AFP, LeClaire, United States :Hillary Clinton’s 1,000-mile road trip brought her Tuesday to a small town in America’s agricultural heartland for the first official stop on what she hopes is her journey to the White House.After three decades in the public eye, the former first lady, senator and secretary of state wants to reintroduce herself to voters as a down-to-earth champion of middle class aspiration.So she began by travelling by van across the Midwest from New York to Le Claire, a small town of 4,000 souls in Iowa – the state which will see the first votes in next year’s primary race.There, on the banks of the Mississippi, the woman who once walked the world’s corridors of power as the United States’ top diplomat, sat down for a tea in Jones Street Coffee House.The small business opened only six months ago to serve a growing community, an apt symbol of the hopes and dreams of the kind of “everyday people” featured in Clinton’s first campaign ad.”Hi everybody. Thank you for having us and all of these people. I love it,” she said, greeting Jen and Paul behind the counter and then sitting down for a chat out of reporters’ earshot.Her guests were invitees – a young mother who volunteers for Planned Parenthood, a student from a campus in nearby Davenport and the president of a university Democratic Party group.But the intent – as with the two-day drive from Clinton headquarters in hip Brooklyn through the Pennsylvania and Ohio rust belt to the fields of Iowa – was to show her meeting ordinary voters.Face-to-faceIt is a marked departure from the steely image portrayed in the now 67-year-old’s failed bid for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.Then, she was defeated in Iowa and eventually nationwide by a young Barack Obama, who went on to win two terms in the White House as America’s first black president.Now Clinton wants to return as America’s first female leader to the building where she lived as first lady during her husband Bill’s two presidential terms from 1993 to 2001.So far she has no challenger within her own party, so she may have time to run a small, face-to-face campaign in early primary states while her Republican rivals battle each other.But – the flip side to her frontrunner status – her formal entry into the campaign on Sunday immediately unleashed a ferocious assault on her record and character from the opposing camp.
