FOR five seconds Hillary Clinton’s voice cracked and her eyes grew damp. It was in January 2008 in a coffee shop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. A sympathetic voter had just asked her how she coped with the hardships of running for president. “How do you do it?” asked Marianne Pernold Young, a local portrait photographer, mentioning that Mrs Clinton’s hair always looked perfectly coiffed. “How do you keep upbeat and so wonderful?”

Pundits rushed to analyse the moment. Mrs Clinton was exhausted, they intoned. The former First-Lady-turned-senator knew that her younger rival, Barack Obama, was walking away with a race for the Democratic nomination that had once seemed hers to lose.

As the media juggernaut gathered speed, the strange intensity of America’s relationship with Mrs Clinton was laid bare. Supporters hailed the fleeting display of emotion as proof of their heroine’s humanity, often hidden by her discipline and caution on the campaign trail. Opponents recalled Edmund Muskie, a Democrat whose presidential bid was derailed in 1972 when he teared up in the face of harsh press attacks, and wondered if the 2008 primary was now over. Back inside the Café Espresso, suspicious journalists surrounded Mrs Pernold Young. Betraying the toxic state of Mrs Clinton’s relations with the press pack, many asked if she was a planted campaign stooge.

The candidate herself cornered a press aide and fretted that voters might think her weak, and not ready to be commander-in-chief. Mr Obama took a different view. Watching footage of his rival as he trundled across New Hampshire in a campaign bus, he thought it a worryingly touching moment. “I don’t like this. I actually think this could really help her,” David Axelrod, the political guru at Mr Obama’s side, later recalled muttering.

Seven years on, as America waits to see how Mrs Clinton will conduct a second bid for her party’s presidential nomination, that flash of vulnerability is still cited in New Hampshire, the state that next January will host the first primary elections (and the second vote, after the Iowa caucuses) of the 2016 presidential cycle. This time it inspires a consensus: Mrs Clinton needs more such moments.

New Hampshire voters expect to meet candidates in diners and veterans’ halls, and to hear them speak in a neighbour’s sitting-room. They have a record of dethroning front-runners who take the state for granted. Mrs Pernold Young still lives in Portsmouth, and jokes that “The woman who made Hillary Clinton cry” will be carved on her tombstone. Over breakfast at the Café Espresso, she says she will back Mrs Clinton this time round, after supporting Mr Obama in the 2008 primary. Appalled by the “quagmire” in Washington, and disappointed by how long it took Mr Obama to learn the ways of government, she likes the idea of electing a worldly insider like Mrs Clinton, sighing: “I don’t want another trainee.” But she does not want a coronation either. She notes that some friends roll their eyes at another Clinton presidency, especially as no serious Democratic rival has yet emerged. “I’d like to see Hillary be challenged,” she says.

Such views are widespread, and have been heard within the Clinton camp. Two close advisers, Robby Mook and Marlon Marshall, visited New Hampshire and Iowa just before Easter, meeting local Democratic power-brokers. One of these was James Demers, a strategist and lobbyist who was one of Mr Obama’s first big backers in New Hampshire. The message from Mrs Clinton’s inner circle was that the former secretary of state will run as though she faces a bitterly contested primary, Mr Demers says. She will use the race to explain to America why she wants the presidency, while building the sort of campaign machinery that propelled Mr Obama to the White House in 2008. Whether her primary involves one, two or ten candidates, Mrs Clinton “knows that she has to earn every vote”.

As one of the most famous people in the world, constantly watched by the Secret Service, it will be hard for Mrs Clinton to campaign in the traditional New Hampshire way, says Terry Shumaker, a lawyer who co-chaired both of Bill Clinton’s campaigns in the state. But he thinks she must try, using the “intimacy” of the state to communicate with the whole country. He describes his old friend as an economic centrist, who sees government as a positive force but believes that business is the engine of the economy. In 2016 she can add domestic and global experience to the mix. “There is a huge hunger for Washington to work again,” he says. And with Islamic State fanatics on the prowl, voters have a “visceral” need to feel safe.

Not all Democrats are convinced. Martha Fuller Clark, a state senator and big Obama backer in 2008, notes that New Hampshire Democrats are not “100% for Hillary”. She herself remains uncommitted, noting that a potential rival, the former governor of Maryland, Martin O’Malley, has been active in the state. In her telling, New Hampshire Democrats want a candidate who will fight against inequality and for the middle class. They worry about climate change, and are unhappy that so much outside money is flowing into their state, notably since the Supreme Court eased the rules on political spending. They want to hear from Mrs Clinton how to “move from a plutocracy back to a democracy”, says Mrs Fuller Clark.

