EXETER, N.H./DAVENPORT, Iowa — Hillary Clinton held a trio of town halls across New Hampshire Sunday, then flew to Iowa, where she kicked off a six-stop, two-day tour across the state. Yet it was the former president, not the potential future one, who soaked up most of the attention on Monday.

Together, they were a model of message discipline, even as they campaigned more than a thousand miles apart. A workmanlike Hillary Clinton plowed through a version of her standard stump speech in Davenport before heading off to Cedar Rapids and Des Moines, while a relaxed Bill Clinton — appearing solo on the trail for the first time — managed to avoid the pitfalls of engaging Donald Trump.


The “Comeback Kid” dove right into a local pitch Monday, making sure New Hampshire voters remembered his own second-place finish there in 1992 while telling them he’s been paying attention to the local opioid crisis.

“Three children of friends of mine have died,” he said, to a hushed crowd in the same community college gym that hosted his wife’s high-profile return to the state in November 2014.

His hotly anticipated return to the hustings in a laid-back gingham shirt and brown sweater dominated the day, bringing out much of the national media and Clinton-specific press, with Trump set to speak just miles away in the afternoon.

“I do not believe in my lifetime that anybody has run for this job who is better qualified by experience, knowledge and temperance,” said the former president to a crowd of roughly 720, delivering a sprawling case for his wife before ignoring rope-line questions about Trump, who has sought to make past accusations of Clinton’s sexual misconduct an issue in 2016.

There was no such drama in Hillary Clinton’s Iowa appearances. Laughing off a question about Trump at her second Iowa stop, Clinton said that as part of her New Year’s resolution, she would allow him to “live in his alternative reality and I’m not going to respond.”

Otherwise, the appearances were largely full of standard Republican-bashing and support for Obama administration policies — most notably the Affordable Care Act and President Barack Obama's proposed executive actions on gun control, which she praised extensively — on her River to River tour, which will take her from the Mississippi to the Missouri before it concludes Tuesday evening in Council Bluffs.

“I don’t think all the Republicans are that ignorant, I don’t,” said the former secretary of state to the crowd of 400 gathered here in Davenport, intensifying her anti-GOP rhetoric while zeroing in on climate change, an issue of particular interest to Iowa Democrats. “I think they are doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry, the Koch brothers, and other of their big donors and puppeteers who say to them, ‘You better not say climate change is real because that would then make it clear, we’re going to be moving away from fossil fuels in a reasonable and orderly fashion.’ No, they want to hold the line, don’t they?"

“I am disturbed by the rhetoric I hear coming from the other side,” she added later. “It’s easy to tear down. It’s hard to build up. It’s easy to insult, it’s easy to criticize. But I don’t think you get much done if that’s the kind of rhetoric you use."

In her final appearance, in Des Moines, she worked in a veiled, if light-hearted, swipe at Trump's promise to "Make America Great Again" as she sought to draw contrasts with Republicans.

"I happen to think America is already great, but we can be greater," she said. "But we don't get greater by dividing, by insulting."

Appearing in Iowa exactly eight years and one day after coming in a disappointing third there last time she ran for president, Clinton hammered home the state's importance to the relatively low-key crowd: “I know if we get off to a good start in Iowa, we’re halfway home,” she said. She made a similar, if more impassioned, pitch Monday night to a rowdier crowd in Des Moines.

While Hillary Clinton usually makes the case that putting a Democrat in the White House is crucial, her husband was even more specific, casting himself in the role of her biggest fan Monday. Never attacking Bernie Sanders — who is also stepping up his own campaign travel — but running through his wife’s résumé, Clinton reminded the crowd that, as president, she would be responsible for filling as many as three Supreme Court spots. Only she, he suggested, has the judgment to do so.

He didn't fire up the crowd of fans, but after a slow start, the former president had the audience paying close attention with glowing stories of his wife’s accomplishments as an education advocate out of law school (“everything she touched she made better”), as first lady, and in the Senate. Staying far from the 2016 fray, the closest he came to criticizing GOP 2016 candidates was when he called former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay “the Ted Cruz of the pre-tea party era."

Nonetheless, the tension between Clinton and Trump ruled the day, even as he shrugged off chances to respond to the billionaire’s claims that his sexual past is a legitimate campaign issue — a claim repeated by a GOP state representative who interrupted a Hillary Clinton town hall in Derry, N.H., on Sunday.

Part of it was fanned by Republican opposition research group America Rising and the Republican National Committee, which put out materials noting his proximity to big-money donors and paid speeches, aiming to taint his image and weaken his surrogate work.

Still, it wasn’t enough to get under the 42nd president’s skin.

“I disagree very strongly with a lot of what they’re saying, but they have to decide where they want to take the country,” he said at the Puritan Backroom restaurant in Manchester, New Hampshire, after his first appearance. “They have to choose their nominee. And we have a primary to win. So one of my many rules in politics is don’t look past the next election. Wage the campaign you’re in and they have to wage theirs."

Clinton then continued to chat with the restaurant crowd as CNN played on a television in the background, at one point bearing a chyron: “Trump blasts Clinton over sexism."

He didn’t seem to see it.