Jim Watson, Getty Images

Mackenzie Carpenter
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

It was the kind of week Hillary Rodham Clinton likes best -- packed with serious policy speeches, adulation from supporters and up-close encounters with voters outside the nation's capital.

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In Selma, Ala., last Sunday, the junior senator from New York and Democratic presidential candidate marched with her husband Bill Clinton, who is still wildly popular with black voters, and gave a rousing speech to churchgoers -- even as her rival, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, attracted larger crowds.

On Tuesday, she was back on her own, cheered at a luncheon sponsored by Emily's List, the nation's largest women's campaign fund, followed by a speech Thursday calling for a GI's Bill of Rights in the wake of the Walter Reed Army Hospital scandal before heading back to New Hampshire over the weekend.

Contrast that to two weeks earlier, when former First Friend and Hollywood movie mogul David Geffen called Mrs. Clinton "incredibly polarizing" and predicted that she couldn't win the White House in 2008, even though she continues to lead the field of Democratic contenders.

No person in public life today provokes such extreme reactions wherever she goes -- except perhaps the man currently sitting in the Oval Office.

What is it about Hillary Rodham Clinton that so incenses people -- or so excites them?

Political experts cite several factors that will influence how voters resolve their feelings about Mrs. Clinton in the coming months: her unique history as first lady and U.S. senator, her politics, her personality, her husband, and her gender.

"She's a complicated, outspoken woman," said Susan K. Flinn, who edited the 2000 anthology "Speaking of Hillary: A Reader's Guide to the Most Controversial Woman in America."

"She's said herself that she's a Rorschach test, that people project their own issues onto," said Ms. Flinn, "and it's true. Sometimes their reactions, though, simply leave the realm of reason. It frankly would have been easier for her to run if she hadn't been first lady and wasn't married to the president. She could have had her own political career much earlier."

Ah, yes, her husband. Bill Clinton's political brilliance and personal baggage -- the Monica Lewinsky scandal for starters -- will work for her and against her. While including him as a full partner in Selma, the next day Mrs. Clinton predicted the public would not be seeing "that much" of him during the campaign.

Then there are her centrist politics: from her vote to authorize the war in Iraq to her support for criminalizing flag burning, which infuriated the left wing of the Democratic party -- even as some moderates say they don't quite believe she's one of them.

To complicate matters, she has a less-than-electric presence on the stump and on television; her public persona is frequently described by critics as scripted and rehearsed even as others call her warm, empathetic and friendly.

Finally, and perhaps most important: she's female. This past week, her campaign announced a new effort to appeal to women voters that includes a Web site, www.icanbepresident.com, aimed at younger women.

While nearly two-thirds of Americans say they are ready for a woman president, it's an issue Mrs. Clinton and her campaign advisers are negotiating carefully.

"Certainly, this election will determine whether we will break a barrier," said Melanne Verveer, former chief of staff for Mrs. Clinton when she was first lady. "But I think there's a growing comfort level with the fact that our judgment about who we elect as our leaders shouldn't be based on sex."

Yet her candidacy seems to be very much about gender. A March 7 Quinnipiac Poll of three swing states -- Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida -- found that more women support her than men, by margins ranging from 12 to 17 percentage points, and a similarly large female-male divide -- 47 to 33 percent -- was reflected in a Keystone Poll from late February.

Still, while her campaign hopes her historic candidacy will energize the female vote, many women also seem to be having trouble with her.

Melinda Henneberger, author of the upcoming book, "If They Only Listened to Us: What Women Voters Want Politicians To Hear," found in her 18 months of research that women across the political spectrum expressed strong doubts about Mrs. Clinton.

"Rightly or wrongly, there was a feeling she was too poll-tested and not altogether sincere," said Ms. Henneberger. What was most interesting were "women in the middle who didn't like her. These are not people who live and breathe politics, but they did have strong visceral feelings about Sen. Clinton, and it most often came down to what one young woman told me in Florida, 'I don't feel the realness from her.' "

Residue from '92
Such ambivalence can be traced back to how the country first got to know Hillary Clinton. During her husband's 1992 race, she was forced to defend him on charges of womanizing and uttered her first gaffe insisting she wasn't "some little woman standing by her man like Tammy Wynette." When, as first lady -- a position that carries no job description but plenty of differing expectations -- she entered the public policy arena, tackling the huge, intractable problem of health care reform, there was grumbling that she only got that job because she was married to the president, Ms. Verveer said, "even though she was a lawyer and an activist on behalf of children with a whole bunch of skill sets her predecessors didn't have."

But then her health care reform plan, crafted in secret, died from a thousand cuts from a thousand interest groups, and the first lady withdrew to lick her wounds.

When she reemerged, though, the public was never quite sure who she was, because she would never say.

"There seemed to be this concerted effort to push her into a traditional mode of what we thought a first lady should be," said Elizabeth Ossoff, a professor of political psychology at St. Anselm College in Manchester, N.H. "She made a lot of mistakes along the way."

Still, when she decided to stay with her husband after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, her critics chalked it up to unbridled ambition. But many others respected her for it, as well as her overseas work.

