Letting Hillary Be Hillary

"Look, guys, I'm taking questions, as many as we can do." She had screwed up in Iowa, she was coming to believe, because she had been too removed, played it cool. It had been a mistake.

This anecdote, which comes from a source close to the Clinton campaign who wants to remain anonymous discussing the candidate, is predictably self-serving. It does, however, speak to the issue Clinton faced coming out of Iowa, and still faces. Until New Hampshire, she campaigned for president as though everyone knew her, but many of them did not like the Clinton they thought they knew—or at least they liked Obama more. She assumed, she told NEWSWEEK, that voters knew the Hillary who had come to New York in 1999, introduced herself on her own terms, and had become a successful senator.

She was wrong, and has, by necessity, become suddenly accessible to voters and journalists. Whether she would be trying to humanize herself if she had won Iowa is an interesting but ultimately irrelevant question. She bears a lot of the responsibility for the negative narrative that has so long enveloped her, from her 1992 comments seeming to disparage stay-at-home mothers ("I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas") and stay-with-husband wives ("I'm not some little Tammy Wynette") to her resistance to compromise on health care and on Whitewater.

But most political figures who are in the arena for a long time—or even a short time—make mistakes, say things they should not, and whatever the merits, wind up caricatured and under siege; Thomas Jefferson faced the equivalent of attack ads in 1800, so we are not exactly in unexplored territory. Is she retooling in order to win? Do we even need to ask that? This is a campaign, and campaigns are about not only vision but votes.

In New Hampshire, Bill Clinton appeared to dismiss Obama's campaign as "the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen," a remark that infuriated many African-Americans. "When has 'black' and 'fairy tale' ever been mentioned in the same sentence?" asked Todd Boyd, professor of African-American and Critical Studies at the University of Southern California. "That was just insulting, and he needs to be very careful." Clinton called Al Sharpton's radio show to clarify, arguing that the "fairy tale" remark was limited to Obama's claim that he would have opposed the Iraq War if he had been in the Senate in 2002–03 despite expressing some doubts to The New York Times in 2004: "What would I have done? I don't know. What I know is that from my vantage point the case was not made." And when Hillary Clinton noted that while Martin Luther King Jr. marched, it "took a president"—Lyndon Johnson—to get civil-rights legislation passed and signed, the comment prompted some Obama supporters to say that Clinton was minimizing King. By late last week, South Carolina Rep. James E. Clyburn felt compelled to issue a statement calling for a ceasefire: "I encourage the candidates to be sensitive about the words they use. This is an historic race for America to have such strong, diverse candidates vying for the Democratic nomination." John Lewis, the Georgia congressman, civil-rights veteran and perennial optimist, said, "I hope we will put these issues of gender and race to rest and return to the marketplace of politics."

But what if the experience of the post-Iowa presidential campaign proves true as the contest moves out of largely white states: that gender and race are inevitable forces in the political marketplace? Some Clinton supporters think they are at a disadvantage in this conversation; gender, they say, is fair game, but race is not. "How do I raise what I consider to be legitimate questions about his experience and record without appearing to play the race card?" asks Echaveste.