Diva with Perfect Pitch: Hillary Hits High Notes

At the beginning of her campaign for President, which might be said to have begun immediately after she was elected a U.S. Senator eight years ago, Hillary Clinton embarked on a quest to discover which version of herself the American public wanted.

Along the way, she offered snapshots of herself as a war hawk, someone who could work well with her Republican colleagues, someone who could multiply seven-plus years in office by 35 years in public life to portray herself as the voice of experience, and someone who could rhapsodize about guns while throwing back shots and beers. Some of the personas backfired or seemed woefully contrived, and some resonated.

Returned to Her Roots

But by the end of her run for this year's Democratic nomination, when she made her speech Aug. 26 in Denver conferring her blessing upon Barack Obama as her party's nominee, Ms. Clinton was back to fitting the thumbnail sketch the mainstream media long ago produced of her: a liberal with deep roots in her party's old ideals of what America was meant to be. The bruises and lacerations absorbed along the campaign trail — more than a few self-administered — might still be sensitive to the touch, but she made her appeal for Mr. Obama with neither a grimace nor a false note.

THE MESSAGE HE NEEDED: Hillary Clinton's speech at the Democratic National Convention, one supporter said, rallied her loyalists to 'put aside hurt feelings' and back Barack Obama for President because 'the party is bigger than any individual.'

She developed more of a personal rapport with John McCain over nearly eight years in the Senate than she has with Mr. Obama in half that time, but her speech signaled she grasped the difference between getting along and going along, as she rejected the prospect of letting "another Republican in the White House squander the promise of our country and the hopes of our people.

"And you haven't worked so hard over the last 18 months," she told her supporters, both in the Pepsi Center and watching on television, "or endured the last eight years, to suffer through more failed leadership.

"No way. No how. No McCain."

The collegiality and elaborate politeness of the Senate had been checked at the door of the convention hall. Mr. McCain's campaign had been using her critical remarks about Senator Obama during the Democratic primaries to bludgeon him in a commercial that began airing immediately after he chose Joe Biden as his running-mate, and this was her way of saying she didn't appreciate being used in that fashion.

She hit back by ridiculing the presumptive Republican nominee for saying "the economy is fundamentally sound" and for not believing that "47 million people without affordable health care is a crisis." She noted that he wanted to privatize Social Security and did not have a problem with the fact that women earned less than men for doing comparable work.

"He has served our country with honor and courage," she said of Mr. McCain. "But we don't need four more years of the last eight years. More economic stagnation and less affordable health care."

The McCain campaign and some pundits would later argue that as good as her speech was, she failed to make a compelling rationale for Mr. Obama's candidacy. But one of her delegates, State Sen. Diane Savino, countered that this wasn't what the party's nominee needed from her; he would have the chance to do that on his own behalf two nights later.

Rallying 'Round the Party

"I think her sole purpose was to get across that the party is bigger than any individual," Ms. Savino said from Denver the following afternoon. "The Democratic policies have been very good not only to the working and middle class but to wealthier people, too. She was telling people, 'So put aside your personal likes or dislikes and your hurt feelings and realize this is the person who's the nominee and will carry out these policies. We don't get a chance at that with John McCain.'''

Correction Officers Benevolent Association President Norman Seabrook, an Obama delegate, remarked, "I think she made it absolutely clear why she was backing Barack Obama: that they have the same position on health care, education, and equal pay for women."

The tenor of the campaign had gotten rough even before Mr. Obama won the Iowa caucuses in early January. After she slowed his momentum by winning the New Hampshire primary, it took an uglier turn when some of Senator Clinton's supporters, including her husband, ridiculed or tried to demean Mr. Obama's achievements in the run-up to the South Carolina primary and his surprisingly easy victory there.

Poor planning and bad budgeting left her campaign gasping after she failed to put him away on Super Tuesday at the beginning of February, allowing Senator Obama to run up a string of primary and caucus victories over the next two weeks that suddenly left him, not her, looking like the inevitable nominee. And as she looked to go negative before big-state primaries in Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama's supporters tried to turn up the pressure on her to drop out, arguing that the growing acrimony would only hurt the party's chances in November.

