President-elect Barack Obama (WDCpix)

It would be lovely for there to be — if not a full honeymoon period — just a quiet reflective day or two to take stock of what just happened. Whatever the reason, a tanking economy and a wildly unpopular incumbent no doubt high on the list, America just voted a black man into the highest office in the land.

In the polling booths and on the streets after, people smiled at the immensity of what had happened, what they, with the touch of a screen or the mark of a ballot, had participated in: history. Not just history, but a redress of that history.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

There were tears when the victory was announced. Not just in the big crowd in Chicago, where President-elect Barack Obama spoke, but in living rooms everywhere. I know. I saw them in my own living room. I shed a few.

With his rare oratorical gifts, his eloquence, Obama caught that tone in his post-victory speech. He nodded hard at America’s complicated history, but he didn’t dwell there. His was not a racial victory — not just that anyway.

At every turn, Obama eschews the divisive and goes big — raising expectations for everyone. His is a big, wide call for us to band together and be our better selves, post-partisan, patriotic, a word he uses not as a cudgel but as an invitation.

No question, that invitation is resonating. Not just with the young, who are just stepping up for their turn at the bat and who voted in record numbers. They canvassed and called; they traveled the country, eager and earnest and lit up with the chance to be participants.

But the Obama invitation works for many of the older folk, too, the baby boomers, the Clinton and Bush cohort. There is a sense among them — among us, I should say, as I am in this number — of a kind of long hang-over, a sense that we did not keep up the promises of our own youthful days. Instead, we got bogged down in an internecine generational battle, in materialistic pleasures, those SUVS and wide-screen TVs. Of course, even in our self-judgment, there is the inevitable tinge of narcissism.

Obama’s victory turns the page, at last. But again, he does not play the generation card, just as he ran a post-racial campaign as much as possible. Though he is so clearly a post-60’s child himself, he offers a chance of redemption even to the boomers, a chance to be staked again to the country.

In short, Obama has raised the expectations for any and all of us, patriotic expectations, moral expectations, expectations of what it means to be a citizen, a voter whose vote can change history.

But as the president-elect raises those expectations, he must also lower them. That’s the trick, the balancing act.

Because we are in a downward spiral, a tough economic contraction that will, if he is not careful, threaten to nibble away at the energy and optimism he brings to the table. It’s going to be tough. There are going to be sacrifices. More people are going to lose jobs and homes and health care.

He knows it. We know it. He has to be able to lower our expectations — while raising them at the same time, not just with his verbal gifts, but with his first appointments and actions.

He has to keep us excited, on board, even as we are uncertain and fearful of what lies ahead. No question, this is going to be a tough Christmas. You can feel it out there in the shops and the malls. People are not going to spend. It’s going to be harsh.

We have been in a long, prosperous boom — really since the early 80s — more and more stuff, bigger and bigger houses and toys, a rip-roaring economy going more and more global. As many became ever more successful in their private and professional lives, they grew farther from a sense of a communal, civic life.

The go-it-alone atmosphere of the Bush administration — what Obama called the “ownership socieity” meaning “you’re on your own” — did not help. There has been a real paternalistic swagger to the Bush folk, much diminished, of course, in the final throes, by the economic down-turn. But for a long time, they strode the world stage full of certitude and secrecy.

The Clinton administration toyed with raising bigger expectations for any and all, but they were, in a sense, personal expectations, that we would do well for ourselves, achieve a lot. Certainly the economy boomed. But, let’s be honest, some of the big de-regulating that we now have to pay for happened then, too, not just in the Bush years.

There was peace, though the Clinton folk, arguably, did not focus hard on the first acts of terrorism, a forerunner of what was to come. By that time, in his second term, Clinton was bogged down in defending himself after a dalliance with a bouncy intern in a beret.

Bye-bye boomers. The new guys are coming, Obama at their helm. Calm, steely, deeply married, a devoted father of young kids, he comes with the promise of a new beginning on every level.

But he is a child of that economic boom, too; a product of a great education, high achievement, a big house. It will fall to him, right off the bat, to deal with the nation’s fears while keeping our optimism up, to calm the country while beckoning it to make tough, expensive choices about health care and education.

It is a big, nuanced balancing act: lowering expectations while raising them at the same time. Obama must now lead a country full of both hope—and fear.

Anne Taylor Fleming is a novelist, commentator and essayist for “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” She is the author of a memoir, “Motherhood Deferred: A Woman’s Journey.”

Gov. Sarah Palin (WDCpix)

No question, Sarah Palin is a trip. We have all been watching her and arguing about her since she appeared on the national scene. For women she is an absolute lightning rod.

Some are much taken with her, identifying with her folksiness and her feistiness and her self-confidence (that thing women are always worrying they don’t have enough of) — her winking feminine swagger. They see her as the real deal, a refreshing new kind of female with power.

But other women, those who have worked hard to grasp the details and minutiae of complicated issues, be they economic or political or whatever, are bothered, even offended, by the charming upstart now in line to be vice president of the United States.

No question, Palin stands on a kind of class fault line when it comes to women. I get that it works for some, the anti-elitist angle, the “darns” and “goshes,” the “I’m just a small town gal,” mantra she hits over and over. There is something both preternaturally girlish about her and very, very tough — a post-feminist hybrid, the hockey mom-turned-frontier state governor.

What she represents finally is a turning of the dial, the torch being passed to a new generation of women. This is a new version, a new model of ascendant female pol — a God-fearing, country-loving mother of five who stresses not her wide-ranging knowledge of the economy or the world and its myriad problems. Quite the contrary.