By the time her husband left office in 2000, she was at the height of her popularity, which fueled a successful bid for the U.S. Senate and her overwhelming reelection last year. Now it will be important for voters in the presidential election to see what New York voters were able to see, said Ms. Verveer.

Indeed, Lynn Marinelli, a New York State legislator and a Democrat from Erie County, says she has frequently observed Mrs. Clinton's skills during the past six years.

At one visit to a shopping mall in suburban Buffalo, not exactly a Democratic stronghold, "Sen. Clinton walked into the food court in the middle of the day, and she didn't have to step five more feet when people started coming toward her to greet her. She comported herself with such grace and dignity and eye contact. She held their gaze, didn't shift from one foot to the other, which I certainly would have done. I know her husband is known for connecting with people, but she did it, too."

Not every western New Yorker has been so entranced by their junior senator.

"She made my skin crawl, frankly, although of course my take was different from most of the people who showed up," said James Campbell, chair of the political science department at the University at Buffalo/State University of New York and an avowed conservative Republican. At one appearance, "she was saying things that were outright nonsense, that she had all this political experience, when she had no experience other than being first lady," he said.

Mr. Campbell's fellow Republican, Kevin Hardwick, host of a radio show in Buffalo, doesn't quite agree.

"There were these terrible fears that she would be this left-wing wacko, but she didn't move there, she moved to the center," Mr. Hardwick said.

It isn't clear if Mrs. Clinton will be able to make that same kind of intimate connection with voters in a national presidential campaign. Already she's come under fire for awkwardness on the stump, most recently for what some said sounded like an attempt at a Southern drawl in the delivery of her speech in Selma.

"She has that flat voice," noted Ms. Flinn. "But she's a lot like Al Gore, of whom they said, 'If you can get him alone in a room with five people, they'll walk across shattered glass for him.' "

TV may not be kind. "She may not be the right person for a media age that requires a certain telegenic quality in their presidential candidates," said Leonard Steinhorn, a political science professor at American University in Washington, D.C.

Television also has a way of magnifying the slightest gaffe, and even Mrs. Clinton herself has said, "I cannot make a mistake," noted Letty Cottin Pogrebin, an author, activist and founding editor of Ms. Magazine.

"She's very careful, and when she isn't, she gets slaughtered," says Ms. Pogrebin. "Everything she says is dissected and picked apart, from her hairdo to her marriage. Every aspect of public presentation has been examined and critiqued, so no wonder that she's gun shy."

As a feminist, Ms. Pogregin strongly supports the senator's presidential bid, but as a staunch anti-war activist, she admits to being frustrated with Mrs. Clinton's vote on Iraq -- an issue where gender has been a hindrance, not a help.

Problems in pink
One of the few times Mrs. Clinton seemed to almost publicly lose her composure was in 2002, in a meeting with about 50 members of Code Pink, a women's anti-war group, just before the Iraq vote. Standing behind a wall of tables, her body language tense but her voice calm, she tried to explain her position to the women, who were clad in pink slips. After she refused to back down, one of the women threw her pink slip at the senator. Visibly angry, Mrs. Clinton shook a finger at them, declaring she would never do anything that would put her constituents in harm's way, and strode out, as a chorus of female voices shouted, "You are! You are!"

"She's a very calculating politician," said Medea Benjamin, one of Code Pink's founders, who said her group is perhaps harder on Mrs. Clinton on this issue than on other candidates because she's a woman. "She's one of the most powerful leaders in this country, she's the front-runner and plus, we expect women leaders to represent the views and values of women, who by more than 10 percentage points oppose our having gone to war."

Ms. Benjamin's use of "calculating" -- which, along with "cold," is a label frequently attached to the senator, unfairly, say some.

"Tell me a man who's run for office who isn't in some sense cold and calculating," said Ms. Pogrebin.

"She is tough, but you have to be absle to answer criticism and spring back, and she does that remarkably well."

Today, Mrs. Clinton seems to have found her comfort level as a senator, more so than when she was ever first lady. But how will she play out as a presidential candidate, where challenges lurk every day, from Iraq to Obama to, even, the occasional rude question about Monica Lewinsky?

While she's being greeted by enthusiastic crowds and praised for her friendliness, glimpses of political calculation surfaced this week after news that she'd met with and told a gay-rights group she opposed the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" rule -- but neglected to publicize the news.

"You'll have to ask my campaign," was all she would say when asked twice Monday in Iowa why she didn't make the meeting public.

Still, "the fact that she's so well exposed now is good for her. It gives her more of a chance to become familiar to people on her own terms," said Mr. Steinhorn, the American University political scientist.

"Like her or not, we'll become more familiar with this person and the long time frame of the campaign will ultimately benefit her."

"In the end, how Hillary does will depend on how we feel about gender and sexism," added Ms. Ossoff. "Everyone thinks we've gotten past it, but there's still a lack of comfort that we as a culture have with women in power, and that will be reflected in both the way stories are framed about her, and, ultimately, what people decide to do in the voting booth."