LA Weekly

Who is Hillary Clinton? Do you feel like you know? Is she the woman who has feelings, too, from the New Hampshire primary, or the obfuscating, parsing politico we saw on Meet The Press on Sunday? Or is she the condescending smirker from the Las Vegas debate? I can't tell, either.

She has done things that baffle -- like voting to authorize the war in Iraq and virtually voting to hand Bush war powers should he feel like doing the same in Iran over a nuclear weapons program even our own Nation Intelligence Estimate says ceased years ago.

She lacks her husband's ability to convey empathy, except for what now seems like that blip in New Hampshire, if not empathy itself.

Her attempt to reform health care in this country to the standards of the developed world some 15 years ago was admirable, if her approach was somewhat imperial. And she does convey an imperiousness that is sometimes hard to swallow. And yet, her Senate tenure is fairly widely respected on both sides of the aisle. Nobody has every accused her of being lazy or dimwitted.

She somehow maintained her dignity while her husband lost his. She knows disappointments personal and professional and she knows how to withstand attacks that have been and would be withering to others. She seems somewhat fearless of whatever dirty tricks the Republicans are going to pull in the general election, having faced most of them before, and that's going to be a quality that is needed and one that has been missing from recent Dem candidates.

She may actually be the best man for the job, and, added bonus, she's a woman. Yet, she somehow seems more like Margaret Thatcher than, I don't know, Ann Richards, the former Texas governor, a grand Dem dame for whom it was hard not to root. She claims to have found her voice in New Hampshire, yet she lost it almost immediately after she regained her footing. The vulnerability became her, yet it seems like she's been all-too-eager to dismiss it, as if it were a closeted secret she was afraid to expose because, well, she's a woman and vulnerability can be spun as weakness in the gender game. Another inequity in her marriage, since it was precisely a sense of big Bill's underlying vulnerability that made him so relatable to everyday people.

That she's so steely and steady for the most part; so unable, except in moments of near-exhaustion, to pierce the veil, are qualities we tend to admire in a man and call stoicism or resolve. Yet, they often work against Hillary, making her seem unapproachable and imperious.

So, is this her problem, or ours?

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