WASHINGTON – A three-hour-plus think-tank forum about suburbs isn’t the stuff of headlines or television cameras, unless those cameras belong to C-Span. Yet there Senator Clinton was on Wednesday morning, delivering an address about suburban policy to a standing-room only crowd at the Brookings Institution here. Why?

Mrs. Clinton was making a bet. The big story from the 2004 election was that the Democrats lost the suburbs. Mrs. Clinton, being a savvy politician and a probable 2008 presidential candidate, understands that any viable Democratic candidate will need to find a way to appeal to those suburban voters. So while some Democrats are busy rallying their party’s far-left moveon.org activist base, Senator Clinton took a tour through suburbia.

Her “guidebook” is a new report from Brookings titled “One-Fifth of America: A Comprehensive Guide to America’s First Suburbs.” The report defines a “first suburb” as a community, like Nassau County on Long Island, abutting any of the 100 most populous cities in 1950. These were the areas that absorbed the first wave of urban flight immediately after World War II. They still house about 19% of America’s population.

They also, according to the report, present a unique set of challenges now that they are into their second and third generations. Their infrastructure is aging or lacking. Increasing property values squeeze long-time residents whose incomes haven’t kept pace with their property tax bills, a particular concern for elderly residents. Their economies are squeezed by revitalized cities that offer businesses the appeal of an urban address and further-out suburbs that offer businesses lower costs.

Mrs. Clinton is gambling that residents of these first suburbs want politicians who will take care of them. She used her address at the Brookings Institution to highlight her Suburban Core Opportunity, Restoration, and Enhancement Act, a bill that would open the spigot of federal aid for a host of redevelopment projects that often don’t get funded right now since first suburbs don’t meet the eligibility criteria for most existing programs, whether because they’re the wrong kind of municipality – a county instead of a city – or because their residents’ incomes or property values are too high.

Mrs. Clinton’s message to suburbanites, from the midst of a Democratic party that of late seems more aligned with the interests of high-earning, highly educated, left-wing urban elites, boils down to “I am one of you.” She speaks at length of growing up in a suburb, of how her math teacher told her class, after the Sputnik launch, that President Eisenhower expected them to work hard at math and science. Now she lives part of the time in Westchester County’s Chappaqua.

But understanding the need to appeal to suburban voters and crafting a message that will actually do that are two different things. Mrs. Clinton’s talk is laden with her vision of what government can do for the suburbs, from generalities like “reinvigorating the basic bargain” of the postwar generation, in which society supposedly promised members of the middle class that they would prosper if they worked hard, to specifics like her legislation, which would extend many beloved inner-city federal development programs into the suburbs.

This is a stark contrast to the Republican idea of the suburban voter whom President Bush wooed so successfully. Republicans see suburbanites as independent-minded people, and with some justification. In trading in their doorman buildings for their three-bedroom houses, suburbanites strike out on their own. They leave behind apartment buildings with perimeter keys to protect their property and supers to fix their leaks in favor of homes where, if the dryer belt breaks, they have to head to the Sears for a replacement. And even if the cost and inconvenience is a pain, many of them seem to glory in it nonetheless. Witness the success of Home Depots catering to suburban do-it-yourselfers.

President Bush’s “ownership society” rhetoric is tailor-made for the Home Depot crowd, whether second-generation suburbanites who grew up with their fathers scraping and painting and mowing on the weekends or more recent urban emigres who throw themselves with a passion into their new homes. Mrs. Clinton’s legislation, on the other hand, is more likely to appeal to a class of unreformed urbanites who have found themselves in the suburbs as a result of childbirth or rising city real estate prices but who haven’t undergone a fundamental change in attitude.

The two appeals to suburban voters aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. Suburbanites could well love the feeling of independence that comes from living in a home they own and yet still expect the federal government to pay for road repairs or a rehab of the 1960s-era shopping plaza down the street. President Bush won, however, without making any promises about government grants for the suburbs. So maybe there’s something to this ownership society thing after all.

Mrs. Clinton understands that her presidential aspirations will hinge on the suburbs. It’s too soon to say, however, whether she understands the suburbs themselves.