Lessons Learned From Last Time

The truth is that she is an enormously complicated person, as most interesting people are, and the fact that she remains a figure of some mystery 16 years after she first emerged on the national stage is both her fault and ours in the press. Life in that insular bubble nearly killed her presidential campaign. She has, perhaps too late, become more accessible. The question is whether she and the media—and by extension the rest of the country—can ever move past the tired narratives that first emerged in 1992.

Still, Barack Obama and John McCain should study that campaign. For much of 1992, the campaign's internal polling showed Hillary had significantly high negatives. Then a remarkable thing happened—the Republican National Convention. As would be expected, Bill Clinton took much of the Republican assault. But a special scorn, shrill and almost comically over the top, was reserved for Hillary. Almost overnight her negatives dropped, and for the rest of that campaign most voters viewed her favorably. It happened again during the impeachment saga of her husband, and we have since seen it more than once. Nothing helps her more than to be attacked by her enemies (think of the phenomenon as a slightly bizarre twist on FDR's maxim about an unsavory Latin American potentate: "He may be an S.O.B., but he's our S.O.B."). For Hillary Clinton, the gender debate cuts both ways. And she knows it.

© 2008