DES MOINES — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton took on the full trappings of a presidential candidate Saturday on her first campaign swing across Iowa, where she defended her early support of the Iraq war and played up her chance to "break a historic barrier" as the first woman to win the White House.
Clinton's Iowa visit opened her yearlong courtship of Democratic voters in the state whose precinct caucuses launch the 2008 presidential nominating process. Clinton, who is leading her Democratic rivals in national polls but not in Iowa, sought above all to spur excitement over her status as the only major female candidate.
"When people tell me, 'Well you know, I don't think a woman can be elected president,' I say, 'Well, I don't believe that, but we're going to find out,' " she told nearly 2,000 Iowans at her campaign kickoff rally in a Des Moines school gymnasium.
Greeted with repeated roars of cheering, the New York senator and former first lady said she expected "more stories about my clothes and hair than some of the people running against me."
"I just have accepted that," she said. "And there may be some other kind of funny stories about differences between us, or a little bit of the double standard, but I just reject that. You know, I think we've got to move beyond that. I'm going to be asking people to vote for me based on my entire life and experience."
Vowing tougher federal action to ensure equal pay for women and men, she told the crowd: "Women have made progress, and I'm very proud of that, but it is still not equitable."
For Clinton, who announced Jan. 20 that she was forming a presidential exploratory committee, the weekend spent in Des Moines, Cedar Rapids and Davenport marks her first foray before live voters after several online and carefully screened chats.
At the school rally, Clinton operatives supplied thousands of "Hillary for President" placards and bumper stickers.
Dangling from the gymnasium ceiling were red-white-and-blue banners declaring: "Let the conversation begin! Iowa welcomes Hillary Clinton for President."
But the commotion created by the dozens of television crews and scores of reporters covering her appearance threatened to upend the intimate bonding that Iowans had come to expect from presidential candidates.
"I want to have this as a one-on-one conversation, just you and me and about several hundred national press people," Clinton joked at the rally. "But I have to tell you that will fade, and we'll actually be able to pursue this conversation in a very personal way."