Let Joe Biden and company talk about Hamas and Saakashvili all they want. Let them flaunt the details of their knowledge. I, Sarah Palin, bring something else, America, something you all out there have, too — a good, solid sense of right and wrong, of the bright, shiny promise that is and will always be America. No need to get bogged down in details — that’s the game of the over-educated elites, the pointy-headed intellectuals. Make no mistake, Palin telegraphs with every down-home verbal tick, that’s not me.

This is a woman running on her common sense. That’s what she brings to the table. That’s the message she flashes to her sisters out there. We know what matters; we know what’s important. We’re the real capable ones, we moms—hockey or otherwise. We are the multi-taskers; we can diaper and run the PTA and, gosh darn, it isn’t really a big leap from there to the White House, now is it? That’s her winking subliminal text, hidden in everything she says. Time for the country to have a mom near — or at — the helm.

For women of an earlier generation, the second-wave feminist, baby-boom generation that fought so hard to compete with men and be taken seriously at the highest levels, there is something astonishing about watching someone run for the highest office by underscoring her familial and maternal skills.

That would have been unthinkable, certainly, for a Hillary Rodham Clinton, who out-policy-wonked the boys. Clinton studied harder, fought harder, talked harder — with more articulateness and range than most of her Washington colleagues. She was intense, driven, did her homework and certainly didn’t go around advertising her family skills. She was all about political skills. It must be hard for her, irritating, to say the least, watching this upstart gal make the rounds.

Palin is also unabashedly feminine and a tad flirty — certainly with the camera, pert and perky. “Can I call you Joe?” she asked to Biden out of the box—a bit of one-upping familiarity. Oh yes, this is, underneath the feminine, a fierce competitor—the testament given by those who have crossed her in Alaska and felt her ire.

But the notion of being unabashedly feminine, twinkly — that, too, for women pols — is something rare to say the least. The Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has a bit of girlishness herself, but her usual performance is more decorous, careful, and coated in pol-speak, than anything from Palin.

How she ultimately plays out, we don’t know. More than half of those polled don’t think she’s ready to be vice president, or, certainly, president. Her candidate is sliding and she will go with him.

We are at a time — perilous economic time — when answers are more of the essence than presence. In the debate Thursday, Palin navigated around tough questions she didn’t want to answer or didn’t know the answers to, mortgages and bankruptcy for example.

But for now, Palin is still up and running. And it is Hillary Clinton who, after a lifetime of mastering the intricacies of public life, is on the campaign sidelines.

Anne Taylor Fleming is a novelist, commentator and essayist for “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” She is the author of a memoir, “Motherhood Deferred: A Woman’s Journey.”

President Bill Clinton (WDCpix)

All eyes were focused last week—or most of them anyway—on the bailout negotiations, more specifically on the shenanigans of Sen. John McCain as he sought to swoop in and be the white knight of the whole mess. Will he, won’t he, will he, won’t he go to the debates?

He got all the attention he wanted, but it certainly felt political to the max, no matter who spun it otherwise.

But there was another large presence making the rounds last week, seeking public attention — former President Bill Clinton. Yes, his Global Initiative Conference was in full swing in New York, providing the media with a reason to give him a whole lot of air time. And fill it up he did, with his smarts and reach, his talks of AIDS and education, and the need for all of us to care for the unlucky.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

But deeply embedded in Clinton’s eloquent dissection of global problems was his still palpable bitterness over his wife’s loss to Sen. Barack Obama, whose name Clinton seemed to have a hard time uttering as he worked those mikes.

He was finally more gracious when introducing Obama at his own conference. But up until that point, as he talked to Larry King and the women at “The View” — now friskily empowered to be election-year players — he had a difficult time camouflaging the wounds from his wife’s loss. He mentioned Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton by name, over and over, her gifts, what she has spent her life working for, all while straining to give a full-hearted endorsement of the Democratic nominee.

The former president doesn’t seem to have any simpatico with the cool post-boomer now climbing in the polls. In fact, he has expressed far more natural sympathy with McCain. Clinton made a point of saying, over and over, how much he likes the GOP nominee — displaying not just sympathy but an almost respectful envy, from a Vietnam-era guy who didn’t serve to to a genuine war hero.

But Clinton went farther as he made his rounds, expressing his approbation for both Palins. He spoke warmly of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and her husband, Todd. “I like the idea that this guy does those long-distance races,” Clinton said, “Stayed in the race for 500 miles with a broken arm. My kind of guy.”

These are real folks, just like me — and unlike that other guy whose name I am having some trouble with. That’s the theme.

Forget that their policies and politics are 180-degrees away from everything both Clintons have been about. Clinton is, without a doubt, as complex and flawed and gifted a man as ever to be at the helm. But the page is turning and he knows it. There is a sense of the limelight moving on.

Look, what Clinton is doing now is good, no question, and he has the stature and moxie — and need — to make it work, to galvanize other rich folk to try to help solve the world’s problems. Clearly he means to make a profound difference in his later years — and if part of that is a need for redemption after his public fall from grace, fine.

But there was evident these past days, as there often is, a visible fight within Clinton — between his bigger self and his smaller self, between his professed altruism and his narcissism.

I think he’ll win, he said of Obama, through clenched teeth, or a clenched heart, or both. But there was not much energy or enthusiasm in that prediction. He sounded impassioned and folksy and as smart as anyone who has ever occupied the White House. In his performance now, there is always the winking sense of: hey, America, look what you’re missing. You blew it; you could have had us back.

I thought about all this, about Clinton — and for that matter, about McCain — and how both men behaved last week, when I was reading the obituaries for Paul Newman, who died of cancer at 83.

