How Tomorrow Became Yesterday

The strange part of all this is that Hillary has been a better-than-expected presidential candidate. She is substantive and strong and, with one notable exception, a better debater so far than Obama. But overall she is only a good candidate, not a great one. Like most women in politics, she lacks a critical asset. Male candidates can establish a magnetic and often sexual connection to women in the audience. (Just watch Bill Clinton, Obama or Edwards work a rope line.) Women candidates can't use sex appeal (except in France), which leaves them playing the sisterhood card. As Hillary learned in Iowa and other women candidates for lower office have discovered to their frustration over the years, "you go girl!" appeals are worth some votes but don't make for a winning strategy.

So that leaves grit, a quality that both Clintons have in abundance. Just as there was never any chance that President Clinton would resign after revelations that he lied about an affair with Monica Lewinsky, so there is no chance that Hillary will drop out even if she's 0-4 going into Super Tuesday on Feb. 5, and little chance she will drop out after that date if she wins a couple of big states that day.

"Grit, resolve, displays of character under pressure are the keys to correcting course," says one senior Clinton adviser, who, like all those talking after her devastating loss in Iowa, spoke only on background. Bill Clinton set the template for that in 1992 as "The Comeback Kid" after he bounced back from womanizing and draft-dodging stories to finish second in New Hampshire and relaunch his campaign. The idea now is for Hillary to hunker down for a long struggle where she chips away at Obama's stature. With the media always looking for a new narrative, some upset somewhere is all but inevitable. But the Clintons' efforts to have the Democratic Party front-load the primaries (the idea being that Hillary could wrap it up quickly and concentrate on the fall campaign) has boomeranged badly. Hillary has only a month to get her groove fully back. If Walter Mondale had had to campaign with this schedule in 1984, Gary Hart would have been the nominee.

Another problem with the 1992 analogy is that Obama is no Paul Tsongas, the eat-your-peas winner of New Hampshire that year who was easy prey on Super Tuesday when he gave Clinton an opening on Social Security and Medicare. Hillary will continue her efforts to depict Obama as possessing an inferior health-care plan that lacks mandates and thus would not insure everyone. But Obama has successfully countered that you shouldn't be forced to buy something you cannot afford, and he has plenty of money to put this defense on the air.

Where Clinton might have a little more success is on the economy, which seems to be headed for a recession. Her husband managed to tap into anxiety about sluggish growth and the global economy without reverting to the anticorporate message of a John Edwards, which Clinton saw as part of the Democratic Party's past. We'll see if Obama can do that—and match it with concrete plans for the economy—but in the meantime his positions as a "New Democrat" are mostly indistinguishable from those of the Clintons. With Edwards now representing less than a third of Democrats (if Iowa, a strong union state, is to be believed), Clintonism has already been vindicated.

The Clintons themselves are a different matter. For all the talk of "Clinton Redux" or "Clinton Fatigue," another possibility might be "Clinton Irrelevance"—where Bill is beloved as an elder statesman and global citizen with much to contribute (his foundation has already raised hundreds of millions to fight AIDS and other global afflictions), and Hillary settles in as a widely respected senator.