COLUMBIA, S.C. — The last time Hillary Clinton campaigned in South Carolina, she was overshadowed by the two first black presidents of the United States — Barack Obama and Bill Clinton — but this time, she wants to shift the fight from race to gender.

Clinton — defeated by Obama and hobbled politically by her husband’s red-faced defense of his family’s civil rights legacy here seven years ago — returned to the site of her most scarring defeat to embrace her core message of women’s equality and to triangulate between two titans who decided her fate in 2008.


And a few days after Clinton claimed she wasn’t seeking a third Obama term, she went out of her way to make it clear to the predominantly African-American audience that she did view herself as Obama’s liberal successor.

She even offered a gentle re-branding on the president’s 2008 slogan, which her campaign mocked seven years ago: “We want it to be the country of hope,” she said.

“I think this time it needs to be about her, not about Bill or anybody else,” said Joyce Rose-Harris, vice president of the South Carolina Democratic Women’s Council, which hosted Clinton’s appearance here. “I feel she needs to speak to the people, convince the people herself with no surrogates.”

But Clinton, who needs to maximize enthusiasm among the African-American voters around the country to repeat Obama’s recent success in 2016, couldn’t quite escape the echo of her 2008 loss in a state known for clutching its racial history to heart.

It isn’t a matter of getting people here to like her — African-American voters in South Carolina seem to find her likable enough; It’s the necessity of transforming benign resignation about her candidacy into genuine Obama-like passion and massive turnout. In that, she faces a tall but not insurmountable task, judging from the polite, supportive but less-than-ecstatic reception she received at several low-key events in the state’s Capitol.

“Sure, I think there’s enthusiasm for her candidacy,” said Don Fowler, a former South Carolina state party chairman who ran the Democratic National Committee during Bill Clinton’s second term. “But she’s got to go out and put the personal touch” on black leaders in the state.

The Clinton campaign hasn’t ruled out deploying Bill Clinton here in the future — but that doesn’t seem to be a high priority, considering what happened here last time. Fowler told POLITICO he recently spoke to the former president and urged him to campaign for his wife in Columbia and Charleston. “He told me to write a letter,” Fowler said with a smile — and he hasn’t gotten around to penning the request just yet.

South Carolina’s black kingmaker Rep. Jim Clyburn, who criticized Bill Clinton’s behavior in 2008 as “bizarre,” wasn’t in Columbia, even though the House was out of session. Clyburn, a former majority whip and key member of the Congressional Black Caucus, has a history of withholding his support — he didn’t officially endorse Obama in the 2008 primary, despite private expressions of support — but he offered a general Clinton-friendly statement to The Associated Press on Wednesday.

“There was a lot of pent-up emotion involved in that vote,” said Clyburn, the only Democrat in the state’s GOP-dominated House and Senate delegations. “Mrs. Clinton stands well with the black community.”

There were signs of wait-and-see among the state’s core Democratic constituency. The keynote event of the trip, a speech on women’s pay equity at a hotel ballroom, was less than a standing-room-only, with about 30 of the 200 seats in the downtown Marriott ballroom empty 10 minutes after the event’s starting time. There was little sign of life at Clinton’s new Columbia headquarters in a lush residential neighborhood a mile from the state Capitol; The tidy, low-slung Craftsman-style house was locked, lights out, with only one laptop and few hand-painted signs visible through the front window.

Campaign officials bridled at the suggestion the office was a Potemkin Village, and predicted it would be filled with phone-banking volunteers later in the day.

In 2008, black voters — who make up about half of the Democratic primary electorate and a quarter of general-election voters — defected en masse to Obama, propelling him to a 55 percent-27 percent victory over Hillary Clinton. Worse still, the Obama campaign masterfully leveraged Bill Clinton’s bluster into a crafty, sotto voce argument that the Clintons had lost touch with black voters who had been their bedrock supporters. One Obama 2008 campaign official told POLITICO recently that “we really did a number on them” — by inflaming anger of Bill Clinton’s attack on the then-freshman senator from Illinois.

The most damaging of Clinton’s comments: His claim that Obama’s win here was a “myth” and “mugging” — and his claim that the victory would be regarded as insignificant as Jesse Jackson’s victory here in the 1984 primary.

The speech Wednesday provided a rhetorical preview of how Clinton plans to handle the potentially combustible task of differentiating herself from Obama without angering or demobilizing his base. In Columbia, she emphasized their collaboration when she was secretary of state — and talked about how both Obama and Bill Clinton saw their hair turn white in office. “You are not going to see me turn white in the White House,” she said. “I may not be the youngest candidate in this race, but I have one big advantage: I’ve been coloring my hair for years.”

And the line that elicited the most enthusiastic response was one of her most subtle, a call for civility and respect for Obama — which deeply resonates with black voters who feel that white conservatives have disrespected Obama because of his race. “We should show more respect toward each other, and we should remember why we’re doing this,” she said. “Because we love our country and we want it to be the country of hope and potential for our children and grandchildren.”

Clinton’s soft reentry, her campaign believes, is a critical first step to rekindling her family’s once-robust lifeline to grass-roots black voters nationwide, who fled in droves following her bruising 2008 primary here.

“It’s been a traditional perception that African-Americans are a monolithic community and [the Clintons] took that tack in 2007 and 2008,” says former state Rep. Bakari Sellers, an enthusiastic Hillary 2016 supporter who backed Obama against Clinton during her last campaign in the Palmetto State. “They realized their mistake during the primary, but it was too late by that time.

“What’s going on here now is her reintroduction to African-American voters, and the way she interacts, the issues she tackles, that is going to be the framework with voters in Ohio, North Carolina, everywhere,” he added.

“It’s about more than just her locking up African-American votes in the [South Carolina] primary.”

Gabriel Debenedetti contributed to this report.