The Expectation Gap

He had success pulling together Democrats and Republicans to fix the broken death-penalty system, and he has had some luck reforming campaign-finance and lobbying rules. In Illinois he worked with three lawmakers to stop politicians from using campaign funds to pay for personal expenses. But he has also run head-on into political reality. In Washington, as a junior U.S. senator, he pushed a bill to require nuclear power plants to disclose any leaks—but the bill was watered down when nuclear-industry executives, nuclear regulators and Senate Republicans objected, and it never passed.

Obama's style has always been inclusive and accommodating. Partly because he grew up as the son of a black father and a white mother in Hawaii, a place dominated by whites, Asians and Pacific Islanders, he has long since learned to adjust to different, and sometimes conflicting, points of view. Running for president of the Harvard Law Review during a period of jousting over political correctness in the early '90s, he managed to convince members of every faction that he agreed with them, according to a 2007 New York Times profile. Such crowd-pleasing can unjustifiably raise expectations. If Obama is elected president of the United States in November, he will disappoint some of his more-ecstatic believers if he doesn't achieve world peace and end hunger in the first 100 days.

Hillary Clinton's approach to change has evolved over time. As a student leader at Wellesley in the tumultuous late '60s, she was an effective compromiser, bringing faculty and antiwar protesters together. But as First Lady in the Clinton administration, she earned a reputation for being stubborn, haughty and vindictive. She brooked no dissent to her massive health-care-reform plan in 1993. In "For Love of Politics," Sally Bedell Smith's account of Bill and Hillary Clinton in the White House, the author describes a scene of health-care providers' trying to persuade her to pare down her proposed regulatory behemoth. Clinton "stiffened so noticeably," recalled Michael Bromberg, a lobbyist for private hospitals. "Her body language was angry … She really believes that if you criticize one page of a 1,364-page bill, you're the enemy." Her fellow Democrats did no better. When Congressman Jim Cooper of Tennessee joined with two old Senate hands—the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and John Breaux of Louisiana—to try to broker a less far-reaching bill, "she rejected us coldly," Cooper told NEWSWEEK. "We got no compromise. We got the hammer."

Clinton says now that she was chastened and educated by the failure of health-care reform in 1993. Working behind the scenes with Sen. Ted Kennedy and GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch, she helped pass a health-insurance plan for children in 1997. "You often learn more about a person when they don't succeed than when they do," she often tells audiences on the campaign trail. As a senator, she has reached across the aisle. She has worked with Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina—who as a member of the House helped lead the battle to impeach her husband during the Monica Lewinsky scandal—to establish health-care benefits for Reserve and National Guard troops who have served in Iraq. "I have even worked with Newt Gingrich," she says in a mischievous voice to campaign crowds, pausing to let the horror sink in. As audiences start to hiss, she delivers her punch line with a sly grin and so-sue-me shrug. "Like I said, there isn't anything I won't do to solve a problem."

More recently, say supporters, her drubbing in Iowa provided a glimpse of how she handles disappointment. While her ubiquitous husband was focused on blame and what went wrong, Hillary grimly concentrated on what to do next. In part by opening up a little, warming up to previously shunned reporters and nearly shedding a tear in New Hampshire, she was able to recover and stage yet another Clinton "comeback."

The catch is that voters can never be sure which Clinton they will get day to day, says Carl Bernstein, the former Washington Post reporter and author of "A Woman in Charge," a Clinton biography. "In this campaign, as in other periods in her life since college, one day you can get the demonizing, I-am-victim Hillary. The next day you get the compromising, more thoughtful Hillary," Bernstein told NEWSWEEK. Which Clinton would show up back in the White House? Some Hillary watchers think she was able to assert her independent, true self as a senator, away from her dominating husband. But the former president would likely be a real presence in the White House, dragging Hillary back into the coils of a complex and fraught relationship. Of course, it is equally hard to predict how Obama would react to the severe and often surprising challenges of the presidency. That is the problem with gauging the characters of presidential candidates: you can't really know until it's too late.

With Karen Fragala Smith, Martha Brant, Daniel Stone, Jessica Ramirez and Elise Soukup

© 2008