Hillary: Love Her, Hate Her

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Being at Bill's side can seem like standing next to a nuclear blast. Hillary appeared to vanish as he set the audience on fire at Coretta Scott King's funeral in February. When Hillary's moment came, aides noticed something familiar about her ponderous tribute: she was lifting the best line of her husband's 2004 Democratic National Convention speech. She memorialized Martin Luther King Jr.'s widow as having risen from her grief after his assassination to tell the civil rights movement, "Send me." It was a leaden version of the "send me" riff with which Bill had electrified the crowd in Boston two years ago, describing John Kerry's Vietnam service. "She doesn't have his touch," says one of their oldest friends. "My recommendation would be that they not campaign together."

But that would create a different problem. People would start wondering, once again, what the deal is with that marriage. More than eight years after the country lived through the trauma of seeing a marital crisis turn into a constitutional one, the state of the Clintons' union continues to fascinate people. A comedian can rarely mention either of them without a dig at their private life. A tally of how much they see each other (14 days a month on average since the beginning of 2005) merited front-page treatment by the New York Times. Even the unveiling in April of their official portraits at the Smithsonian--hers, a luminous profile, evoking the Italian Renaissance; his, a sporty pose you might have expected to see over the fireplace at Southfork--had the sharp-eyed tabloids noting that no wedding ring was visible in his.

As with everything else about the Clintons, how you view their marriage tends to be a good indicator of your politics, and vice versa. Whereas a majority of Democrats in the TIME poll said they believe Hillary stayed with Bill after the Monica Lewinsky scandal because of Hillary's commitment to the marriage, 72% of Republicans said she did it to advance her political career. Nothing makes her strategists more nervous than the occasional scandal-sheet report that Bill had been spotted out on the town. The possibility of another scandal is "the subject nobody wants to touch," says one. "It could be nothing, or it could be the biggest issue. People gave her a break on Monica, but if there's a subsequent relationship, that presents a real problem."

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