How She Would Govern

But success in the Senate was about more than controlling the paper flow; Clinton had to convince people who didn't agree with her, or even like her. The conversion narratives are by now clichéd: how Trent Lott, who wondered if "maybe lightning will strike" before Clinton could take her Senate seat, came to admire her low-key manner. How Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who'd served as a manager of the impeachment case against Clinton's husband, worked closely with Clinton on veterans issues on the Armed Services Committee. Clinton is quick to believe her own bipartisan hype. Asked if she has an easier time trusting Republicans as senator than she did as First Lady, she instead talks about how easy it's been for Republicans to trust her: "If you had said to me eight or nine years ago that I'd be working with Trent or Lindsey or a lot of these folks," she tells NEWSWEEK, "I would think you're probably a little cross-eyed."

Clinton's critics note that for all the bipartisan back-patting she gives herself, she has no transformative piece of legislation to show for it. Then again, who has produced transformative legislation in the past 10 years? While it is nearly impossible to find examples of Clinton's consciously putting her personal popularity at risk in order to work with the other side, it is indisputable that she is a more pragmatic thinker than the obstinate Hillary of health-care days. "Incremental steps can be very big," Luzzatto says.

To many in her party, however, Clinton is often too afraid of political risk. Their most compelling piece of evidence: Iraq. It is hard to remember now, but in her early days in the Senate, it was taken for granted that Clinton's greatest political imperative was to boost her hawk credentials. As a woman, and a Clinton, she had to prove that she could be as tough as any man if she ever wanted to run for the presidency. After joining the Senate Armed Services Committee, she immersed herself in details of force structure and military preparedness. She reached out to generals and formed a close bond with Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, an Army ranger and paratrooper. In October 2002, she joined 28 other Democrats in voting to authorize the Iraq War.

Clinton says the Iraq War vote was without "any doubt" the most important one she's made as senator, the product of a "difficult, painful, painstaking" decision-making process. Over and over in the campaign, she and her aides have said that her vote was one of principle, not expediency, that she sincerely believed her "yea" would give Colin Powell the leverage he needed to persuade the administration to wait to invade until it had the support of the United Nations. This is hard for many in either party to believe. "Everyone knew that was in fact a war resolution," says one former Clinton administration official, who now supports Obama and did not want to criticize Clinton on the record. "The overwhelming sense among the Dems then was that this was a politically sensitive vote. They didn't want to be on the wrong side of a winning war, and a popular president. Political calculations were pre-eminent in the decision." Indeed, in her persistent refusal to acknowledge that political realities played any role in her decision, she seems most like the old Hillary—incapable of admitting a flaw.

The young Clinton presidential campaign has, to date, been classic Hillary: disciplined, efficient and loyalty-obsessed. Her closest aides are veterans of her two runs for Senate in New York. In staffing the campaign, these senior loyalists had two criteria: find the best of the best and the brightest and find people who wanted to work for Hillary. "You would interview people and some people would say, 'I really want to do a presidential'," says a senior adviser who would speak about the campaign process only anonymously. 'That was the wrong answer. The right answer was, 'I really want to work for her'."

Clinton and her aides are smart enough to know that a reputation for loyalty enforcement may not be helpful after six and a half years of George W. Bush. She and her staff are quick to talk about the vigorous debate behind closed doors and how in meeting after meeting Clinton can be counted on to ask silent participants what they think. In the early days of the Obama campaign, Washington, New York and Los Angeles twittered with stories of Clinton staffers arm-twisting waffling Democrats, stories the Clinton campaign vigorously denied. Still, the message seems to have gotten through. "Every dinner I go to there's someone who starts all their conversations with, 'Well, I support Hillary'," says a Democratic donor who has given money to Clinton, Obama and Edwards, and would not even say which city he lived in on the record for fear of retribution from the Clintons. "It's 'The Hills Have Eyes'."