For half an hour, Hillary Clinton sits in a corner of a couch, in a corner of the Internet, answering questions read by her “campaign blogger.” The questions are mostly from women, like “Ann in San Diego,” and the selections are not exactly hard-hitting: An older widow wants to know if Clinton is concerned about the problems of older widows. (She is.)

On hillaryclinton.com, last week featured the first three Webcasts, an hour and a half of Clinton listening intently, occasionally laughing and once even pausing to hit the water bottle. She answers questions softly, conversationally – although at some length, recalling the old image of the smartest person in the class.

Of course, after the last six years of the country trying the opposite approach, that image may no longer be a such a negative.

Clinton chatting on a couch is not electrifying stuff. It’s dismissed as the New York senator trying to soften her image, especially by people convinced she has the underlying cold-bloodedness of an iguana in a headband.

But there’s a reason that women candidates often go for a conversational style, as opposed to stem-winding oratory. It seems it doesn’t take much to make male voters nervous.

Where a male candidate is “forceful,” a female candidate is “shrill.” Two powerful male politicians in conflict are having a “turf battle,” two powerful female politicians in conflict – a prospect increasingly common in the new Congress – are having a “catfight.” A male candidate campaigning with children expresses “family values,” a female candidate appearing in the same underage crowd – as Clinton did this week – is accused of “mommyism.”

Politics is different for female candidates, even candidates for jobs that include the nuclear launch codes. They have the double challenge of proving that they’re both hard enough and soft enough.

As the first female frontrunner for a presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton faces a challenge, and sets a pattern, that nobody has ever tried before.

It’s fascinating to watch Clinton negotiate this path on her Web chats, producing for each question enough detail to show she’s not too soft, enough hominess to show she’s not too hard. Giving the Bush administration a “D” for its performance on one issue, she adds, “It may not be a failing grade, but I sure wouldn’t want to bring it home to my mother.” She apologizes for an energy position “longer and more wonkish than I can put on a Web chat.” On health care, she’ll be “asking people for their ideas on what they think would work.”

This campaign-as-conversation strategy has worked for Clinton before. When she was preparing to run for senator from New York, a state she didn’t live in, she repeatedly traveled the upstate Republican territory on a “listening tour.” It became a political media joke, but Clinton ended up running better in the region than Democrats actually from New York usually did.

Now the question is whether a candidate can use the Internet – and a homey-looking couch – for a nationwide listening tour. The tactic pioneers a new pattern for the kind of presidential candidate unlikely to have a photo opportunity hunting ducks, and having to be very careful not to be angry in public.

The country may be ready for a new approach.

At the same time Clinton was launching her Web chats, Vice President Cheney sat for a standard politician’s interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. With just the kind of attitude that would be a problem for a woman politician, Cheney gazed at his interviewer with his usual loathing and declared firmly that any idea that blunders have compromised the U.S. position and credibility in Iraq is “hogwash.”

In fact, he said firmly, “bottom line is we’ve had enormous successes and will continue to have enormous successes.”

Somehow, a woman senator running for president conversationally seems less of a problem than a vice president not on speaking terms with reality.