Quotes of the Day

The day after Hillary Clinton's dramatic victory in New Hampshire, TIME's Karen Tumulty spoke to the presidential candidate by phone about the lessons imparted by the campaign so far. Excerpts:

TIME: Senator Clinton, having listened to you a lot over these last couple of weeks I really was struck by the different tone and different message of your speech last night, from the very first one. I was wondering what is the message that you think you got from voters in Iowa and New Hampshire? What was it that they weren't hearing from you before and you think they are hearing from you now?
CLINTON: Well, I was talking specifically about New Hampshire, of course, because in that very concentrated four-day period I had a chance to speak to I don't know how many thousands of voters and answer hundreds of questions. And I felt as the hours were going by that I was able to let people know why I do what I do. That sounds, perhaps, overly simplistic. I have always been committed to public service, long before I was ever in public office. It is just who I am. It is what I care about. I care deeply about this country and I want to make sure it does what it can to help people and that is what I have been determined to do as well. But I think it is fair that a lot of people may not have known what motivated me or what I get up every day thinking about and as we had this intense period in New Hampshire, it just put everything in such sharp focus that I believed I was able better to break through and connect with people on a very personal level.

Do you think that it was that you weren't sort of drawing clearly enough the connection and the link between your resume and your record and what that means for them?
I think it was a little of that, Karen, but I think it was also that it is important in today's very concentrated media environment where most people will obviously never meet you personally, but get to know you through that lens — to do more to convey what I believe I have always conveyed personally, in my relationships with people and the work that I have done.
I started out way behind, and pretty much was written off many times in my New York Senate race. But I had the time and the opportunity to get to meet enough people one-on-one, that I really felt that connection. It sounds, perhaps, obvious to say, but in a presidential campaign where you are trying to speak to the whole country as well as to an individual state, more of what I have to do has to be through all of you. I have always been somebody who was other-directed and pretty much just decided that people would judge me by what I did.
I have never thought that what I said was anywhere near as important as what I did. I think there is a distinct difference between talk and action and maybe it is because I have been in these trenches for a long time and the people I value are the doers. When I got to the Senate I said I was a workhorse, not a showhorse, and set out to prove it. So what I have been realizing in the last days and weeks is that I have got to do some of this work myself. Lots of people with whom I have worked or been friends for a lifetime flooded into Iowa and New Hampshire to talk about me, and I am not really good about talking about me — so that was kind of a welcome addition. But I have to carry some of that responsibly myself and the people of New Hampshire really freed me up to do that.

You said earlier today that you really felt the debate was a turning point. Your performance in the debate had gotten a lot of commentary in the media. It seems like the voters saw it a lot differently than the pundits did. I certainly know, talking to a lot of voters in New Hampshire as well. I talked to one woman who said she was planning to vote for Obama until she saw that debate and what she was most struck by was that you stood your ground.
Yeah, you know, Karen, look, you have followed me a long time and I have known you over the years, and I am sure you understand I sometimes think that the media doesn't really follow what people are thinking and doing to the extent what I would like... on two levels. Number one: politics for me is a means to an end. It is not an end in itself. And obviously, if you are on the campaign trail and you are covering the candidates 24-7, it kind of becomes an end in itself. And I am always reminding me and my staff that it isn't and that we've got to keep focused and our eyes on what matters — and that is whether someone is going to be better off if we go through all of this at the end of it all.
And the other is that it just has been my experience, going back many, many years, that voters hear things and see things differently. And that debate, I knew as soon as it was over and I was walking off the stage, one of the cameraman grabbed my hand and said, "That was great." And then from that moment on, everywhere I went people were telling me that they really got what I was doing and they were glad I wasn't the only one that was on the hot spot for a change.
I realized that if you see it with your own eyes, instead of having it interpreted for you — and obviously that debate in New Hampshire was a big deal among the voters there — it does have a reality of its own. Now, for me, I have got to really do the best I can to continue doing what I am most comfortable and committed to doing, which is that on-on-one message of advocacy and caring about the people that I want to represent. Because that is why I do it. If that wasn't part of it for me, I would spend my time some other way, but I also do have to get better at explaining myself and answering questions instead of just assuming that what I do speaks louder than words and people will eventually figure it out.

So much has been made of how you choked up. I was sort of struck, though, because this is something that men now, including your husband, in politics do almost routinely. What difference do you think that made it convey to voters the sort of real person that is there beneath the...
I think what it might have done is to put into the public arena what happens to me every single day on a private level. I have those encounters with people that touch me and really move me all the time. And usually it is when I am shaking somebody's hand on a rope line or I am in a small meeting or somebody comes up to me on the street. And I feel connected to that person, because they are worried they don't have health care. They are losing a job or some other problem that they are hoping that I will not only be empathic about and relate to, but actually try to help them overcome.
And I think what that moment really illustrated is — guess what? Those of us who get up on the stage and make the speeches and shake the hands and do the interviews, are also human beings. And the empathy goes both ways. I really felt touched when that woman said "Well how are you?" because it said to me that she was seeing me as a human being as I had been seeing her and all the people there. And it's that kind of connection that I think is a very strong basis for us to go forward together.