Paul Newman (Flickr: Heather Lucille)

He was the other man to get some air time as the week ended. A class act, everyone agrees, a marvelous film actor, whose ego never showed — on screen or off. No entourages, no messy affairs.

He was a man, by all accounts, with a tenacious love for his spouse; a man unassuming about his gifts, though driven to be a really good actor; a man who kept acting, and didn’t get all hammy in his later roles like some other big stars like, say, Al Pacino.

Newman was also a man who did the philanthropy thing — with his salad dressings and spaghetti sauces — pouring the $250 million he made into camps for sick kids. All done with an easy hand. All done without saying: look at me, look at me.

He left the planet a better place. He left us the marvelous films and the legacy of giving back — rare for anyone, rarer still for someone in a profession like show business — and he did it without leaving ego fingerprints all over the place.

It was a lovely and sad note, Newman’s passing, in a week full of posturing and political gamesmanship.

Anne Taylor Fleming is a novelist, commentator and essayist for “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” She is the author of a memoir, “Motherhood Deferred: A Woman’s Journey.”

Gov. Sarah Palin speaking at the Republican National Convention. (Flickr: Tom LeGro, NewsHour)

The idea floating around is that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is popular and exciting because she is something so new. Yes, she is the first woman to run as a Republican vice presidential candidate — and a gun-toting hockey mom to boot.

But her real appeal is the opposite. She is a throwback, conjuring with her every word the man who remains the hero to his party: Ronald Wilson Reagan, the morning-again-in-America guy. He made people feel good again about their country after the long, dark hangover from Vietnam and Watergate, and then the hostage crisis in Iran.

Reagan banished the ghosts of My Lai, wiped away any lingering humiliation over those hostages. America, he said, in his very posture and in every speech, is the beacon of hope and freedom, period, end of discussion. Always had been, always would be. Forget all those nattering nabobs of negativism, all the trendy postmodernironists, the David Lettermans with their smirks. This was the land of patriots and he was the No.1 Patriot — precisely how Palin (and for that matter, everyone else who has spoken at the Republican National Convention) has characterized herself and her running mate, Sen. John McCain.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

That’s why Palin’s acceptance speech for the GOP vice presidential nomination played so well in that hall — and why she resonates so strongly with the rank-and-file. She is all about nostalgia. Palin is tapping into exactly what Reagan tapped into: a bone-deep longing to turn the clock back, to be part of an earlier America when things were simpler, sweeter, decidedly less complex — or at least seemed that way.

“I had the privilege of living most of my life in a small town,” she said. Not just any small town, but a small town in the wild and natural state of Alaska, arguably the country’s last frontier. Everything she says conjures an earlier America where men — and women — slaughtered and skinned their own meat, read their Bibles and raised their kids (home schooling) with scant meddling from the government.

The good old days, when most Americans lived in small towns — which most of them haven’t lived in for almost 90 years. It’s exactly what Reagan embodied — or skillfullyharkened back to: his heartland roots. It was epitomized by his evocative campaign slogan: It’s Morning Again in America.

That’s what Palin is striving to invoke — that feeling of nostalgia, that feeling that it can be a new dawn. It’s appealing, that sense that we can rewind the reel, return to a simpler time, when the country was flush with a sense of optimism and a sense of conquering dominance. Alaska, wilder and freer than all the other states, it seems, is still flush with some of that optimistic swagger and sense of freedom or license. This land is your land, this land is my land; we have a God-given right to drill on it –Palin is a daughter of Alaska to the bone.

She represents a kind of “Little House on the Prairie” feminism. That’s another reason why she has been confounding to some women, to many commentators. They haven’t known where to place her on the feminine/feminist continuum.

Maybe that’s because Palin isn’t feminist, or postfeminist even — the labels we customarily use. She is actually pre-feminist feminist. The fiercely confident pioneer gal who can raise a family and run a town, who can shoot a caribou or send a poison-arrow dart through a political opponent — as she did time and again last night, under cover of a sweet smile.

Palin is every bit as tough as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Her toughness just comes in a far different retro-packaging, which makes it harder to classify. She doesn’t have Clinton’s sometimes uneasy mix of soft and hard, that observable internal tension that can sometimes give way to tears, sometimes to a testy quip. To a lot of women — and men — out there,Palin seems of a self-confident piece.

She doesn’t quite have Reagan’s charm or his “aw shucks” sophistication. Her small-town roots show a little more; her barbs were a little sharper, shall we say, less affably cloaked. But she’s got the rest of him down — certainly his message. Whether that message will play in today’s world — and whether it will play beyond the obvious conservative base — is hard to say. Some might say doubtful.

In her appeal to nostalgia, there was little mention of the country’s current problems. No mortgage mess, no talk of subprime loans or the need for financial regulations or health care. None of those currently vexing problems. No, no need to bring all that stuff up. It would be off script, messy. She was after a feeling. That’s what Reagan was such a genius at — the “B” script ham actor played like a charm in the political arena.

And that feeling is: America is the greatest. There is no mention of our current place in the world, how we are regarded or not. Not because she is a foreign-policy neophyte, but because it is off-message again. That’s why there was no mention of a newly reinvigorated Russia or a intimidatingly robust China. Just a brush through Iraq where, of course, we are the good guys. My son, she said, is being deployed on 9/11 — the symbolism lost on none of us — and I am so proud.

Proud, proud, proud. That’s the heart and soul of the nostalgia message. I am proud of my country.

It plays because Americans love that feeling of pride. We were all raised on it. In our children’s history books, we were told of the genius of the Founding Fathers, reminded that America was the planet’s great experiment — the shining city on the hill.

