Always Their Own Worst Enemies

The campaign's new (new) approach was obvious but necessary: to both sharpen the negatives against Obama and personalize Hillary. She has never wanted to go on "Saturday Night Live" or "The Daily Show," but in the days before Ohio and Texas she did both—and did well, showing surprising comic timing and self-deprecation.

Hillary is not, and will never be, a happy warrior. Her broad, fixed smile masks resentments not far from the surface. Though she sometimes lost herself to teary outbursts as First Lady—at least a few aimed at her husband—she has, by and large, controlled her emotions on the campaign trail, behind the scenes as well as onstage. An exception was her reaction to MSNBC reporter David Shuster's suggestion that the Clintons had "pimped out" their daughter, Chelsea. She was "extraordinarily upset," says a staffer who was on the conference call informing her of the journalist's comments but declined to be identified discussing conversations with the candidate. "Enough is enough," Hillary said, and threatened to pull out of an MSNBC debate (Shuster was suspended for two weeks and the debate went on).

Both Hillary and the former president share a world view that it may be necessary to tolerate the press from time to time but that in the long run, the media will never give them a fair shake. It is a dark, if perhaps realistic, view reinforced by Mark Penn, who counsels the once and possibly future First Couple to forget about the "impressionable elites," the know-it-all journalists, professors and think-tankers who are obsessed with "likability." Pay attention to the "jugheads," not the "eggheads," counsels Penn in his book, "Microtrends," the voters who make less than $50,000 a year and "know what it feels like to be without health insurance or a job."

Hillary Clinton has shown that she can handle the pressures of a relentless campaign. Her friend and adviser Sidney Blumenthal jokes that the press is in love with the "Perils of Pauline" storyline about Hillary that makes her seem like the heroine of one of those old silent movies, tied to the tracks while the locomotive bears down. The difference is that Hillary herself has slipped out of the bind without being rescued by anyone—certainly not by her husband.

With Martha Brant, Karen Breslau, Arian Campo-Flores and Suzanne Smalley

© 2008