Sisters are doin’ it for themselves

That echoes complaints from other Democrats, such as Gary Hart, a former presidential contender, who recently said it should “frighten every American” that the Clinton machine reportedly intends to raise $1 billion. Once the real campaigning starts, the former secretary of state needs a strategy to engage and excite the broader electorate, especially the young, Mrs Fuller Clark adds: not least because she thinks that female politicians are judged more harshly than men, which makes it hard to be accessible. “Women really want to do a good job, something that constrains them from engaging more freely with voters.”

After years worrying about the Middle East and Russia, Mrs Clinton will be grilled about health care, or the lack of full-day kindergartens in half the towns in New Hampshire, predicts Colin Van Ostern, a member of the state’s Executive Council. He thinks this will do Candidate Clinton much good: “What Hillary Clinton needs is exactly what New Hampshire demands.”

The challenges of a fresh Clinton candidacy were summed up by Bill Clinton, the man with the potential to be the campaign’s greatest asset and worst liability. No living ex-president enjoys higher approval ratings, as Americans forget the scandals of the 1990s and remember the economic growth, balanced budgets and bipartisan reforms of the welfare system that were achieved on Mr Clinton’s watch. Yet in 2008 an ill-disciplined Mr Clinton caused chaos in his wife’s campaign.

The former president recently told Town & Country magazine that he was not sure he was any good at campaigning any more because “I’m not mad at anybody,” citing the mellowing effects of being a grandfather. Despite that disclaimer, Mr Clinton could not resist analysing his wife’s putative campaign in some detail, noting that it is hard for any party to hold the White House for longer than two terms, and arguing that should his wife run, she should “go out there as if she’s never run for anything before and establish her connection with the voters.”

The problem is that the Clintons have run for many things before. Mrs Clinton first entered the governor’s mansion in Arkansas in 1979, and has been in the public eye ever since. This makes connecting with ordinary folk a challenge. In a speech last year to a convention of car dealers, she confided that: “The last time I actually drove a car myself was 1996.” The fact that she typically received six-figure sums for such speeches does not help either.

Republicans may be expected to paint her as part liberal-elitist, and part big-government statist. Playing on lingering public disapproval of the Obamacare health reforms, Republicans may try to revive memories of Mrs Clinton’s failed attempts at expanding health coverage during her husband’s presidency.

Republicans will also try to use her record as secretary of state from 2009-13 against her. It is common to hear them talk of a world made more dangerous by a naive, feckless “Obama-Clinton foreign policy”. Mrs Clinton is blamed on the right for her role in offering Russia a “reset” in relations, for clashing with the Israeli government of Binyamin Netanyahu, and for generally squandering her time as America’s top envoy. Of her boast of having travelled to 112 countries, one putative Republican challenger, Carly Fiorina, a former boss of Hewlett-Packard, scoffs that: “Flying is an activity, not an accomplishment.” Without a scrap of evidence, many conservatives remain convinced that Mrs Clinton chose out of political calculation not to protect an American mission in Benghazi, leading to the deaths of America’s ambassador to Libya and three aides, then sought to cover up her blunders. Such suspicions have not been allayed by the recent revelation that Mrs Clinton used a private server throughout her time at the State Department, preserving for the archives only the e-mails that she deemed relevant and deleting the rest. And she will face queries about donations from foreign governments, some less than democratic, to the Clinton Foundation, a family charity that also serves to keep her in the public eye. The Democratic grassroots have their own gripes with the Clintons. They have not forgotten that Mrs Clinton voted for George W. Bush’s Iraq war as a senator. It took her until March 2013 to come out for gay marriage. But mostly the left of the party worries that the Clintons are too soft on capitalism. They recall Mr Clinton’s presidency as a time when the rules on Wall Street banks were loosened, in their view setting the scene for the later financial crash. It remains an article of faith among trade unions that the North American Free Trade Agreement signed by Mr Clinton with Mexico and Canada sucked jobs out of the American heartland.

Standin’ on their own two feet

Though no credible Democratic challenger has emerged, many Democrats see (or want to see) a vacuum to Mrs Clinton’s left. Mr O’Malley, who as governor of Maryland was hardly a socialist banner-waver, now sides with groups who insist that America can afford to increase federal benefits for the old, breaking with years of broad consensus that Social Security is doomed to insolvency unless benefits are eventually curtailed and taxes raised.

