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Joe Purvis is a bear of a man, a southern lawyer whose easy drawl and relaxed mien complement his natural gifts as a storyteller. He nods at the replica of a brown trout mounted on the wood-paneled wall of his cluttered Little Rock office ("that one went 10 pounds, 2 ounces," he beams) and proceeds to explain how he hooked it in a pool of "gin-clear" water, patiently waiting for the fish to exhaust itself before reeling it in, weighing it and then photographing it from several angles so a craftsman in town could construct a facsimile.

Next, in a practised cant, he turns to a more elusive subject: Hillary Clinton. Mr. Purvis, 61, has known her since the late 1970s, when he was the assistant to Arkansas' attorney-general at the time, Bill Clinton. He grew up four blocks from the former president in Hope, Ark., where the boys attended kindergarten together, and has remained a close family friend ever since.

Like many of the couple's confidants, he believes that Ms. Clinton has got a "bum rap" from her legion of critics. And, like many of their friends, he was enlisted this winter to help humanize her campaign for the presidency in a video testimonial as part of a charm offensive titled The Hillary I Know.

"Hillary is not as naturally open to people she doesn't really know," Mr. Purvis explains, leaning back in a leather chair. "I remember, several years ago, the Hillcrest softball league had its annual picnic out at Ray Winder Field. A whole group of us were there — and I look over and here's my wife and Hillary, sitting on the curb, engaged in as intense of a conversation as you could ever imagine about our two girls, and the things that are going on, and just about any stuff that you would expect a parent sitting around a neighbourhood barbecue to be talking about.

"And I thought, 'Here she is, the first lady of the State of Arkansas, wearing a pair of shorts and a knit top or whatever, and just as relaxed as she can be.' And I thought, 'This is the lady I'd like everybody to see.'"

There is a deeply held belief in Little Rock that Ms. Clinton is misunderstood at best and, often, purposely mischaracterized. Eager to set the record straight, her supporters enumerate a laundry list of pro-bono work she has performed for various civic organizations, or her establishment of the first legal clinic at the University of Arkansas.

They are fond of detailing how she reformed the juvenile code, developed kindergarten and advocacy programs for children, took pains to write thoughtful notes and even secured better treatment, unbidden, for a child afflicted by cancer.

To hear Arkansans proclaim her virtues with an uncannily similar, near-missionary conviction, is to grapple with an improbable duality: Down here, everyone seems to feel that somehow, one of the most psychoanalyzed and otherwise scrutinized figures in American politics of the past generation remains a mystery to vast swaths of the public. Behind her starched countenance, her friends insist, lurks a warm, funny and genuinely caring person.

So far, however, not enough voters appear able or willing to grasp this alternative reality.

Despite what many Democrats view as superior experience and qualifications, Ms. Clinton, now 60, continues to lose ground to her more charismatic rival, Barack Obama, 46, who has built what some pollsters view as a near-insurmountable lead heading into next week's primary showdown in Texas and Ohio.

For all the talk about strategic blunders and tactical missteps, many believe the real Achilles heel of her campaign is the likeability factor. The very fact that Ms. Clinton's handlers have assembled people to retell stories of her at the ballpark or make videos to vouch that she has a sense of humour underlines how difficult it is for her to connect with voters on a personal level.

"I think it's hard for many of us, particularly in Arkansas and especially those who have worked closely with Hillary, to understand," says Ann McCoy, who spent eight years at the White House in a variety of roles, including director of personal correspondence for the president and the first lady, and whose daughter once served as nanny to the Clintons' daughter, Chelsea.

"We all know that she doesn't have the charisma of Bill Clinton. But she has a huge heart — she has so much sensitivity to people's needs and she reacts to those needs. Maybe she's one of those people you just have to get to know to really like."

No 'genteel Southerner'

Ms. Clinton's most trusted advisers in Washington and New York, where she launched a successful bid for the Senate eight years ago, are a fitting proxy for the candidate herself: Many have been with her since the White House (including a group of women who dubbed themselves "Hillaryland") and they are a hermetically sealed bunch, not prone to idle chatter. Leaks to the press are rare and woe be the staffer who is caught talking.

