Sitting amid coffee mugs and microphones at a New Hampshire diner Monday, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton became emotional in talking about the grind of the presidential campaign. “This is very personal to me,” she said. “It’s not just political. It’s not just public.”

Now, in the wake of her victory in Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, experts are saying the catch in Clinton’s voice helped her to catch Sen. Barack Obama, who had led in the polls.

“Part of her problem was that she was perceived as just one arm of this broader Clinton machine that is cold and calculating and impersonal,” Brown University political science Prof. Jennifer Lawless said yesterday. “This was a moment you actually saw her being real.”

But experts also cautioned that other factors were at play in Clinton’s victory and that the diner moment was part of a larger dynamic.

“Hillary’s ‘human moment’ might have helped, but it was a teary moment in the context of hard-edged, loud-mouthed political pundits saying her career was over,” Dartmouth College government Prof. Linda L. Fowler said. “There was so much glee in the media after her upset in Iowa, with people writing her political obituary. New Hampshire voters generally didn’t like being told how they were going to vote before they voted, and women in particular didn’t like that.”

Lawless — who wrote a 2005 book called It Takes a Candidate: Why Women Don’t Run for Office and who lost a 2006 Democratic primary to U.S. Rep. James R. Langevin — said the diner moment mattered because it probably represented what Clinton was like on the campaign trail during the last few days of the New Hampshire contest.

Some 15 to 20 percent of voters made up their minds within the last 36 hours, Lawless said. So the diner moment might have swayed them, and those voters would not have been reflected in the polls that showed Obama leading, she said.

Fowler said women are more likely to decide just before an election. “And when you have 20 percent of an electorate undecided just before an election, smaller things like the diner moment can be more significant,” she said.

But Lawless and Fowler agreed that the diner moment alone did not catapult Clinton to victory. For example, Lawless said Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain competed for New Hampshire’s independent voters, and McCain won that battle. Also, Fowler said New Hampshire has “a pretty strong Clinton organization that she and Bill have tended to for years.”

Lt. Gov. Elizabeth H. Roberts, a Democrat who supports Clinton, said that Clinton had said she found her voice in New Hampshire, and she didn’t think Clinton was referring only to the diner moment.

In both New Hampshire and Iowa, voters get to meet candidates and hear their speeches, Roberts said. “New Hampshire is like Rhode Island in that closeness to our elected officials,” she said.

And in New Hampshire, Clinton “decided to let her emotion and passion out a little bit more,” Roberts said. “When she is out in a crowd, she is a dynamic, intelligent, funny, engaging person. That doesn’t always come through, but people got a chance to see that in New Hampshire.”

Another local Clinton supporter, Marcia ConÉ-Tighe, said Clinton would have won without the diner moment. “People went out and heard her speak, went to her public events and walked away really feeling strongly about her passion and commitment to leading the country,” she said.

ConÉ-Tighe is executive director of the Women’s Fund of Rhode Island, a nonprofit organization that focuses on the political participation and economic autonomy of women, but she emphasized the organization was nonpartisan and she supported Clinton as an individual.

ConÉ-Tighe said displays of emotion get interpreted differently depending on a candidate’s gender. “When a woman candidate gets emotional, some think it’s weakness,” she said. But when President Bush shows emotion, people finding it touching, she said.

On the other hand, Fowler noted Edmund S. Muskie’s 1972 presidential campaign fizzled in New Hampshire after news reports said he cried as he stood in front of The Manchester Union-Leader, bitterly denouncing the publisher’s editorial attacks on his wife.

But she said former President Bill Clinton and Mr. Bush seem to get choked up on a regular basis. “So maybe these teary-eye men are making it safer for women to be emotional,” she said.

Still, even if Hillary Clinton’s emotion helped her in New Hampshire, there is a chance it could harm her in the general election, “when there will be the issue of who’ll be commander in chief,” Fowler said. “It’s now on film, and it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to think what a clever ad person might do with that.”

Female candidates find themselves “walking a fine line between being perceived tough enough to handle the job and stereotypes that women who are assertive are bitchy,” Fowler said. “When a man is being aggressive, he’s tough or showing leadership, but when women do that, they often get a negative reaction.”

Clinton did an excellent job of walking that line during Saturday’s debate, Fowler said.

Lawless said pundits questioned the authenticity of Clinton’s diner moment, but she thought the average person saw it as real. “People could empathize with her,” she said.

Lawless said Clinton needed to win New Hampshire. Now, she said, “it’s a very clear and tight two-person race.”

efitzpat@projo.com