(1) Cookies

Hillary was 44 in March 1992, when she said this:

I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.

I was teaching Political Science -- American Politics, Public Opinion -- at the University of Illinois when she said that.  Oh, I knew, everyone knew, that that was some baaaaaad politics there.  And yet I could not stop grinning ear to ear.  This woman had the temerity -- shocked! shocked! -- to explain the plain truth to the public that she valued her career, her brainpower, her sense of self too much to pretend to hide her candle under a bushel.

Nowadays, that is nothing revolutionary.  Look, again, at Elizabeth Edwards, Michelle Obama.  Obama was 28 then (she is 44 now, though she will turn 45 a few days before her husband is inaugurated); Edwards turned 43 that year, but had made her career choices well before her husband's political career was anywhere near the horizon.  For an aspiring first lady to say, as if it were a self-evident truth, that of course she should be considered an equal partner, and equally competent adult, in her own life was a splash of ice water in the public's face.  For feminists like my then-wife and our circle of friends, it was as exciting as if we were gays watching a politician come out on national TV and say "sure I'm gay, you have a problem with that?"

This sort of thing was not done.  And then, it was done.

Hillary got slapped down, of course, and had to be contrite, but no one had to wonder what she was thinking as she dropped "Rodham" in favor of "Clinton" and offered to submit a cookie recipe to women's magazines.  As with Galileo when he was forced to recant his stance that the Earth was stationary, on being told that the role of the First Lady as auxiliary to the husband was eternally fixed, one could hear her thoughts with ringing clarity: "eppur si muove.  "And yet it does move."

(2) Compromise

Hillary was 44 when the progressive world almost came crashing down, on June 29, 1992.

Just over four months before the 1992 election, the Supreme Court decided Planned Parenthood v. Casey.  That is "Casey" as in Pennsylvania Governor Bob Casey, father of the current Senator, whom Bill Clinton would not allow to speak at the 1992 convention because of the widespread expectation that he would use his national forum to excoriate the party on the issue of abortion and possibly leave without endorsing the ticket.

We pro-choice advocates had expected to lose Roe once Clarence Thomas replaced a dying and - after Bush's victory in the Gulf War - discouraged Thurgood Marshall.  Abortion rights had been secured for 19 years, and that looked like it would be the full run.  Casey was the first facial challenge to Roe v. Wade.  Only two Justices, Blackmun and Stevens, were reliable votes in favor of it.  Neither swing votes O'Connor or Kennedy had ever had to address a facial challenge against Roe.  Neither of their votes were expected to be decisive anyway, because Bush appointee David Souter was fully expected to join Rehnquist, Scalia, newly appointed Clarence Thomas, and lone anti-Roe Democrat Byron White in overturning Roe.

Casey came out on the last day of the 1991-92 term.  Among feminists, the air that day was funereal.  When it came out, it turned that much of the nibbling away at Roe's edges had been successful.  But amazingly - so amazingly that it didn't even sink in at first - Roe itself had been affirmed.  David Souter had burst out of his conservative cocoon to become a moderate-liberal butterfly.  Not only that, we later learned, but he had actually snatched the vote of Anthony Kennedy away from the Rehnquist's majority at the last minute.

The progressive movement -- as stunned at the failure to take back the White House in 1988 after eight years of Reagan as it would be in 2004 after four years of G. W. Bush - was flat on its back.  After the success of the Gulf War, when G. H. W. Bush's ratings hit 90 or so in March of 1991, the progressive movement was flat on its back.  Casey merely underlined the cost of failure.  We had just about lost the Supreme Court; Casey would have been the coup de grace.

The Democratic field in 1992 was considered weak, as Bush's post-war popularity kept the strongest candidates out of the race.  Mondale's traditional liberalism had not done the trick in 1984; Dukakis's post-ideological pragmatism had not done the trick in 1988.  The Democratic Party was on the verge of lasting damage - of a sort one could imagine if we were to somehow lose the Presidency this year and lose ground in Congress.  Parties thrive as coalitions of believers, followers, and pragmatic opportunists.  Had the Democrats lost in 1992, it would have become a stupid choice for anyone with serious national political ambitions to become a Democrat unless they simply couldn't help it.  There was too much money and influence behind the Republicans.