In the less buttoned-down environment of Arkansas, however, people display much less hesitation discussing their adopted daughter. But Arkansans haven't always seen her so positively. When Hillary Rodham arrived upstate in an Oldsmobile Cutlass in the fall of 1974, she was a 27-year-old lawyer with Coke-bottle glasses, unruly hair and Ivy League credentials.

"When she first came here, it was, 'weird last name, weird clothes, pushy broad,'" recalls Sheila Bronfman, who has known Ms. Clinton for more than three decades.

Like her soon-to-be husband, who was campaigning at the time for a seat in Congress, the young Ms. Rodham was also viewed as a rising political star; at Wellesley, where she obtained her undergraduate degree, she was featured on the cover of Life Magazine after delivering a commencement address that she hastily revised to attack a Republican senator seated next to her.

She went on to pursue a law degree at Yale, where she met Mr. Clinton, and before coming here to help with his campaign, had spent several months in Washington, D.C., where she had been invited to work on the impeachment of president Richard Nixon.

"She wasn't your genteel Southerner," says Ms. Bronfman, a middle-aged woman with oval wire glasses and a quick laugh, who helped Bill Clinton in his first gubernatorial contest and helms a group called the Arkansas Travellers that has accompanied Ms. Clinton through many primary states. "[Hillary's] more the enforcer and [Bill's] more the free spirit," she adds.

Although Arkansas in the 1970s remained a Democratic stronghold of the South, unlike many of its Republican-minded neighbours, it was nevertheless a deeply religious and socially conservative state. The new arrival roiled the establishment first by refusing to surrender her maiden name after marrying Mr. Clinton in 1975 and later by continuing to pursue her legal career even after her husband was named governor.

Indeed, it was here, more than at Yale or even Wellesley, that she honed her political abilities and cultivated the interest in health care, education and families that would furnish the foundation of her presidential campaign platform.

If the cool reaction bothered her, Ms. Clinton never showed it. As one of the few women in her profession, friends say, she was forced by necessity to develop what she once described as "skin as tough as a rhinoceros hide."

"I think she is driven by a powerful intellect and a very rational, analytic approach to the world," says Pat Lile, a well-spoken, 67-year-old mother of four who has known Ms. Clinton since 1977 and worked with her in creating the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. "And she came through that era when a woman who was outwardly emotional just wasn't going to make it. For her to let it all hang out would not be true to her nature. That would be deceptive.

"So," Ms. Lile adds, in contradiction to what some Arkansans believe, "it's not like there's a different Hillary that's struggling to get out."

In truth, Ms. Clinton had accumulated plenty of calluses already before leaving her childhood home in Park Ridge, Ill. Polite friends describe her father, Hugh, a former navy officer, as strict and controlling. Her biographers have called him emotionally abusive, quarrelsome and virtually impossible to please.

Ms. Clinton's mother, Dorothy, had a particularly rough upbringing — abandoned by her own mother at an early age and shipped to live with mean-spirited relatives in California. People in Ms. Clinton's inner circle said her mother's hardship had a profound effect on the daughter.

Her two younger brothers had an impact too. "She was competing with the boys," Ms. McCoy says. (Tony Rodham, a business consultant, and Hugh Rodham, a lawyer, each have brought Ms. Clinton a measure of grief as adults, making the news for allegedly improper connections to pardons granted by Bill Clinton, among other minor scandals.)

"She had a real winner's instinct," Ms. McCoy continues. "You know, a lot of people with children will let them win at things. I've watched [the Clintons] play games with Chelsea — they never really did that with her. It was kind of a lesson [that] you've got to work a little harder to get there."

Ms. Clinton's competitive fire is often remarked upon, but much less mentioned, particularly outside the southern states, is her faith: She was raised in the Methodist Church, a denomination defined by a strong ethic for social activism. It is also regarded as more diffident than other Protestant churches, finding virtue in deeds rather than in evangelism. More than one acquaintance contrasts the Clintons in doctrinal terms — Hillary as the low-key Methodist and Bill as the garrulous, social Baptist.