At a time when there is a definite sense that, in fact, we are no longer invincible — that this, unlike the last, will not be the American Century — what better thing to do than take a page out of theGipper’s playbook and gaze backward not forward.

Gov. Palin and Sen. McCain at a rally in Washington, Pa. (Flickr: buddhakiwi)

The astonishing thing about the lack of experience of Sarah Palin, the Alaska governor selected by Sen. John McCain to be his running mate on the GOP ticket, is that no one much seems astonished. Oh sure, there was partisan carping, James Carville and company making the talk-show rounds, mugging about it. There was some serious objection in some serious ranks, even, we are told, from high-ranking Republican Party elders. But in general, what might have been greeted with consternation, derision even, was not. The question is: why not and what does it say about Americans.

After all, this is a woman of scant political resume, mayor of a tiny hamlet, governor—of less than two years—of a sparsely populated state with a lot of money and not too many burdensome problems. This woman would now be, if her ticket won, a small step away from the Oval Office, a step away from tangling with Putin and Ahmadinejad (she has apparently only been out of the country once), not to mention tackling our sagging economy and energy woes and providing a wise sounding board for her sometimes loose canon of a running mate. So why the muted alarm?

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Part of the answer lies in her gender. It is a plus, a coup — especially after the loss of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. McCain and company were only too happy to suggest Palin was the logical heiress to Clinton’s disgruntled voters, those who felt she had been dissed by the media and the Obama folk all through the long primary campaign. McCain would give those disappointed women someone to vote for — a theme echoed by Palin herself every time she speaks. Of course, for the most part, that’s folly, since there are no two more polar opposites than Clinton and Palin.

They come from different planets, the Yale Law School grad and fiercely articulate lifetime public servant on the one hand, the beauty pageant winner and ex-sportscaster-turned governor on the other. If Clinton was the cream of the liberal female baby-boomer crop — make that the elite baby boomer crop — Palin is the poster girl for the next generation of feisty, self-made right-wingers.

No, Palin is not the logical heiress to Clinton’s mantle. She is, in fact, the anti-Hillary. That’s what she’s selling, the dirt under her fingernails, the blue-collar husband, the unwieldy but cherished brood—five kids, one a Down syndrome baby and a grandchild now on the way, offspring of her unwed 17-year-old daughter. She is real goods—that’s the message. Far from being a hindrance, her lack of experience is a plus — as, apparently, is her daughter’s unexpected pregnancy, generating empathetic noises from people left and right.

Never has the anti-experience mantra been more popular. Just ask Clinton. She tried to campaign on her experience and then had to pivot mid-run when it was clear the theme was DOA. Change was in, experience was out. Barack Obama clearly understood this from the get-go. He, too, of course, has relatively little, high-level, hard-core political experience, another part of the reason there wasn’t a fierce kick over Palin’s lack of background and history and expertise.

We are in one of our anti-elite/anti-experience upsurges. That’s largely due to the long discrediting of the professional politicians, the savage internecine partisan attacks and the gleeful pile-on by the media.

It is also due to the economic divisions that have been so exaggerated over the last stretch of years — middle-class people losing their homes and savings, while the rich get richer, the wildly rich richer still. To heck with them, those at the top. Time for the real people to run the joint — people like Palin.

This up-with-real-people theme is being played out right through the culture. The sometimes clumsy are dancing with the stars and chart-topping wannabes are warbling on “American Idol” — while the rest of us vote them up or down. Forget critics, those elite snobs. We don’t need them anymore. We the people are the court of last resort. The Internet is our new domain, our free-for-all, where anyone can opine, no certification needed. No question, Palin is the beneficiary and the perfect American idol for this attitude, this time and place.

There was a telling quote — some might find it a bit disturbing — in my local newspaper, The Los Angeles Times, the other day. A woman was quoted explaining why she wasn’t worried about Palin’s lack of experience. “If you can go up against a teen-aged kid,” she said, “you can go up against a world leader.

Really? That seems a crazy stretch. But that, too, is emblematic of the mood — the idea that if you are good on the homefront, in your private family management, then you will be just fine out there in the big arena.

We have flipped private and public. Just look at our conventions, replete with touchy-feely testaments by husbands and wives as to the conjugal tendernesses and paternal or maternal gifts of the candidates. It’s a bit gooey, a bit mushy, the emphasis on private performance rather than public performance—but that is part and parcel of the new mood.

There has been a little kick-back against Palin for going back to work only three days after her newest son was born — and presumably about having sufficient funds to pay for his care. Harrumph, went some of the mothers of America — feminists, looking to dent Palin’s popularity, certainly among them — more indignant over that fact than over her lack of experience.

But despite the strong feelings of women pro and con Palin, what’s clear is that her candidacy is ultimately less about gender and more about economic class — and the resentments abroad in the land.

Anne Taylor Fleming is a novelist, commentator and essayist for “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” She is the author of a memoir, “Motherhood Deferred: A Woman’s Journey.”

]]> http://washingtonindependent.com/4074/no-experience-necessary/feed 6 http://washingtonindependent.com/3136/hillary-clinton-holds-back http://washingtonindependent.com/3136/hillary-clinton-holds-back#comments Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:48:51 +0000 Anne Taylor Fleming http://www.washingtonindependent.com/?p=3136

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (Photo by:Jason Kosena)

This night was Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s. Eyes welled up as she appeared, luminous, still so strangely lit up with loss. There in the stands, gazing at her with adoration, was her husband — her complex, clearly emotional and, we are assured, still angry, ex-president of a husband — mouthing “I love you, I love you,” as she spoke. Their long, marital dance is just an inextricable part of our national political drama, as it was again this night, with those strange, mumbled endearments.