Bill Clinton did what he thought he had to do to win: he embraced corporate America.  (So had Jimmy Carter, for that matter, in his campaign sixteen years previous.)  You compromise a fair amount with corporate America, and they give you money - it was as simple as that.  Money was most of what mattered in those days, and corporate interests didn't mind a President who would tinker around with reformist impulses in some areas so long as in the main he let them do what they wanted when it came to deregulation and trade.

Now, maybe Clinton did it with too much relish and too little care.  I think he did.  But at the same time, had he not won the Presidency in 1992, I don't think we would have much of a progressive movement left at all today.  Republican Presidencies in the 1990s, combined with a compliant Congress, would have given us the horrors of the 2000s earlier, without the benefit of the "years of plenty" we had built up beforehand to help us withstand them.  We would have had a stronger and more pure Left, it is true, but one much like the Left in Mexico, which thanks to plutocratic domination and corruption is in no danger of being allowed to win significant federal power anytime soon.  (That may be true of us here as well, but I like our chances more.)

Winning, in other words, was the only thing that mattered.  That is the national political culture in which Bill and Hillary came of age.  They had to adapt to it.  It wasn't pretty.  It left its marks.  But, at the same time, they brought home the goods for their party - at least the power to control events, if not complete freedom over where to go.  They had learned to compromise on some areas of substance and give no quarter when it came to taking power.  They did both, and won.

(3) Competing

Hillary was 44 until one week before her husband was elected to the Presidency.  That contest shaped her.  It was a time before You Tube and automatic dissemination of gaffes via video.  It was a time before the popular advent of the Internet.  It was a time when small-donation fundraising of the sort that Barack Obama has done this year was not only unprecedented, but unimaginable.  It was a time when going on television with her husband and gutting it out when he was accused of scandal was enough to win.  It was also a time when charisma and cool were working for the Clintons rather than against them.  ("Enough with the pretty speeches" was not a probably Democratic battle cry in 1992.)

Hillary Clinton was the person who brought back evil strategist Dick Morris to help her husband's campaign in 1996.  There was only one reason for that: these sorts of brass knuckle tactics have, historically, worked.  And, before you take too much solace in the notion that they didn't work this year, look at the campaign for a moment through Hillary's glasses.  She was not running a brass-knuckles campaign early in the process, when she thought she would need to unite Democrats behind her - and she lost, unable to regain her footing even in the two weeks after Super Tuesday, when Wisconsin and Hawaii topped off Obama's victory streak.  It was around that time that her campaign grew more harsh, not long after she replaced Patti Solis Doyle with Maggie Williams.  After that, she won more of the delegates the rest of the way out - helped, no doubt, by the luck of the draw as to which states were early and which late, and by Obama's decision not to complete at full power after May 6.  But, still, there's evidence, for those who choose to believe it, that these tactics work.

What works most, among these tactics, is not even one that is particularly insulting towards Obama, but rather insulting to those who "know better": an absolute and unswerving ability to believe and assert anything, without shame, so long as it advances one's position.  Hence the convenient shift of position on Florida and Michigan, the willingness to consider going after Obama's pledged delegates, the "Judas"-tossing attacks on apostates.  And some of it was aimed at making it tough for Obama should he win.  From the perspective of those of us who favored Obama, this included sins of reinforcing Republican frames, including the most damaging ones regarding Obama's being somehow "soft" on radical black ideology, being sexist, being inexperienced, and stealing the election from her.  The problem - which we don't yet know will be favorably resolved - is that while Hillary could turn on a dime after deciding to concede, her supporters might not.  Her various quotable statements about Obama also give Republicans enough ammunition for ads that ultimately will only be effectively countered if Hillary eats crow and admits that she was saying some things just to get elected.  That's hard for anyone to do, let alone someone with as much pride as the Senator from New York.  But she has made that bed.