"He is absolutely outgoing, loves to talk, loves to campaign. She is a private person and it's difficult for her," says Ann Henry, who hosted 300 people for the couple's wedding reception at her home.

Ms. Henry, whose husband was in the state legislature and who once ran for office herself, says Ms. Clinton "agonized" over being a political spouse before she married Bill. The two had long conversations about the challenges of juggling the demands of work and family under the glare of intense public scrutiny.

Ms. Henry, also a Methodist, theorized that Ms. Clinton's social activism was more a means of satisfying her faith than it was an elaborate foundation for a political career.

"I think she firmly believes she is carrying out her mission in life. It's a way to serve God. She'll give you a hand, but she thinks you have to join in partnership and carry your share of the load."

Although Ms. Clinton donated her time as a lawyer to chair an education-standards board and helped to create the family-advocate program (both extensions of her earlier work on the Children's Defence Fund with one of her mentors, Marian Wright Edelman), Little Rock was slow to accept her.

"She doesn't play the game — and I admire her for that — but it's hurt her," acknowledges Jo Luck, the head of Heifer International, a humanitarian aid organization whose eco-friendly office complex abuts the William J. Clinton Presidential Library on the banks of the Arkansas River. "She sees what's needed in the world and she does it. She's not running a popularity contest. She's never run a popularity contest."

Ms. Luck, dressed in a trim grey wool suit and matching turquoise earrings and necklace, has a youthful energy that belies her 66 years. She says she tries to be non-partisan, given her charitable work, but it is clearly difficult.

She first met Ms. Clinton in 1981, when she was trying to find a divorce lawyer willing to take her case. Her husband, Bill Wilson, now a federal judge, was at that time head of the state bar association, a powerful position in Little Rock's clubby legal community. Ms. Clinton accepted and the couple settled out of court. (Years later, Mr. Wilson joked that he had to refuse to put up a friend's campaign sign because Ms. Clinton had "taken" his yard.)

One of Ms. Luck's more vivid memories is when Ms. Clinton asked her to assemble a task force for their family-issues organization. Ms. Luck brought a group together, including a few African Americans. Ms. Clinton, who had been drawn to the civil-rights movement in college, did not think there were enough.

"She came in and said, 'This is really a great group — but where are the blacks?' I was blown away, because I'm so liberal."

To her friends, Ms. Clinton's willingness to fight for a cause, brooking no dissent, is moral strength; to her detractors, it is merely arrogance. Her refusal to run a "popularity contest" — or, put another way, to compromise — was perhaps most evident in the way Ms. Clinton botched a sweeping attempt at health-care reform in 1994, shortly after arriving in the White House. Her effort alienated key Democrats, damaged the party and was one of the reasons the Republicans were able to seize control of Congress, a major political defeat for Mr. Clinton.

"That was it for me in terms of Hillary Clinton," Bill Bradley, the influential senator and former basketball player, told her biographer, Carl Bernstein. He recounted how he and a colleague suggested some modifications might be warranted to expedite the program's passage, but he alleged that Ms. Clinton threatened to "demonize" members of Congress who tried to meddle with her plan.

"It was obviously so basic as to who she is," Mr. Bradley said, in a characterization that doesn't quite mesh with the view of her Little Rock friends. "The arrogance. The assumption that people with questions are your enemies. The hypocrisy. The disdain."

Even in Arkansas, she would relentlessly push her ideas, regardless of whether they abraded friends. Peggy Nabors, who worked with her on the education-standards committee in Little Rock, credited Ms. Clinton with helping to improve the statewide curriculum, limit class sizes and ensure that rural students had the same access to high-level science courses.

Yet the two bitterly disagreed over Ms. Clinton's plan to make teacher testing compulsory, a divisive battle that ended up passing by a single vote.

