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All
through the year, as she pursued the private rescue of a marriage and the
public rescue of a presidency, Hillary Clinton was the one person who seemed to see the
larger story and shaped its telling. When talk of resignation spread, she
was the one who said, Let this unfold. "We've got a fight on our hands,"
she told top adviser Doug Sosnik. "You be focused on that and not how bad
things are." When everyone thought the story was about Bill Clinton, she
said it was about Kenneth Starr. When her husband's confession finally
confronted her and us with the truth of his lies, she led the way, from
denial through fury to a grudging acceptance. The code was always clear: if
she can stand by him, she who has been so directly wronged, so should we.
And in the fall, when the Republicans promised an election that would give
Clinton his comeuppance, she went out and gave the Democratic faithful,
many of whom she had let down in the past, something to cling to, straight
on to victory in November.
Now at year-end Hillary Clinton finds herself in places she has never been:
embraced and admired by more Americans than at any other time in her public
life, freed to work on her own causes--and cast as the "single most
degraded wife in the history of the world," as Maureen Dowd lethally put it
in The New York Times. Public pity, for Hillary Clinton, is an enormous
price to pay for popularity. Frustrated feminists and cutting commentators
note that her apotheosis comes not in the Congressional Record but on the
cover of Vogue, not for what she achieved but for what she suffered.
More on This Story:
TIME: The Better Half
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