Letting Hillary Be Hillary

It's a good question, and one made even trickier by reserves of pro-Obama sentiment in the black community—a community often vital in Democratic primaries. Samuel Robinson, the mayor pro tem of Awendaw, S.C., a rural town between Charleston and Georgetown, says: "I kind of think that Ms. Clinton is relying on the fact that blacks have embraced and continue to embrace Mr. Clinton. In the black community, Mr. Clinton has been elevated to the status of honorary black brother. She can sort of ride on the coattails of that abiding affection. But there's a big, horrible split. Black folks love the Clintons, but they also see in Mr. Obama hope, to borrow Jesse Jackson's phrase: keeping hope alive. He's been able to do what no black, from Jesse Jackson to Al Sharpton or any other, has been able to do. He's been able not just to inspire hope but to incite it. I've had conversations with other blacks in my church and community who are saying, 'Sam, we've got to support him.' In spite of people saying he's not electable, in the final analysis, they're saying, 'We've got to make a statement'."

The tangled issues seem to arise daily, even hourly. I asked a colleague of mine, an African-American woman who lives in neither Iowa nor New Hampshire, to write me a note describing her private feelings about the campaign. "I was a Hillary supporter going into the primaries," she said. "When Barack won in Iowa, I felt like a traitor to my race. What if this really is a moment where a black president is possible and I was going to vote for the woman! I felt awful. I constructed this whole complicated theory that I was resistant to the election of Barack because, if he won, then I and every other black person in the world was going to have to accept a new paradigm in American race relations—namely racism is not as pervasive and encompassing as we might like to believe and that the victim stance was going to be pretty hard to claim in the future. So then I became really excited and imagined how inspirational a black president would be, especially to the young black men who feel hopeless. Then came the 'You're likable enough, Hillary' moment, and I swung sharply back to Hillary. I thought: 'Great, another man who resents strong women and therefore resorts to personal insults to demean her'." In sum: from Clinton to Obama then back to Clinton—in the space of about four days.

Presidential candidates usually find themselves starring in at least two different versions of the same movie—one dark and tragic, the other sunlit and sweeping. The Ronald Reagan of 1980 was either a forgetful nuclear cowboy or a welcome figure of strength in an age of drift. The George W. Bush of 1999 was either a legacy hire who had blown the first four decades of his life and could not name the president of Pakistan, or he was likable and engaging and seemed warmer and looser than Al Gore. This year Barack Obama is either a smooth but insubstantial media-created savior, or he is the embodiment of hope and change whose election would transform America, redeeming us from our racial sins. And Hillary Clinton is either the boomer Daisy Buchanan who has ruthlessly plotted her way to power so that she can bring about a liberal utopia, or she is the hardworking, experienced policymaker and advocate who knows how to fight the good fight in Washington.

Like so many politicians, and so many of us, neither Obama nor Clinton is as perfect or as flawed as their devotees and detractors believe. Clinton knows more about this dynamic than nearly anyone else in contemporary politics; for 16 years, since she moved into the White House as First Lady, she has been lionized and vilified, hailed and hunted. As she reintroduces herself to the voters she hopes will make her president, she will be drawing on a lifetime of being alternately calculating and idealistic, arrogant and vulnerable, hopeful and fatalistic. She is driven by the conviction that politics can make the world, if not perfect, at least better, and by the confidence that she is innately suited to exercising power in the pursuit of the good. With his two memoirs and rapid national rise, Obama has successfully made his personal narrative more widely known than Clinton's pre-Arkansas, pre-White House story. Neither her vision of the world nor her belief in herself is rooted in the five days between the 2008 Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, but much farther back, in her childhood and in her church.

She was always, it seems, in charge, seeking out roles that conferred both responsibility and power. Her fifth-grade teacher tasked her and her female classmates with keeping unruly boys in line. "I got a reputation for being able to stand up to them," she recalled. She was president of the Fabian fan club in Park Ridge, Ill., even if there were only two other members; her father did not give her an allowance ("I feed you, don't I?" asked the conservative Republican Hugh Rodham), which led her to find a summer job "supervising a small park a few miles from my house." It was not easy—Hillary had to pull a wagon of balls, bats and jump-ropes those few miles—but at 13, about the time Obama was born, she was learning that life required resilience. When she was 4, she was afraid of playing with a neighbor, Suzy O'Callaghan, who, Hillary recalled, "was always pushing me around." Running inside one day, afraid, Hillary found an unsympathetic Dorothy Rodham awaiting. "Go back out there," Hillary's mother told her, "and if Suzy hits you, you have my permission to hit her back. You have to stand up for yourself. There's no room in this house for cowards." Hillary absorbed the lesson, squared her shoulders and sallied forth. Mrs. Rodham's hawkish counsel worked. "I can play with the boys now!" Hillary announced on her return. "And Suzy will be my friend!" An early lesson that has proved useful: hit back when you get hit, and then try to win over your foes.

She has never lacked for confidence. At 13, she used a pay phone at school during lunch hour to call Mayor Richard Daley's office to register her unease about reports of pro-Kennedy voter fraud, which she and a friend then investigated on the South Side of Chicago with unhappy Republicans one Saturday morning. (They did not tell their parents where they were going.) What was the source of the confidence? "I think it came from both of my parents," she says. She adds: "My father was raised with brothers, he was a football player and a boxer, he was a chief petty officer in the Navy, he was a man of his times. He didn't really know what to do with a daughter, so he just pretty much said, let's throw the football, let's learn how to switch-hit. It was his way of relating to me, and it was all about sports and doing well in school, and it was really a strong spur to me to earn his support and his approval. But it also built my confidence at the same time. Going out and playing football or baseball with the boys, when I was a tomboy, was a great way to learn about winning and losing, and most girls didn't have that experience … [A lot of research about postwar women shows that] most young women who became successful in the outer world did have a father who either ignored the barriers or explicitly said they are not there for you." Her mother taught self-reliance: "My mother, who had had to make her own way in life, believed that she would do everything she could to give us a good start in life and protect us and prepare us, but at the end of the day, life was unpredictable, you never knew what was going to happen, you had to be prepared to take care of yourself, you had to be willing to stand up for yourself. So I had not just one but two really powerful messages, each coming out of my parents' very different experiences, but combining to give me that confidence, to give me the feeling that I should do what I thought was right for my life and make the decisions that would be best for me."