But whatever lumps she inflicted on Mr. Obama, Ms. Clinton seemed to find her stride along the way. Her new message of economic populism, while occasionally marred by dubious reaches like her call for a summer moratorium on Federal gas taxes, allowed her to connect with voters in ways that she never had when she treated the nomination as hers for the claiming. She wasn't the first candidate to finish strong once it was too late to change the outcome, but if she didn't capture the nomination, she seemed to recapture the better part of herself.

A Test for Obama

This posed a potential problem for Mr. Obama: that her late surge might convince her that she didn't have to play the role of the vanquished, joining his side in a stage-managed show of unity. Her pre-convention demands were criticized as an attempt to muscle him, and when he yielded to several of them, including the calling of the roll to allow a good portion of her delegates to affirm their commitment to her candidacy, some pundits suggested the Illinois Senator had shown a weakness that did not augur well for how he might handle foreign dictators.

The problem with that analysis — aside from the fact that some of those same columnists had previously rolled over without even being commanded to for the likes of President Bush and Rudy Giuliani — was that it was predicated on the view of Ms. Clinton as a hostile power with whom no true rapprochement was possible.

It could be argued that Mr. Obama was not responsible for much of the scorn she endured from both the national media and members of her own party, Teddy Kennedy most prominent among them when he endorsed the Illinois Senator to register his displeasure with Bill Clinton's remarks coming out of South Carolina. That did not mean, however, that Senator Obama could just wipe his hands of the mess and expect that Ms. Clinton would meekly accede and turn her supporters to his cause without receiving her due.

"She was absolutely right to stand up there and take her bow and say 'I cracked this glass ceiling,''' Mr. Seabrook said.

'Something Bigger Than Me'

But in recounting what she heard during her campaign, from a wounded Marine waiting for medical care, a young mother who adopted two children with autism and then discovered she had cancer, and a boy worried that his mom had just had her hours cut when they were already just scraping by on a minimum-wage salary, Senator Clinton brought those conversations around to what the Democratic Party is meant to represent.

"I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me?" she told her audience. "Or were you in it for that young Marine and others like him? Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids? Were you in it for that young boy and his mom surviving on the minimum wage? Were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible? We need leaders once again who can tap in to that special blend of American confidence and optimism that has enabled generations before us to meet our toughest challenges."

They were words worthy of John Steinbeck, one of Mr. Obama's favorite authors. Ms. Savino said the next day, "She was amazing. I think she's his best spokesperson. He needs to send her out all over the country."

Mr. Seabrook said Senator Clinton had already made all the argument Mr. Obama should need to bring most of her supporters around. "I think the message resonated and got across," he said. "And those who didn't get it I think don't really want change; they wanted one individual. Those who want to be selfish that way probably weren't going to vote for Barack Obama to begin with."

Speech Deeper Than Teddy's

There were some parallels to Teddy Kennedy's speech at the 1980 Democratic convention, with its strong enunciation of what the party stood for and a heavy emphasis on economic justice, but that one mentioned the man who had defeated him in the primaries, President Jimmy Carter, just once, even as it repeatedly ripped into Republican nominee Ronald Reagan. It was a memorable speech, but it came off less as a call to rally around Mr. Carter than a statement of what Mr. Kennedy would have run on had he gotten the Democratic nod.

His challenge to a sitting President from his own party had begun to unravel the previous November, when Roger Mudd asked him about Chappaquiddick a decade earlier and Senator Kennedy offered his best Jackie Gleason "homina, homina" routine in reply. His 1980 convention speech reminded voters what had attracted them to him in the first place, but by then his chance of becoming President had already slipped away and he probably knew it.

Her Own Undoing

Ms. Clinton's chances fell victim to a few bad choices, starting with her vote to authorize President Bush to go to war with Iraq that almost certainly went against her better judgment, and continuing with her careless, overconfident early campaign. It's not clear yet whether the presidency will always elude her, particularly if Mr. Obama wins in November and pushes her likely timetable for another run back until 2016.

But however much that thought looms over her, she was able to do what she had to do for Mr. Obama last week. At the end of her odyssey, she found her way back to the person she always seemed to worry couldn't overcome the prejudices against her, infused with an admirable mix of grace, toughness and determination.

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