It is for this reason, by the way, that some of the most over-the-top attacks against Hillary don't strike me as out of place.  The famous resubtitling of Hitler's tirades in the movie Downfall and the continuing reference of Hillary to Glenn Close's character of Alex in Fatal Attraction are aimed at the same target - Hillary's tenacity and will to believe - which, indeed, is evidence that the latter is not necessarily sexist.  Hillary's supporters asked why we Obama supporters were so scared of her, if she was truly so far behind.  The answer is that, given Hillary's powerful will, what happened today was not a foregone conclusion.  (And what happened today is not really a "conclusion" at all: she has the next five months to live up to her commitments, and they are hard ones.)  She could well have been willing to cut the baby in half, tear down the temple, cut off the party's nose to spite its face.  Her tactics right up to Harold Ickes's dark warnings at the RBC meeting a week ago and her attempted theft of Barack's thunder on Tuesday night were, in fact, designed to play on those fears to improve her hand.  We weren't afraid of her winning, at least after May 6, but of her making it impossible for Obama to win.  That fear was a recognition of her fierce competitiveness and her power.

(4) Consolation

Hillary was 44 when her husband first faced the scandal that almost knocked him out of the 1992 race, and she learned how to come back.  She learned, perhaps, a false lesson: that it's more possible to do than it really is.

The thing to bear in mind about Hillary for the past four months is that we were seeing her at her worst.  He state at the end of this campaign was, in fact, about as bad as could be imagined, because she had poured more of her heart into it for longer than any losing candidate of recent years and had come closer to winning than any except maybe Reagan in 1976.

She was legitimately shocked to find herself behind and to find that Super Tuesday did not come through for her.  She was shocked to find herself outshone; remember, Obama was not wowing people so much until his Jeff-Jack speech in Iowa last fall.  She pulled out her bag of sharp tricks only because she had no other choice if she wanted to stay in the race.

Psychologically, the worst thing for her may have been that she had to know that, as impressive as Obama was, she was done in by her own mistakes through February.  Using a baseball metaphors, she made a stupid base-running mistake - her failure to contest the caucuses, due partly to her failure to manage her campaign spending - and got thrown out at home nullifying the tying and the winning run.  (If you prefer football, go with "dropped an open pass in the end zone.")  Ultimately, it was her job to make sure that someone was keeping an eye on Solis Doyle to make sure the budget was OK; it was her job to bring in enough donations to contest the caucuses; it was her job to be "likable enough" to bring in money and votes.  And whether through hubris or negligence, she messed up what should have been a decisive early victory.

If you were as smart and driven as Hillary Clinton is, you would find that unbearable.

So she got stuck in a situation where the only path she had to victory was one of tearing her opponent down -- and unluckily for her, her happened to be an eloquent and gracious Black man.  What a horrible situation to be in -- especially on the public stage, especially on the threshold of history, especially after having made such a strategic blunder.  And worst of all, she wasn't entirely without hope.  She was too close to victory to cut bait without being thought a lily-livered quitter -- which is the last thing she is.  She was trapped by her proximity to success, and balancing the dreams of almost 18 million voters on her shoulders.

I wrote about what kept Hillary in the race, while many people sneered at her, in this (slightly re-edited) quote.

There is an example used in game theory called a dollar auction, where you offer to auction off a dollar for as little as a penny.  The only trick is that both the top and the second-highest (i.e., losing) bid have to pay up.  Do this, and you can get people to pay $3 or $4 for a dollar, because they don't want to be the one who comes in second.  (It's related to the sunk cost problem.)  Watching people trapped in a dollar auction is pathetic.  They want out and they can't bear to get out.  After all, if the other side gives up first, they win.

Hillary is losing a dollar auction, designed by quirk of scheduling fate and too-narrow late victories to string her along so that she can't quite accept defeat.  It has to be torturing her, especially given her knowledge that he own campaign blew it in February by not contesting the caucus states -- and that this was in turn largely because she was not likable enough to raise enough money.

She's staying in because she's being tortured by fate, which won't let her out easily.

She didn't handle it well; few would.  We saw her at her worst.  Now I hope we'll see her at her best.

(5) Conclusion

Hillary was 44 when I fell in love with what she represented.  But she will not be President number 44, or indeed, likely, ever President at all.  I know what I want from her: not merely to fight for Obama like she is fighting for herself, but also to dedicate herself to one crusade above all: universal health care.  That seems to be what Obama wants of her as well, and he may well be willing to defer to her expertise.  That legacy, if she embraces it, would be - if not quite as good as the Presidency - great enough to satisfy any politician.  The Hillary who was 44 in 1992 would probably recognize how great a legacy it would be.  I hope that she recaptures that spirit of her youth.

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