How She Would Govern

Candidate Clinton, of course, is above doing loyalty enforcement herself. It is clear to anyone who watches her that Clinton has a strong sense of what a president should and should not do. At the CNN-YouTube debate earlier this summer, she artfully chided Obama for putting the country's prestige at risk when he said he would be willing to talk to dictators. In prepping for the debate, her advisers reviewed countless YouTube submissions, but missed the dictators question. Clinton's answer, they say, was simply her own instinct.

But the real evidence about what kind of president Hillary would be may lie in the things she isn't saying—or isn't saying yet. Friends and advisers say that the current Iraq debate obscures a simple truth about Hillary Clinton: 15 years inside The System have made her a fervent believer in the strong, smart management of American power. "At this stage of the '91 campaign, Bill Clinton didn't know anything about the use of power and only a limited amount about international affairs," says a top aide who was aware he was deviating from campaign script and would discuss Clinton's thinking only anonymously. "She's tougher than he is. She's not going to advertise that during the primary process. But everyone who knows her knows that."

Or at least those who think they know her. It is a curious fact of the 2008 campaign that Hillary Clinton has been part of American life for so long and yet the details of her thinking, and the ways in which she makes decisions, are so little understood. To get the chance to change the country, she will have to make the case that she herself has changed.

With Susannah Meadows, Eleanor Clift, Karen Breslau, Michael Hirsh, Jessica Ramirez, Kurt Soller And Katie Connolly

© 2007