"She called me 'obstreperous' one time," Ms. Nabors recalls, at the spartan downtown office of the Arkansas Education Association, a blue "Hillary" sticker on the window behind her desk.

"The press said, 'How did that make you feel?' And I said, 'It impressed me how good her vocabulary was.' But I think it says a lot about her character that you can be strongly opposed on an issue and still work together."

In the 1980s, friends recall, she began to pay more heed to her appearance and became more engaged with her husband's career. Gradually, Ms. Clinton did win over much of Arkansas.

"Almost the first reaction you get from people is that they were initially put off by Senator Clinton," says Andrew Dowdle, a professor at the University of Arkansas and co-ordinator of the William J. Clinton History Project. "But over the years those feelings turned incredibly warm. She had the luxury of time, and because the social and political networks here are so close, that gave her multiple opportunities to make first, second and third impressions. Once people had the chance to work with her, people almost universally said their opinions changed, which is really rare."

The secret garden

Unlike most people, who identify Ms. Clinton as a politician, a first lady or even a lawyer, Susan Fleming still knows her best as a mother. Her daughter, Elizabeth, was best friends with Chelsea in grade school and the four of them used to escape sometimes on brief road trips.

Over a cup of coffee at a Little Rock organic bakery and café, the grey-haired former city manager reminisces with a smile about the days when Ms. Clinton would phone to discuss their kids.

On one occasion, she sounded particularly upset. "She said, 'Susan, this is the most difficult call I've ever made.' It turned out that Chelsea had been exposed to head lice." Another time, in a rebuke to Ms. Clinton's apparent indifference to fashion, the two 11-year-old girls rifled through her closet and gave her a makeover.

But Ms. Fleming also remembers 1992, when she flew with her daughter to New York, which was hosting the Democratic nominating convention, and joined Ms. Clinton and Chelsea for a Broadway matinee of The Secret Garden. When they emerged from the theatre, they were swarmed by cameras and reporters. The first lady of Arkansas was popular at home, but nothing like this.

"I just went back to the hotel and thought, 'Okay, their lives will never be the same,'" Ms. Fleming says.

She could not have imagined how right she was. Ms. Clinton became a polarizing figure. In 1993, in an atypical moment of public self-reflection, she described herself a "Rorschach test."

To her fiercest critics, she was either Lady Macbeth, conniving behind the throne to manipulate policy decisions, or Daisy Buchanan, conspiring with her husband at the kitchen table in a toxic pas de deux.

More recently, in a video making the rounds on YouTube, she was equated with the narcissistic Tracy Flick (played by Reese Witherspoon) in the satirical film Election — all ambition and determined chin, hell-bent on becoming class president.

The more that biographers, polemicists and reporters have laid bare the minutiae of her life, it seems, the blurrier the picture has become.

Ms. Clinton is perhaps less like an ink blot now than a palimpsest, a sheet inscribed over so many times that the words grow illegible. Her elusiveness has no doubt been heightened by her Methodist reserve and her refusal to melt under scrutiny.

That aloofness seemed to calcify into a mask during the later White House years, where both Clintons trailed a persistent whiff of scandal. Ms. Clinton received a grand-jury subpoena over Whitewater, a real-estate deal gone bad in Arkansas, and was hounded by the press about a handsome profit she made trading cattle futures years before. And then, of course, there were her husband's sexual dalliances, culminating with Monica Lewinsky, which resulted in a humiliatingly public and seemingly eternal dissection of the Clinton marriage.

In Little Rock, friends regularly reference the matter, although never by name — instead, it is "that debacle" or "the thing" or "the whoop-de-doo." Not surprisingly, they defend Ms. Clinton's decision to stay in the marriage, which strengthened many people's suspicions that the couple's matrimonial bond was cemented by political ambition rather than love.

"What if Hillary had said, 'I will not have it, I will leave'? It would have been a huge disruption for the country," says Ms. McCoy, who was working at the White House during that time. "But above that, Hillary loves Bill. I can't understand why it all happened, and I'm sorry it did. … Perhaps it's a little different kind of love than most families experience."