Could you talk about what the road looks like ahead because I think that what the split decision suggests is that this is going to go on for a while. It's going to go at least until February 5th, and it may go a little further than that. Do you look at the race differently now and is this causing you to sort of reassess how you pace it, how you fund it, how you plan the map?
You know, not really because I always assumed that it would go at least through February 5th. That's what we have been planning for. It is what I started doing when I began putting people in various states and asking key leaders to assume responsibility for what we were going to try to achieve. It is just too compressed a schedule to believe that it was going to be a smooth path. That is how I always anticipated it.
Obviously it would have been great if that had not been the case, but that sure is not what I thought and it's not what I planned for so we're going on as we had anticipated. It's a very challenging schedule for everybody. It's not something that I'm telling you that you don't know, I mean, trying to cover all this ground, give people a chance to see you there while still running a national campaign is going to be a hill to climb [laughs] but we're up to it and we're getting ready and prepared to go out and do it everywhere we need to to compete. I don't know whether it'll be finished or not but I kind of suspect it'll be decided by the close of the vote counting on February the fifth.

Well you're also bringing in what has been described to me as fresh thinking in the form of some additions to your team: Maggie [Williams, a Clinton confidante] and Doug [Sosnick, a policy advisor in Bill Clinton's White House]. What are you trying to accomplish here as you are sort of rejiggering your team?
Well, I really am facing the reality that despite the fact that it's been very costly to run this national campaign for a year, we didn't have enough people and we didn't have enough, you know, the breadth and depth to be able to cover all this ground that we have to cover. You know, just thinking about going from New York to California in three and a half weeks is [laughs] pretty daunting. So I'm thrilled to have so many of my long-time friends, people with lots of experience, coming forward and saying look we're here for you, we want to come in, we want to help the great team that you already have, we want to augment the jobs that are already being done. We've got to begin to send people around the country, which we'd held off doing because we obviously didn't want to assume those financial costs. This is all about being ready to take on what we know is going to be a nationwide spread to running across the country from the east to the west coast.

Can I ask you one more thing about New Hampshire? You know the polls had — unless everybody I talked to on your campaign was lying to me — they seemed to be pretty late even into the day yesterday thinking that this was not necessarily going to be a great night for you. When did you figure out that things had shifted and that you had things going your way?
Well, I felt that way after the debate Saturday night, you know, [but] I had nothing to prove it. I was down 13 to 15 points [laughs] but I could sense the change coming. And then I felt it for sure when I got back from going out at the crack of dawn, actually before dawn, on Tuesday morning. I felt really good by the size of the crowds I had Saturday, Sunday, Monday. But then when we actually went out to polling places, and I looked at voters and they looked at me, I shook their hands and we saw people just randomly. I stopped at a Dunkin' Donuts and just began to ask people to go out and vote. I really felt good.
I am not one who pays attention to the polls, I know some people apparently do but that's not me. I began to sense that we were going to do well. I got back to my hotel room in the afternoon and I didn't say that I think we're going to do really well but I felt it. And you know, when the first exit polls came back and I was still nine down, I thought you know, either I have totally lost my touch for figuring out what voters are thinking and doing or this is going to be a lot better than anybody besides me thinks. Then my husband came back because he had gone to some other polling places. And his own impressions were incredibly in line with mine. We felt positive. And thankfully the voters of New Hampshire decided that they wanted to give me this chance to go forward and make my case to the American people.

Women came back to you in a very big way between Iowa and New Hampshire. I don't know if you can draw a trend line from one state to another but for instance, you lost single women to Obama by 13 points in Iowa, you won them by 17 points in New Hampshire, and they are a very big...
Well you know, Karen, there are two things about that. Number one, I don't know how anybody tries to really make sense of what happens in caucuses. I am someone who understands and really gets what goes on in elections and I think exit polls have a certain utility, but I'm sure that they give you all the information you need. So you know, on both counts from both states, what I look at is the final result, I look at the parts of the states that I did well.
You know, I came out of Iowa with only one fewer delegate than Senator Obama, so despite what was written up as this win, which it was obviously on numbers, in terms of what matters and in delegate counts, it was, you know, neck and neck. And in New Hampshire it was a close race. But this time I came out ahead so I think we're just going to keep going back and forth and I think voters are going to be looking at both of us and trying to make up their minds and I welcome that. That's what I have always intended to do and that's what I'm going to be doing for the next three and a half weeks.
I don't think about voters in categories, I really don't. I know that maybe it's a convenience to try understand what certain people might be thinking about an election but I really try to look at the electorate as people as individually as I can imagine and then try to let them know where I stand, what I do, and give them a chance make their own assessment about me. Everyone of us is individual. We don't fit into categories... One of the great things about America is our individuality. So I'm always a little skeptical of any of those categories but obviously I'm thrilled with the outcome last night.

Can you describe the moment where the President comes back on primary day and he sort of gets the same hunch you do that...
I mean, yeah, he got back shortly after I did and he came in and said "Well, what'd you think?" and I said "Bill, I'm going to do a lot better than what anybody else thinks." And he said "That's exactly what I think." And, you know, we had the same experience in '92 in New Hampshire.

• Karen Tumulty