Lots of leftists still long for Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to make a populist bid for the presidency, demanding tougher regulation of Wall Street, fewer free-trade deals and more redistribution to the middle class. Mrs Warren says she is not running, but the clamour continues. It is in part an attempt to put pressure on Mrs Clinton to tack to the left.

Some critics worry that Mrs Clinton is too old (she would be 69 in January 2017, making her the second-oldest newly elected president, eight months younger than Ronald Reagan). Others fret about her health (she suffered a blood clot on her brain in 2012). She cannot do much about either charge.

She could deal with a different concern—that no one knows what she really believes—but she is in no hurry. Candidates usually take sharply ideological positions during primaries, to woo the die-hard activists who vote in them, before tacking back to the centre as the general election nears. However, if Mrs Clinton faces no real primary challenger, she may not need to do this. Instead, she will need to woo enough Democrats to build a sense of excitement and grassroots involvement, without alienating swing voters. And if she cannot achieve the same stellar levels of support among black and young voters that Mr Obama did, she will need to fill the gap some other way.

She has made her pitch to women clear. She stresses her desire to help more of them into the workforce. She solemnly declares that women should receive equal pay for the same work as men (a position with which no one disagrees). In the past she has campaigned to make it easier for women to sue over alleged discrimination.

A big test involves white voters without a college education, who make up about a third of the electorate, but have drifted from the Democrats since Bill Clinton’s day. Mr Obama only won 36% of their votes in 2012, and might have done still worse if he had not successfully painted his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, as their worst nightmare of a boss.

Should Mrs Clinton win the general election, she will also need to be ready on Day One to deal with Republicans. There is virtually no chance that Democrats will win the House of Representatives in 2016, and even if they retake the Senate they will not have a filibuster-proof majority.

Expect Mrs Clinton to run to Mr Obama’s right on foreign policy. In interviews since leaving the State Department she has said that she urged him to take a muscular approach to Russia. She has chided Europeans for failing to stand up to Vladimir Putin (she wants them to send arms to Ukraine, for example), while crediting the reset with achieving at least one arms-control agreement and securing Russian help in talks to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions. She has called the latest draft deal with Iran, brokered by America and other world powers, an “important step”, whatever that means. Last year she signalled that she would be more comfortable with stricter curbs on Iran’s nuclear programme. In a rare overt criticism of Mr Obama, she said in 2014 that the failure to help non-Islamist Syrian rebels fight against Bashar Assad had left a “big vacuum” for Islamic State and other jihadists to fill.

A history of hat throwing: US presidential candidate announcements Mrs Clinton has come close to echoing Republican grumbles that Mr Obama is too apologetic about American power. She says that her country cannot solve all problems, “but there’s not a problem that we face that can be solved without the United States.” While ruling out a return to the hubris of the George W. Bush years, she hints that the time has come for America to re-engage with the world. In domestic forums Mrs Clinton is fluent in the language of the modern business-friendly centre-left. She is keen on public infrastructure, universal education for the youngest children, lowering the cost of college and experimenting with German-style wage-subsidies for the working poor. She likes to see church groups working alongside strong trade unions and community organisations, and uses “evidence-based” as high praise for any policy. In 2008 she sometimes sounded like a deficit hawk, with slogans like: “We’ve got to stop spending money we don’t have.” In 2008 she also called for a “time out” on new trade deals, though as secretary of state she backed new pacts. During primary debates she called herself “committed to making sure Social Security is solvent” and said that the best route to reform lay through bipartisan compromise.

And ringin’ on their own bells

Yet even policy experts invited to private sessions with Mrs Clinton in recent months are not sure where she stands. One centrist policy adviser says that, after being quizzed by her about paths to restoring middle-class prosperity, he thinks (and certainly hopes) that she will say that it is a false choice to argue that fairness and economic growth must be in opposition to each other.

Such centrists would like to hear her thank Mr Obama for saving the economy from disaster after the financial crash in 2008 and praise him for expanding health care. Then she could change the subject, turning the country’s attention to the task of building an economy for the 21st century, harnessing growth to boost middle-class wages. If it sounds to voters more like a third term of Bill Clinton than four more years of Mr Obama, that would suit many Hillary-backers just fine.