It looked as if she was giving it her all. It sounded like it, too. There was emotion, eloquence, even humor, an impassioned plea for all the assembled Democrats — and the millions of others out there listening — to get on board, to support the party’s presumed nominee, Sen. Barack Obama. It was even lovely sometimes, artful, way above the unusually banal language most of her cohorts and colleagues have been using these past talky hours. All right, we can exempt Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Michelle Obama from this criticism. (More about both in a minute.)

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Clinton’s task was obvious. To heal the party, bring to the fold her die-hard supporters, nearly a half of whom, according to today’s Wall Street Journal, say they still cannot see their way to supporting Obama and, 20 percent say they might stray McCain’s way.

Say it ain’t so, Clinton said directly to them. You must get on board. Were you in it for me or for the country? Be your better selves and support our party’s candidate, even all you disappointed women out there. My mother was born before women had the right to vote, she said. Now my daughter can cast a vote for her mother for president.

It was goose-bump time for many women — certainly women of her warrior generation who feel as if the torch has been passed right over their heads.

No question, it was a good speech, noble. Clinton was tucking her wounds away for the good of party and country. The ultimate team-player who didn’t want to be blamed for harming that party, the ultimate fighter who didn’t want to dampen her own viability should Obama fail this time. There she would be, ready to take to the battlefield again.

You can feel that, even as watching her, there is a sense that perhaps her true fate lies elsewhere, in the long, honorable road of Teddy Kennedy. He was a man who had to run for the presidency — by the dictates of family and fate — and, once rebuffed, settled into a long, serious career in the Senate, becoming the most revered of men and agile of legislators. It’s not the torch she wanted or is able to settle for right now. Perhaps later.

What’s clear is that there is still a bruised and restless positioning going on with her, as was evident in that speech. (For Kennedy, his 1980 run signaled a hard and irrefutable end of his presidential quest; too much stuff had come up.) Yes, she endorsed Obama—mentioning him at least a dozen times. But what she endorsed was the candidate — not the man. He had no flesh on him. He was the Democratic candidate, and that was enough for her.

There was no talk of Obama’s passions, his career, their shared goals and ideals. Of course, she reaffirmed the big “D” democratic values. We’re for the forgotten, the working class not the upper class. We’re for energy independence and a restitution of the respect America used to garner around the world, so squandered in the last eight years. We’re for health care and hope and change. That’s why I ran, she said—underscore “I.” She never said that’s why Barack Obama is running. It was a passionate but strangely impersonal—almost totally impersonal —endorsement.

In fairness, to Clinton, Michelle Obama didn’t offer a completely fulsome portrait of her husband either. She wasn’t able to put flesh on the political leader her husband has been and can be. He was a community organizer. OK—what did he get done, believe in? As a state senator? As a senator? He’s a good man, she says, a man who, with tenderness and caution, drove her and their newborn daughter home from the hospital, awed by the new paternal responsibility.

That was her task, granted, to humanize their family, make them seem like every other family out there. We are awfully touchy-feely now in our conventions, in our country. But there is still a strange absence in that hall in Denver.

In fairness, too, it isn’t Clinton’s job to fill that absence. She went as far as she could. That’s what it felt like. There was just something held back, something about Barack Obama she could not certify, could not delineate—could not or would not.

Yes, he’s no McCain, no George Bush. But she didn’t try to help define who he is, didn’t exactly speak to her working-class supporters and allay their fears about Obama, didn’t say to them — he is your man, he will look after you. I know him; I’ve been with him. He is a good man, a man of judgment and compassion.

She didn’t say any of that. She threaded a rhetorical needle Tuesday night.

There was much to admire, to resonate to in her speech. But, whether consciously or unconsciously, from will or wounds, there was still something missing: Obama himself.

Anne Taylor Fleming is a novelist, commentator and essayist for “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” She is the author of a memoir, “Motherhood Deferred: A Woman’s Journey.”

John and Elizabeth Edwards in Tipton, Iowa, in June 2007. (Photo by John Edwards 2008 Campaign)

What what she thinking?

That’s the question that continues to haunt the painful saga of John and Elizabeth Edwards. Not that she loves him and stayed with him after he confessed to having an affair (and possible lust child; though whether he told her about that we don’t know).

If we have learned one thing watching Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, it is that marriages are complex, each and every one, with its bargains, and attachments, and wounds that run deep. After, of course, insisting she was not some little woman standing by her man, Hillary Clinton was in many respects just that. It was clearly what she needed to do, sailing on post-presidency into the Senate and her own fierce run for the White House.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

No, the question in Elizabeth Edwards’s case is: Why in the world did she go ahead and let him run — run with him, run hard all across the country, giving her all despite her stage four cancer and her two young children — after she knew. After she knew about his dalliance with a bouncy, blond so-called filmmaker with a penchant for New Age spirituality.

In these days of her public humiliation, one wants not to add to it. He is the cad, the creep. Looking back at his charm, his expensively coiffed hair, his caramel-voiced defense of the poor — while he built a palatial country estate. All this was a bit suspicious at the time. There were overtones of another Slick Willy.

But then there was Elizabeth Edwards. She was the moral anchoring point, the class act. So authentic, so warm, so unslick, so graceful, so brave. If a woman of such obvious depth and concern for the country, a woman who had lost a son and had faced cancer with openness and strength — sharing it all but not in a sympathy-begging way — if a woman like that loved a man like that, well then, he must be OK, too.

He must be, underneath the mediagenic voice and looks, real, too. Because he loved her. Because he was proud of her and said so at every turn. Because she was his sounding board, his best surrogate, his No. 1 campaigner.

