Lewis, Clinton's senior adviser, told me on Tuesday night that she had no doubt about what turned the election around. It was the scene in a New Hampshire diner on Monday, when Clinton's voice cracked and she came close to tears as she spoke about the opportunities her country had given her.
"I just don't want to see America go backwards," Clinton said, her chin resting on one hand and her eyes welling up.
Many commentators warned that the tearful moment would raise doubts about Clinton's toughness, reinforcing doubts about the idea of a woman president, but Lewis believes it allowed voters to see Clinton as they never had before.
"A whole lot of people who had thought of Hillary Clinton as a more one-dimensional figure saw her as a real person. And that was very important. They wanted to know what kind of person are you and that connected. They could see her as somebody who is real. What came across is that she's really doing this because she cares. That was by far the most important thing because people saw that clip played over and over and said, 'I know what she means. I know how she feels. I've had moments like that'," she said.
Clinton owes her New Hampshire victory to women voters, many of whom were outraged by what they perceived as a double standard in the media's reporting of the moment in the diner. Canvassers said that women who had not planned to vote yesterday went to the polls because they identified with the dilemma Clinton faced - characterised as a cold, calculating harridan if she was tough but dismissed as weepy and over-emotional if she showed her feelings.
The turning point in Clinton's 2000 senate campaign came during a televised debate when her Republican opponent, Rick Lazio, walked across to her podium and wagged his finger in her face. Women voters said they were reminded of their husbands confronting them with the monthly credit card bill and flocked to Clinton's banner.
After Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky was exposed in 1998, his wife's popularity rating shot up as the public saw her for the first time as a woman who could suffer.
In private, Clinton is smart and tough but also funny and warm but her public image, even among many who admire her, is of a cold, calculating political machine. When I asked her last year why she had such difficulty in connecting with the public, she insisted that it was only a matter of time.
"I faced the same challenge in New York where I was 100 per cent known, and where people thought they had made up their minds one way or the other. And I saw people's minds change. I saw people being open to new information that gave them a better idea of who I was and what I was trying to do. So I'm extremely confident that that's exactly what's going to happen here," she said.
In fact, it took the near meltdown of Clinton's campaign to expose her to the public as a politician with a human side and to persuade some of her legion of detractors in the media to give her a second look.
Until last week's loss in Iowa, the Clinton campaign appeared to be modelled on Bush's 2000 campaign, which sought to establish an air of inevitability and kept interaction with journalists to a minimum in case the candidate made a mistake.
This caution was unnecessary in the case of Clinton, who is one of the most well-briefed and highly disciplined politicians around.
Panicked after Iowa, the campaign threw open the doors and discovered that Clinton fared best when she was given free rein and the more voters saw her vulnerabilities, the more they liked her.
From now on, Clinton will be much more accessible to the media and will seek out more contact with voters in the hope of bridging the empathy gap with Obama.
Despite the upset in New Hampshire, Obama remains a formidable candidate, with unusual personal and political gifts, a well-funded campaign and an extensive organisation throughout the country.
Now that Clinton is back in the game, she faces four weeks of tough campaigning between now and February 5th, when more than 20 states vote. She will seek to drive home her message that, while Obama is a good talker, she is a doer with the experience to tackle such issues as healthcare and the economy.
As she rose to thank her supporters on Tuesday night, Clinton acknowledged how transformative the last few days in New Hampshire had been for her candidacy - and perhaps for herself.
"Over the last week, I listened to you and, in the process, I found my own voice," she said.