WASHINGTON: Rescued from political free-fall, Hillary Rodham Clinton says she finally has found her voice.

Now, still locked in a tight contest with Barack Obama, she must decide whether to adjust it further — and what to say.

Clinton’s New Hampshire resurrection, which defied her own strategists’ most optimistic predictions, came amid a growing realisation by her team that she needed to retool her message to blunt an Obama wave.

She began the adjustment in New Hampshire, softening her steely personal image and jettisoning her lengthy stump speech in favour of more direct interaction with voters. At the same time, she sharpened her criticism of Obama, turning his message of change back on him to question what he ever actually accomplished.

She needed the change, people outside the campaign say.

“It’s very important to allow people to see her not only as a highly competent leader but also as a person who can connect on a human dimension,” said Ruth Mandel, director of Rutgers University’s Eagleton School of Politics. “She enriched her voice, and she expanded her voice, in New Hampshire, and that’s how she found her voters.”

Now what? The New York senator already has brought aboard a new group of advisers, including longtime confidante Maggie Williams as well as Doug Sosnik, who served as White House political director under former President Bill Clinton, the candidate’s husband.

Aides say privately they hope some fresh perspective from trusted friends will help mitigate the influence of senior strategist and pollster Mark Penn, whose judgment was sharply questioned after Clinton’s drubbing in Iowa last week.

Detractors say Penn, who has long believed voters care more about issues than a candidate’s personality, failed to anticipate Obama’s appeal while counseling Clinton to adopt a message that was too dry and too nostalgic about her husband’s years in the White House.

He also recommended she run as a quasi-incumbent emphasising inevitability, which only served to reinforce her image as cold and remote.

The strategy flopped last week in Iowa, where Obama bested Clinton in the state’s Democratic caucuses. Even more ominous was the defection of women, 70 per cent of whom voted for someone else.

Stunned by Iowa, both Clintons moved personally and aggressively to recast the campaign’s message to be more about what she will do, rather than what she has done in the past.

The former first lady also heeded pleas from advisers to allow more of her personality to emerge, and to actively seek voters’ support rather than convey a sense of entitlement.

She retooled her criticism of Obama, after virtually ceding the “change” motto to him for much of the campaign. She painted him as an agent of “false hopes,” noting among other things that while he had run for the Senate in Illinois as an anti-war candidate, he voted repeatedly to pay for the war once elected.

Clinton’s new strategy crystalised on Monday in response to an innocuous question in a Portsmouth, New Hampshire, coffee shop. Asked how she holds it together on the campaign trail, Clinton managed to choke back tears while skewering Obama at the same time.

“This is very personal for me,” she said, adding, “Some of us are right, and some of us are not. Some of us are ready, and some of us are not.”

In that moment, Clinton managed to win back women voters who then brought her victory in Tuesday’s primary.

Thanking supporters, she said, “Over the last week I listened to you, and in the process I found my own voice.”

Now comes the tricky balance of exposing her softer side while forcefully challenging Obama’s experience and ability to make the changes he promises.

The effort will be further complicated by a vast change in the political terrain, as the retail campaigning required in Iowa and New Hampshire gives way to an emphasis on paid advertising in larger states.

Both the Clinton and Obama teams are girding for the enormous outlay of cash required to mount an effective TV campaign in states like New York and California, which hold primaries on Feb 5.

Clinton advisers are weighing how much to use the former president as a campaign surrogate.

Bill Clinton remains widely popular among Democratic voters and may have helped deliver his wife a strong majority of Democratic voters in New Hampshire.

But he has also overshadowed her at times on the campaign trail and reinforced a backward-focused message the campaign is anxious to shed.

In a conference call with reporters on Wednesday, several Clinton “superdelegates” — elected officials who say they will support her at next summer’s Democratic convention — professed to be delighted with the way Clinton has begun recasting her message.

Texas Rep Sheila Jackson Lee put it this way:

“We have a candidate now connecting with the hearts and minds of the American people.”—AP