The country needed her husband, she told us, with that wonderful smile, and she was willing to throw heart and soul into his run. Not just for him, not just to help him fulfill his ambitions — but for us. She made believers of us all — not about him, but about herself. She was the real deal, someone we could all emulate, want to get to know, want for a friend.

Yes, there was carping at the time from some quarters as they launched their White House quest, running side by side and hand in hand. What about the kids? They were little; they needed stability, a mom at home (what about dad?). And what about the cancer? Was she, the mother of such young children, jeopardizing her health by barreling around the county helping to humanize and sell her husband?

There was a bit of that, and the implication that her ego, too, might be involved — that she wasn’t quite as selfless as she appeared. But, with her energy and accessibility, she made believers of just about everyone, especially after she announced the cancer was back and she — they — would still run full-tilt.

Amazing, touching and, perhaps in hindsight, a little nuts. Because she knew all that time about the affair. She had to know the tabloids were after the story and after her husband — stalking him as he stalked the White House. It’s just a little bit bizarre, that disconnect, even from someone so special and admirable.

Somewhere in all this, she, too, put the blinders on. One can only assume she was thinking that he wouldn’t be found out. What if he had somehow gotten into more serious contention? What if he had actually won the nomination? What if had come out now, on the practical eve, of the convention? Would the media and the public just swallow hard and say, oh well, old news. None of our business.

Not this year. It would have been a mess, a bigger one than there is now.

That’s what is both troubling and sad. You can make the argument that this is private stuff, private pain. Many people clearly believe that would be a more desirable state of affairs — where personal lives and personal indiscretions are not constantly fair game. But that is not the world we live in right now, nor the country.

Elizabeth Edwards, so spot on in every way, had to know that. It wasn’t going to be tucked under any rug in her nice, new house. She could forgive him and re-embrace him — as she says she has. But the country might not be able to do that anymore. Bill Clinton seemed to get away with bimbo eruptions when he was first running for president, but the level of cad fatigue has geometrically increased. And, by running with her husband, Elizabeth Edwards, in effect, invited us all in — yes, even those nasty tabloids who had been chasing him from day one.

I just wish she hadn’t. I don’t want to know. I didn’t want to see the requisite mea culpa from the latest cad, didn’t want to have to imagine the disgust and hurt of his wife and family.

At least, John Edwards made the repentance rounds on his own. Elizabeth Edwards did not have to stand by her man, like Silda Spitzer, her face etched in pain and humiliation. That’s something. But the bottom line is the same: if you want to keep it really private, you can’t run for public office. Not today.

Anne Taylor Fleming is a novelist, commentator and essayist for “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” She is the author of a memoir, “Motherhood Deferred: A Woman’s Journey.”

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) (Barbara Kinney, Flickr)

Exits are hard.

When to leave. How to leave. Should you leave them laughing? Or crying? Or both? Should you be sentimental but dry-eyed? Self-celebrative but self-deprecating? No question, quitting the game is a tough moment, especially when and if it all comes down to the wire, and you are being nudged out not just by reality but also by old, loyal chums. Leave now before more damage is done. Buck up and concede with grace.

Such was the dilemma facing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton when she was finally ready to call it quits. She hit, it is fair to say, a perfect note, part narcissism (who doesn’t leave the stage without a fair dose of that), part magnanimity, especially when it came to Barack Obama.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Let’s be honest. She was at the National Building Museum in Washington on Saturday to service his ego and needs, not her own. Her time was over. All she had to do was pass the baton as best she could. She has not his soaring rhetorical gifts. There has always been something about her that bespeaks the smartest girl in the class, something a little practiced if fluent, a little schooled.

But her exit speech was as graceful as it gets. She did exactly what she had to do: endorse Obama full-tilt and urge her supporters to do the same. The speech was in sharp contrast to her Tuesday night speech after the last primaries, when she couldn’t seem to say anything about the historic nature of the night when the first African-American became a major party’s nominee for the highest office in the land.

Too painful right then to go there. She did the math over, insisting she still had 18 million voters on her side and would release them, presumably, when Obama came up with something to help salve her wounds. By Saturday, the wounds were tucked back under the pantsuit, and the old pro was at the podium one last time.

When she walked off, there was a kind of nationwide exhalation. It had been a long bruising fight. True, there were in that audience, and around the country, many impassioned Hillary supporters — including cadres of irate women who think she was dissed repeatedly by the sexist bully boys of the mainstream media along with the lowlife blogger boys of cyberspace who called her every name in the book.

Let us not forget she was running at a time when the hot Hollywood comedies are sophomoric sex romps like “Knocked Up,” all having at their center a frantic, frat boy x-rated insecurity about the power of women, sexual and otherwise. That old puerile stuff.

It is remarkable, then, that Clinton did so well, even, and especially, with men — hardworking, beer-drinking, blue-collar men. The women supporters were one thing, the men entirely another. There were exciting moments and exciting victories and a candidate as tenacious and gritty, as capable of playing hardball, as the next guy. Hats off to her for that and for the way she finally took her leave.

Here’s the thing: it’s hard, in the aftermath, not to be angry and relieved all at the same time. Angry because you’re a woman and there is no question there was a nasty undertone to a lot of the coverage she received — smirky, dissective and dismissive. It came from women often as much as from men — both Maureen Dowd and Peggy Noonan seeming to polish up special vitriol when it came to Clinton, a seeming lifetime of animus packed into every column about her.

Given the antipathy Clinton engenders — and has for years — it is amazing, really, she had the chutzpah to run at all, the tenacity, the willingness to put herself out there one more time. Some can, and did, write it off as pure ambition. What politician isn’t full of rampant ambition?

