This Woman's Job is to Recast Hillary Clinton's Image

To get a brief reprieve from the pressures of working in the White House, Kristina Schake, a former aide to the first lady, Michelle Obama, took a class about her favorite painter, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.

She noticed that the Italian painter often showed Christ with bare feet, portraying his subject as a common man.

It was a lesson that informed Schake's job in the East Wing when, as the first lady's communications chief, she encouraged her to take an undercover shopping trip to a Target in suburban Alexandria, Virginia, to showcase her dance moves on "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon" and to make a cameo at the Oscars.

Positioning a public figure is not exactly the work of a Baroque master, and a trip to Target does not a work of art make.

Nevertheless, the lesson from Caravaggio was clear in Schake's approach.

Having helped shape Obama's public image into that of an accessible everywoman, Schake is about to face what may be her toughest challenge yet: working to get another first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, elected president.

Clinton, who is expected to announce her candidacy this month, has brought Schake, 45, to her 2016 communications team to try to tackle an issue that dogged the 2008 Clinton campaign.

Back then, Clinton's advisers argued she should emphasize strength and experience, rather than her softer side, a strategic decision that Ann Lewis, a senior adviser in that race, has called the "biggest missed opportunity" in the failed 2008 primary contest against Barack Obama.

Now, after two decades in the public eye, Clinton must try to show voters a self-effacing, warm and funny side that her friends say reflects who she really is. In short, she must counteract an impression that she is just "likable enough," as Barack Obama famously quipped in 2008.

As the campaign's presumptive deputy communications director, Schake will be behind the effort to transport the Hillary brand beyond paid campaign television ads, policy discussions and the requisite sit-down with a nightly news anchor.

The daughter of a stay-at-home mother and a commercial airline pilot from Sonoma, California, Schake is best known for finding ways to communicate with Americans outside the coastal elite - a perspective Clinton, who lives in Chappaqua, New York, and regularly commands a speaking fee of more than $200,000, will need.

That won't necessarily mean she will mimic Michelle Obama's "Driving the Station Wagon" dance on late-night TV, but Clinton could, for example, talk to the Food Network about dinners with girlfriends or discuss her yoga routines on a health and wellness blog.

The proliferation of new ways to reach voters through multiple devices means "it's not the same formula in politics that it was even just four years ago or eight years ago," said Stephanie Cutter, a Democratic strategist and a deputy campaign manager for the Obama re-election campaign. "It's about understanding people who are just living their lives and figuring out ways to fit a candidate into that, rather than vice versa."

Schake, who declined to be interviewed for this article, first learned what resonates with a mass American audience from the man best known for "All in the Family" and "When Harry Met Sally." In 1998, actor and director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, hired her to help with their push to pass a ballot initiative that would add a 50-cent tax to each pack of cigarettes sold in California to fund early childhood education.

Ron Reiner said Schake consistently reminded him not to veer from the predetermined script, which had an almost cinematic simplicity.

"Every step of the way it was 'the good guys are fighting the bad guys,'" Reiner said in an interview. "It was, 'Do you want to support big tobacco or do you want to support little children?'"

The initiative passed despite the roughly $40 million the tobacco lobby spent to defeat it.

Reiner introduced Schake to Chad Griffin, a former aide in the Clinton White House who is now the president of the Human Rights Campaign. Griffin and Schake became best friends and together started Griffin-Schake, a Los Angeles-based public affairs shop.

They handled media relations for Maria Shriver when she was the first lady of California.

Schake was one of the first people Griffin came out to, on the rooftop of the Standard Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. "She worked to get the story out of me, and she got what she wanted," Griffin said.

The battle for gay rights soon became the two friends' focus when they became central players in the legal case against Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that barred same-sex couples from marrying.

Schake prepared the plaintiffs for the crush of publicity while also showing a mainstream audience that they were just ordinary committed couples.

A month before the Supreme Court dismissed the California measure, Schake persuaded Kris Perry and Sandy Stier of Berkeley, California, who had been together more than a decade, to pose for a feature in People magazine.

"I was really self-conscious about being the only really physically gay-looking one" of the plaintiffs, Perry said in an interview. She told Schake she thought she should change her hair or wear different clothes. "She just put her hand on my shoulder and said, 'No, that is not going to happen,'" Perry said.

In 2010, Schake stepped back from the gay marriage fight to work for Michelle Obama, a position for which Shriver recommended her.

She promoted Obama's "Let's Move!" initiative to fight childhood obesity, spreading the first lady's message with appearances on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" and "Top Chef" and in her famous "Mom Dancing" routine with Fallon, which generated 22 million views on YouTube.

"She was in California, so she didn't have an ingrained Washington way of doing things, which I think let her take a fresh look at things," said Susan Sher, the former chief of staff to Michelle Obama who hired Schake.

Can Schake help Hillary Clinton come across as more than 'likable enough'?

After a position in the West Wing fell through, Schake joined L'Oreal USA as the cosmetics company's chief communications officer. Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, said he thought Schake had "retired from politics" before the Clinton campaign called.

"She is happiest when she's working on things like the marriage campaign," said her older sister, Kori Schake, a prominent Republican who held a senior position on President George W. Bush's National Security Council. "She was very much drawn to the historic opportunity to help Secretary Clinton."

The bipartisan Schake sisters stick together despite their political differences. Kristina Schake used to intervene whenever their parents' liberal friends in Northern California tried to debate the Iraq War. "She'd say, 'We're so happy Kori is home for the holidays, please don't make her do her job,'" Kori said.

A relatively new New Yorker, Kristina Schake lives with her longtime boyfriend, an Albanian journalist she met in Rome. She frequently attends exhibitions of photography and art, and walks the streets listening to Bowery Boys podcasts about the history of the subway system. She will likely work out of the Clinton campaign's headquarters in Brooklyn.

It remains to be seen whether veteran Clinton aides will empower newcomers like Schake and whether Clinton will be open to trying new things that could prove risky. Schake will work under her friend Jennifer Palmieri, a former White House communications director who also worked in the Clinton administration. Other veteran Clinton aides, including Mandy Grunwald, will also advise, particularly about Clinton's backstory.

A person familiar with Clinton camp discussions who could not go on the record before the campaign's official start said that Clinton does not need a "life coach" and that Schake's value will be to figure out new ways to spread the former secretary of state's central message of lifting the middle class.

To that end, Schake, whom Anita Dunn, a former White House communications director, described as "an island of tranquillity and calm when everything is going crazy," often sits in on early strategy and policy meetings, in addition to typical powwows about communications and press coverage.

No matter how effective Clinton's message, voters tend to have an intangible hankering when it comes to presidential candidates. "You have to feel a person's warmth and humanness, because you're going to see them in your living room for four years," said Rob Reiner, a longtime Clinton supporter.

That's easier said than done in the throes of a campaign when even genuine acts can seem like political posturing. In 2008, critics accused Clinton of pandering when she cried in a diner in New Hampshire and downed a shot of whiskey in Indiana.

"When you see Hillary Clinton alone, she's a good old girl," Reiner said, echoing the familiar lament that voters just don't know the real Hillary. "She likes to have a beer and laugh."