News Analysis: Hillary Clinton faces challenge to sell herself as folksy candidate

In U.S. presidential elections, personality often trumps policy, and that may prove to be Hillary Clinton's major challenge in the race to the White House.

Clinton on Sunday announced her run for the White House in a three-minute video, presenting herself as a "champion" of the middle class at a time when U.S. middle class families are being squeezed from all sides.

Clinton's short videotaped speech, released on Monday, is apparently aimed at portraying herself as a champion of the middle class. "Americans have fought their way back from tough economic times, but the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top," she said in the video.

"Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion," she said.

As a former First Lady and Secretary of State in the first term of the Obama administration, Clinton's brand is recognized internationally as she had traveled to more than 100 countries, meeting with many world leaders.

But all that won't matter as she campaigns to get the votes of ordinary middle class people, and she will have to sell herself as a folksy candidate who can relate to average people, which has always been a struggle for her.

While Clinton comes off as poised and confident, she lacks the charisma and relatability of her husband, former President Bill Clinton, experts said.

"Her greatest weakness is that she lacks the personal charm of her husband. But she comes across as very competent so that will help her in the campaign," Brookings Institution's senior fellow Darrell West told Xinhua.

Moreover, polls find that many Americans, even those of her own party, do not trust Clinton, especially after the revelations that she solely used a private email account to conduct business during her four-year tenure as secretary of state, and kept a private server at her residence.

That sparked a wave of controversy and myriad questions, such as whether she sent any classified information through the account. While she denied ever sending anything classified through the email, critics said that was unlikely in a job in which classified emails are routinely sent.

One of Clinton's big problems "is that she has a trust deficit -- people are not seeing her as honest and trustworthy," Republican strategist Ford O' Connell said.

In a Bloomberg poll published Friday, 53 percent of Democrats and Independents said they believed Clinton "purposefully withheld or deleted some" of her emails. < Clinton seems to have learned a lesson from her 2008 presidential bid, which faltered after her defeat by incumbent President Barack Obama for the Democratic Party's nomination. Using the slogan "I'm in it to win it" in 2008, Clinton was criticized for being arrogant and out of touch with everyday American voters.

With the 2008 defeat in mind, Clinton is now trying to counter any negative public perceptions of aloofness, by kicking off her campaign Tuesday with a low-key road trip to the state of Iowa, which will hold the first vote. Clinton only ranked the third in Iowa's party nomination vote in 2008.

Clinton drove to Iowa in a van and ate lunch at a Mexican chain restaurant on Tuesday. Her current mode of travel sits in sharp contrast to the chartered helicopter she used in her 2008 campaign for president.

Instead of holding big events to publicize her campaign, Clinton will hold smaller roundtable meetings in Iowa to interact with common voters such as college students and small business owners. Endi