Ms. McCoy offers a competing view on the conventional take of familial dysfunction, recalling Chelsea snuggled with her dad on the couch watching old movies or lingering at the table with her mother, going over homework.

"She thought it was very, very important to Chelsea to stay together," explains Harry Truman Moore, another Arkansas lawyer and Clinton confidant who volunteered to take part in the Hillary I Know sessions.

He insists that, in addition to her private family life, Ms. Clinton also has a playful side that is rarely seen outside of her closest friends.

Mr. Moore remembers staying at the White House one evening, chatting with Mr. Clinton upstairs in the Solarium, when Ms. Clinton strolled in from a fundraising event for the Hispanic community.

"Jimmy Smits was there," she beamed, referring to the television star.

"Jimmy Smits?" Mr. Moore asked.

"Yeah," she replied. "And he's hot."

Shedding a tear

A couple of weeks ago, Jay Barth, a professor of political science at Hendrix College in Conway, Ark., gave a talk on the primary races to a crowd made up mainly of Clinton supporters. The mood was downbeat. Mr. Obama was continuing his surge in the polls and observers had begun to suggest that Ms. Clinton would need an improbably convincing victory this Tuesday in Texas and Ohio to have a chance at winning the candidacy.

"They were just deeply bummed out," he says. "They just feel like she hasn't shown herself, and I think they're really frustrated by that. I think if [her character] had shone through this year, we might have been looking at a different race."

It did shine through in brief glimpses, as in New Hampshire, when a woman asked Ms. Clinton an innocuous question about how she managed to cope with the blood sport of the primary contest. In a now-infamous moment, her eyes welled up with tears. At first, critics complained that she was undermining her credibility as a potential commander-in-chief. But that lachrymose turn reignited a stuttering campaign, propelling her to victory in New Hampshire and punctuating the importance of wedding political credentials with personal warmth.

The episode also underscored the sort of tightrope Ms. Clinton must walk as a woman candidate — too tough and she's an "ice maiden," too emotional and she's "weak."

Few know this feeling like Geraldine Ferraro, who in 1984 became the first female vice-presidential candidate on the ill-fated Walter Mondale ticket.

In an interview this week, she confessed that she has become an "emotional nut" watching her friend's campaign unfold, and she accused Ms. Clinton's interlocutors in the mainstream media of cleaving to a sexist double standard.

Ms. Ferraro, 72, was regarded as tough and a fighter in her day too. Yet on Super Tuesday, as she prepared to cast her ballot for Ms. Clinton, she found herself weeping in a polling booth, considering both the historical significance of a woman finally making it to the White House — and the magnitude of the lost opportunity if she failed.

"I went in there, closed the curtains, put my hand on the lever, and I filled up with tears," she says. "It was tears that this woman has put herself out, and it is painful to watch how she's being beaten up. And it's only because she's a woman. It was just a whole sense of the history, of her campaign, of my campaign. I'm not going to be around to see another woman run. I'm really not."

One of the ironies in this contest is that when Ms. Clinton first plotted her candidacy, she doubtless viewed herself as the agent of change, a trailblazer in the mould of Ms. Ferraro who could make history by becoming the first woman to gain the presidency.

Instead, she encountered Mr. Obama, a charismatic and silver-tongued rival with a competing, and equally powerful, claim to history, which would put the first African American in the Oval Office. If he lacks her experience, he is also free of the burden of perceptions she has shouldered since her days in Washington.

"I wish she could come across as a little bit more of a 'bring us together' voice," Ms. McCoy says. "But she is a litigator — you can't change a leopard's spots. … And is that necessary? To really like our leaders?"

Another skilled Democrat, Bill Clinton, might say so. He famously remarked that Democrats prefer to fall in love with their candidates, while Republicans prefer to fall in line. Unfortunately for Hillary Clinton, his words appear to be ringing true.

Sinclair Stewart is a Globe and Mail reporter based in New York