But no question, there is also relief that is has come to an end. The Clintons and their marriage and the bargains they make and have made have haunted our consciousness, and certainly the national media coverage, for so long. There is on the stands, even now, a Vanity Fair piece dissecting Bill Clinton’s post-presidential life, rife with innuendoes about his private life and solid reporting about the morally compromised fat cats he hangs out with.

There would have been a lot more of that had Hillary Clinton garnered the nomination, a lot more prying into the former president’s alliances, personal and professional. We live in a media world where private lives are fair game — often, most of the game. You just can’t be sitting on secrets. It makes you tense and armored, which is how Hillary Clinton looked until those much-dissected tears and until, as defeat grew ever-near, she seemed at long last to relax into her warmer self.

It was late. She was overmatched by a natural — a man cool and careful and gifted, a man who has mastered the art of being open and accessible while holding something back. A man both hip and earnest. A man so determinedly gracious in victory that his opponent had no option but to follow his lead, which she did — even though, in the dark of night or those private moments, the loss must sting hard.

She’ll be back, no doubt, after Obama’s campaign finds the right role for her, but it will be in the service of someone else’s need and ego not her own. Her vaunted ambition notwithstanding, she is a team player, Hillary Clinton is. Just ask her husband; just ask the many senators whose respect she has earned. She will do the same for Obama when he calls, hiding her deep, personal disappointment as she rallies those disaffected women and blue-collar men to his side.

Anne Taylor Fleming is a novelist, commentator and essayist for “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” She is the author of a memoir, “Motherhood Deferred: A Woman’s Journey.”

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) (Barbara Kinney)

She can’t seem to stop.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is still making the grueling campaign rounds in hopes of what? Some miracle, some last-ditch suicidal revelation or gaffe from the other side? Is she, in fact, even thinking anymore? Or is she just going on trussed-up rote—hair coiffed, colorful jackets and smile in place—the daily ritual of running so deep in now it has become addictive, impossible to stop.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Of course this is what the Clintons do—both of them. They run for public office. They lose and win and run again. They push and charm with a dual sense of commitment and entitlement that is awe-inspiring. She was radiant in her West Virginia victory speech on Tuesday, as she has been these past few weeks, making her last-ditch case at various diners and day-care centers. She seems to be almost singing, under her breath, a verse of “This Nearly Was Mine”—the show-stopping second act song from “South Pacific,” currently in a stunning revival at Lincoln Center in New York.

See: sentiment’s fine. Corny is fine. This nearly was mine. Should have been, could have been. Could still be. Her chorus, her familial claque, Bill and Chelsea, are everywhere, too. Clearly the family that campaigns together stays together.

That’s the thing: what now? Clearly this campaign has been a bonding time for the Clintons. For years, the couple seemed almost to be living apart—she doing her Senate thing; he moving around the world doing good works and burnishing his post-presidential legacy. But former President Bill Clinton has clearly been on board for his wife’s run. He has been her most avid champion—if sometimes a bit intemperate, even angry, in making the case. He wants this for Hillary, no doubt about it. He has been everywhere, in hamlets and towns, exhorting what is sometimes just a small crowd to support his wife. It’s as if they were back in the beginning somehow, running hard in the rural byways and small towns of Arkansas, as if he—and she—had not already occupied the White House, together, for eight years. This nearly was hers.

A smart woman friend of mine said of Hillary Clinton that she has been badly served by the men around her in this campaign. She was referring to Mark Penn and the other guys at the top of her organization— these guys missed the national zeitgeist change early enough, the Obama threat and the need to shake down every vote, prevail at every caucus, no matter how small. But she also meant Bill, making the case of his wife with such fervency he has turned off some voters—not to mention many pundits.

But the truth is without him, who knows? Hillary Clinton is a creature of this marriage to her bones. She was — and is — a strong-minded, gifted woman who would no doubt have found a way to have a meaningful life. But with her marriage to Bill Clinton, she moved into a different realm — as did he. They became more together than either of them might have been apart—and they both knew that right from the get-go.

I knew them then. I saw them as they embarked on their marriage and their journey to the top. They needed each other; they wanted each other. They wanted the pair they became. If she was, ultimately, the forgiving mother figure to his Peck’s bad boy, he was also the champion of her gifts, giving her a platform on which to hone and display them. It is an astonishing story—what they have achieved, what the marriage has survived.

It is way too simple to describe it as an arrangement, simple and simple-minded. Every long marriage has secret places, wounds, things forgiven — little things, big things. The Clintons have just lived a lot of theirs in public. Even so, we don’t know really know what goes on between them. Not really; not any of us.

Soon, it seems inevitable, they will leave the main stage—providing Hillary Clinton does not get the vice presidential nod from Sen. Barack Obama, which is something people are certainly talking about now. And if Obama, now the likely Democratic nominee, doesn’t prevail against Sen. John McCain, one can also imagine Hillary Clinton gearing up for the next time around. But current odds are that we will have a momentary Clinton respite —and that will be restful.

They are old-school—too messy, too hot for the new, cooler, post-modern world, Obama’s world. Even McCain, with his quiet voice if sometimes raspy temperament, seems cool by comparison to the Clintons right now. They are sixtysomething — hard to imagine because, like so many of our baby boom generation, they have seemed preternaturally energetic and driven.

No question, it will be restful, too, not to have that endless internecine generational warfare played out over and over: the liberal, dope-smoking, anti-war 60’s kids vs. the Bible-clutching, Clinton-hating reactionaries; all that talk about values and abortion and prayers in the schools. Funnily enough, the Clintons have always been kind of square in a way. They seem to have long prided themselves on being pragmatic and centrist, eyes always on the prize, hardly the hard-core caricatured liberals the right would have them. She is clearly running, as her husband did, from the center—the big lesson he taught the Democrats back when.

