Holmes: Hillary's struggles

There were two points in the last New Hampshire debate where we saw sides of Hillary Clinton she's mostly managed to hide from the public for years.

The first came early on, after John Edwards described himself and Barack Obama as the "agents of change" and Clinton, by implication, as the defender of the status quo. Hillary's face seemed to darken. Up to then, she had seemed tired. Now she looked angry.

"I've already made change," she said. "I will continue to make change. I'm not just running on a promise of change. I'm running on 35 years of change."

The words underlined her problem. If you've been doing it for 35 years, it's hard to call it change. But the revelation was the anger that flashed across her face. You saw a little of what Hillary insiders used to call the terror of the West Wing. You could imagine her throwing an ashtray at the president.

She seemed to relax a little after that, and when she was asked to explain why polls showed Obama to be more likeable, she showed something else.

"Well, that hurts my feelings," she said with a little pout, as the audience burst into laughter. "But I'll try to go on."

She gave a little shake of the head that somehow evoked the most popular girl in the senior class. This was the Hillary charm that has won over some of the crustiest senators on the Hill. Like her temper, Hillary's charm has been more heard about secondhand than seen.

Then, when she choked up Monday in response to a question about the personal toll the campaign was taking, Hillary hit the humanizing trifecta. The ice queen was gone, and so was her inevitability. Suddenly Hillary was pretty likeable after all.

Conventional wisdom says that's why Hillary surprised the pundits and won in New Hampshire, but conventional wisdom always focuses excessively on just one part of the picture. Other factors surely came into play as well: second thoughts from voters who didn't want to make Barack Obama inevitable, a great organizational effort by the Clinton/Shaheen machine, and lots of mental coin-tossing as voters entered the polls. Lots of angles can move 8,000 votes.

But the humanizing moments rekindles a long-standing fascination with the conflicts that we've watched tug at Hillary Rodham Clinton for a long time. It was in the midst of another primary campaign in 1992 that Clinton, under fire for financial irregularities involving her Arkansas law firm, defended her choice to be a professional rather than "stay at home and bake cookies."

Her very human defensiveness landed her in the middle of a culture war moment, one that was gleefully exploited by her husband's political opponents. From that moment on, they began constructing a caricature of Hillary Clinton. The likes of Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Don Imus, the late night comedians and the Fox News gang painted her as a feminist shrew with a hard heart and no kitchen skills.

There's nothing special about Hillary's. Turning people into caricatures is what the news-entertainment-punditry establishment does best. The Republican conglomerate is especially good at creating a caricature and running against it. They did it to Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004. For years, they have been burnishing the caricature of Hillary Clinton so they could run against it in 2008.

Obama's rise surprised Hillary and the Republicans, who can't agree on their own candidate but have planned for years that Hillary would head the Democratic ticket. Obama hasn't been turned into a caricature yet. Moreover, the Hollywood writers' strike has shut down an important part of the caricature-building machinery. We can only guess what fun the Saturday Night Live crew would be having with characters like Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, John Edwards and Ron Paul.

Clinton has been fighting to be seen through the fog of her caricature for 16 years, and not without success. She managed to get enough New Yorkers to see her as an intelligent, capable, compassionate public servant to win two elections to the Senate. She convinced enough New Hampshire voters to pull her campaign out of what looked for a few days like a tailspin.

That struggle will continue. Her caricature is part of the baggage she carries to the campaign trail, a heavy bag that also includes her husband and her vote on the Iraq war. New Hampshire should encourage her that it is possible for voters - Democrats, at least - to see the real, human Hillary behind the caricature.

But the first serious female presidential contender won't be able to avoid the culture wars entirely. Gender, identity and the differences, even among women, over women's roles will simmer under the surface and erupt without warning, like tears welling up in the eyes of an exhausted candidate touched by a personal question.

Rick Holmes, opinion editor for the MetroWest Daily News, blogs at Holmes & Co. (http://blogs.townonline.com/holmesandco). He can be reached at rholmes@cnc.com.