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The prospect of this kind of clash helps explain why White House officials, who grow exceedingly sensitive in discussing anything that involves the First Lady, are vague about what will come out of her latest endeavor. Hillary herself raises a wide range of possibilities: policy recommendations that might be carried out by Executive Order or regulation (like a national registry of day-care workers who have been credibly accused of abuse), new legislation, new state and local programs, better enforcement of the laws already on the books. But the President, in his own interview with TIME, set an ambitious goal for his wife: "I see it as sort of a last big hurdle we need to clear, to create a kind of 21st century social compact that will enable people to be good parents and still succeed at work."
Hillary's approach this time bears little resemblance to her health-care crusade. The woman who once traded put-downs with House majority leader Dick Armey on Capitol Hill now makes her point by tousling the curls of a toddler in a day-care center for hospital workers in Florida, or cooing over a sock dog made for her by children in an after-school program at the Marine base in Quantico, Va. Even her wardrobe has been transformed: the powerful teals and reds of her health-care days have been replaced by Oscar de la Renta pastels, with pumps to match.
Her message has a new look as well. Hillary now preaches the virtues of small steps rather than big ones, of incentives rather than mandates. She strives to find what others consider doable, rather than struggling to get them to embrace her view of the ideal. "I'm not wedded to any particular way," she says. "I think it's important to raise a lot of options and...include people at all levels." Most significantly, her formal role begins and ends at advocating changes, not pushing them through. It was she, along with then Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros, who pressed the President to get more deeply involved in the crisis beleaguering the District of Columbia. "She was a very strong advocate for the district and hammered [the President] on this thing, because she gets out in the community more than he does," says White House spokesman Mike McCurry. But when it came time to put forward a specific plan and launch a fight for it on Capitol Hill, the job fell to Budget Director Franklin Raines. Says Cisneros: "She's found a new way to get things done."
White House staff members say that after a two-year, self-imposed exile from the West Wing, Hillary is putting in an occasional appearance there again, expressing her views on everything from race relations to an initiative grandly titled the Millennium Program, a series of events designed to celebrate the new millennium. The First Lady insists that there was no retreat and no comeback--and that her generation's ambivalence about her role has not changed her in the least. "I continue to do what I want to do and what I consider important," she told TIME. "These questions I don't really find are ones I can respond to. Somebody else will have to analyze that. I don't think of my life like that. I never thought I was living anybody else's role or anybody else's expectation."