So we stick with her one last round, watching her barrel ahead, a hard glint of hope and determination in her eyes. It is sometimes like watching a first-rate athlete trying to play hard-ball against a deft opponent with a more graceful swing, a lighter touch.

Some are grumpy about her endurance, seeing her as a spoiler for her party. But others are inclined to let her have this non-victory lap, let her suit up one more time and make the rounds singing that plaintive refrain: “This nearly was mine.”

It will be over soon enough. You can sense a bit of nostalgia already for the end of the spectator sport known as Clinton-watching. There has been nothing like it, like them. Not even close.

Anne Taylor Fleming is a novelist, commentator and essayist for “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” She is the author of a memoir, “Motherhood Deferred: A Woman’s Journey.”

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) (Barbara Kinney, Flickr.com)

We like always to think of it as a virtue, the head-down, tortoise-beats-the-hare tenaciousness that exemplifies the admirable victors, the artists, the lovers, and — yes — the powerful, who persist in their goals long after the fleet and fleeting have taken their seats. Which, of course, brings us to Hillary Rodham Clinton. Nobody in recent memory, certainly no woman, has pushed and fought and hung as tough as our would-be first woman president.

More to the point, she has ignored and continues to ignore calls for her to step aside, despite the formidable math that stands in her way. She is clearly not afflicted with the traditional female need to make nice. Not by a long shot.

She has been excoriated in print and on the Internet for taking the low road, been analyzed ad nauseam by the TV punditry, been abandoned by former Clinton allies. Yet, on she goes, strangely, even fiercely, alluring in her persistence.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Am I crazy, or does she actually look better, glowier, more vital than she did months past when the nomination seemed to be hers for the taking? She is a radiant warrior — or warrioress, if you will — bringing to bear on her White House hunt the same grit and tenacity she has so clearly brought to her marriage. Back when many people, a lot of them women, urged her to abandon her serial philanderer, she brushed off their injunctions with head held high. In fairness, a lot of women seem to exemplify tenaciousness in love, trying to hold marriages and families together despite a straying mate. The domestic sphere is our orbit to manifest persistence.

But seldom do we see a woman show such ferocity in the service of her own blazing, trail-blazing ambition. Seldom have we seen a woman subtly, or not-so, go for the masculine jugular as this one has — slashing at her male opponent with a kind of baiting, patronizing, survivalist’s glee. You want to go a few more rounds? Great. I’m in. This is just getting fun. She seems more and more lit up, he more and more defeated, defensive, even though, technically, he is still in the winner’s column.

It’s quite a spectacle. One that leaves many of us with two minds. Yes, great — if you are in the battle, full steam ahead. Don’t pull your punches, don’t curtsy and leave the stage. Don’t whine or cry, a la Pat Shroeder back when.

To the young women around me, I say, watch her. You may have problems with her; you may think this is ultimately disturbing stuff, but there is something instructive — even quite moving — in her example. If you’re going to play with the big boys, at some point, this is what it might look like.

But there is the flip-side. Clinton is flirting with seriously weakening the presumptive nominee — he does have more popular votes and more delegates. In her zeal to win, she is showing a dangerous willingness to take down her party, a willingness to ding and demean Barack Obama as an untested lightweight unwilling to go for her jugular in turn.

You get the feeling from Clinton that this is her perversely finest hour. A time when every slight, from kindergarten on, is being brought to bear in her obdurate willingness to stay the course — suggesting now that the Florida and Michigan votes should count after the party flat out said they wouldn’t, and after Obama wasn’t even on the ballot in Michigan. Rules be damned — right?

But underneath it all is her dangerous willingness to let race finally finally infect the consciousness of this country. The votes, certainly in the industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, are showing a real racial divide. In the latter state, Clinton got 63 percent of the white vote — inflaming the resentments of the hard-core industrial workers in those states to get it — while Obama got 90 percent of the black vote. And 18 percent of Democratic voters said race mattered to them.

To the young women around me, I say, watch her…But there is a flip side…

OK. The jig is up. We are face to face with our ourselves. Clinton has lasted long enough, and fought hard enough, for the race issue finally to be at the forefront, to grab the post-mortem headline in The New York Times.

Bill Clinton tried to do this in South Carolina — put race squarely on the table — and it backfired. The Clinton campaign, abetted by the prowling media hordes, tried to put it on the table again with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. story, only to have Obama try eloquently to take it off — and seem to succeed in fair measure with his elegant speech.

But now it’s back, really back. No thanks to Obama’s so-called pal, Wright, himself. He told PBS’ Bill Moyers that Obama was, after all, a politician — and they had to say what they had to say. Sounds like wounded ego. Whatever, he didn’t help.

The longer we go, the longer she hangs in, the more Hillary Clinton has been able to make the country wonder if, indeed, it is ready to elect a black president.

We hoped we were past that. We talked of Obama as the post-racial candidate. In their retro-shrewdness, the Clintons have called our bluff. They’ve taken us down the old, low road. She has done this at least in part by her obdurate willingness to keep on keeping on.

Obviously race would have come up in the general election in some form — overtly, covertly, every which way. But it is front and center now: questions of Obama’s electability and, under that or on top of it, his skin color. Even those who might applaud Clinton’s tenacity and still be ardent supporters of her candidacy cannot help but feel some sickness and even some shame over the reckoning her ferocious persevering campaigning has helped bring about.

Anne Taylor Fleming is a novelist, commentator and essayist for “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” She is the author of a memoir, “Motherhood Deferred: A Woman’s Journey.”