Hillary: Love Her, Hate Her

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If Bill is a distraction when Hillary shares the stage with him--and more of one when she doesn't--that leaves Hillary with another option: sending him out on the campaign trail alone. What political pros call the surrogate is the most traditional role for the spouse and often the most valuable. But when Bill is subbing for Hillary, you start wondering which one is the candidate. In late July, for instance, people paying $75 a ticket began lining up more than an hour early at Capitale in New York City, where Bill was headlining a fund raiser for Hillary's political-action committee. He opened by saying he wanted to make three points: first, that his absent wife, who was attending to the people's business down in Washington, has been "a really good Senator"; second, that he was "particularly proud" of her for bucking a partisan atmosphere to offer constructive solutions on energy, the environment, health care and education; and third ... well, his third point turned out to be about the "epic struggle" of his presidency. For the rest of Bill's 20-minute speech, his wife merited an individual mention only here and there. Everything else was framed in the first-person-plural we. Not that the crowd seemed to mind, judging from the deafening applause.

Americans, it turns out, have good memories of the Clinton presidency. In the TIME poll, two-thirds said they have a favorable view of that time, and Bill's job-approval rating was 70%, nearly twice George W. Bush's. But do they want him wandering the White House with no real job and no accountability? Only 18% said they would like to see him play a major role in a Hillary Clinton White House. Frets a Hillary confidant: "There's always going to be that question, Is she running on her own, or is she running as his surrogate? If she's going to do this, she's got to do this on her own."

THE HARDWORKING SENATOR

FROM THE BEGINNING, HILLARY HAS MADE sure that her political operation has had her own stamp. There are a few people around from her husband's campaigns, chiefly strategist Mark Penn. But by and large, she has formed a team whose loyalties are to Hillary alone. It is an extraordinarily disciplined operation, one in which she does not allow the turf wars and leaking that always kept his in turmoil. But veterans of Bill's campaigns say privately that Hillary's operation is too inflexible and insular for prime time.

In the Senate, Hillary was initially denied the spot she sought on one of the so-called super-A committees--Appropriations, Armed Services, Finance and Foreign Relations. So she went with her expertise, taking a seat on the Health and Education Committee, among others. But she persisted in lobbying for better assignments. In 2003 she ditched the Budget Committee, which sounds more important than it is, to take a spot that had opened on Armed Services. She was one of the first in Congress to point out that U.S. forces in Iraq lack the armor they need. After 9/11, she became one of the Senate's loudest voices on homeland security, pointing to lapses in port inspections and voicing early criticism of border protection. She counts as her biggest accomplishment her role in securing $20 billion in aid for her state in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks. More recently, she has taken a lead role in the fight to increase the minimum wage, proposing to tie wage hikes to congressional pay raises.