Clift: Hillary's New Persona

Like many of Hillary Clinton's supporters, Deborah Tannen was bracing for a different outcome in the New Hampshire primary. She'd heard the pundits debating whether the senator could hold her loss to single digits, and when Clinton ended up winning, Tannen was delighted to see the media with egg on its face. She was pleased too that what she calls "the double bind" didn't completely override the election results.

Tannen has made a career out of studying gender-specific communication. A professor of linguistics at Georgetown and the author of the best-selling 1990 book "You Just Don't Understand" (Morrow), a study of male-female conversational patterns, Tannen defines the double bind like this: If a woman acts in a way that's expected of a leader, she risks not being likeable, she's not feminine enough. If she acts in a way that we expect of a woman, i.e. she cries, then she's weak.

Hillary Clinton is that rare woman in political life whose toughness is not in question. She has been tested in the glare of the media in ways that most people can't imagine, rebounding from failure on health-care reform to holding her head high through her husband's transgressions. What was in question is her humanity. The scripted, almost robotic nature of her campaign turned off voters, especially women, who didn't recognize this programmed creature as one of their own. In Iowa, Hillary lost every demographic group except women over 65, a generation more familiar with the slings and arrows of gender discrimination and more forgiving of Hillary's custom of masking her emotions.

All might have been lost in New Hampshire if it weren't for a series of moments that coaxed, if not forced, Hillary out of her shell. Every sentient human being saw Hillary's eyes well up when a sympathetic woman in a diner asked her how she does it, how she gets out of bed every day knowing the gauntlet she faces. The scene was replayed endlessly on cable television accompanied by mostly male commentators denigrating Hillary for what some speculated was manufactured emotion. HILL WEARY AND TEARY blared the New York Post. The episode fed into a storyline of a campaign coming unglued, and the glee among the chattering class at the prospect of the Clinton dynasty crumbling was unmistakable.

Being declared dead is not a new experience for either Clinton. So many pundits had pronounced Bill Clinton finished in 1992 that when he won the nomination, aides made a video of all the wrong predictions strung together to the tune of Frank Sinatra singing "They All Laughed."

Hillary's choke-up moment was a turning point for both New Hampshire's women voters and for the media, as well. Among some high-profile pundits, it opened up the floodgates of negative Hillary commentary. Between that and the snide digs like the IRON MY SHIRT placard at a Clinton meeting, women were infuriated—and young women got a dramatic reminder that many of the old fights haven't been won just yet. Clinton aides saw it as a "Rick Lazio moment," when Hillary's hapless opponent in her 2000 Senate race crossed the stage during a debate and waved a piece of paper in her face, a bullying gesture that rallied women to her side.

It was also reminiscent of the Anita Hill hearings in 1991, when an all-male Judiciary Committee grilled Hill over her accusations of sexual harassment against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Whether women believed the charges or not, and many didn't, the result was an outpouring of women voters galvanized by the spectacle of the all-male inquisition of a lone female. The result was dubbed "the year of the woman" with a record number of women elected to Congress. Any gathering of women today will yield anecdotal evidence of why many don't like Hillary or are conflicted about her candidacy, but when the guys start piling on, that's when the tribal impulses kick in and women rally round.

Tannen says gender is fundamental to how we order the world, more fundamental than race, and that's not going to change. The next several weeks will test the boundaries of how far Hillary can stray from stereotypical femininity. If she's to win the nomination, something has to happen to make people realize they don't know much about Obama, or at least not enough to entrust him with the presidency. She can't have her husband do all the dirty work or that will present a different set of problems. "Each individual woman has to find her own mix of attributes so she's likeable and comes across as capable and confident," says Tannen. "I guess showing emotion [in New Hampshire] was one way of mixing in enough of the feminine."

Hillary said she found her voice in New Hampshire. Good for her if she's left the controlled and cautious Hillary behind for a more passionate fighting version of herself. Still, anything she does is a risk, even if it's a necessary risk. Some voters may not like the new Hillary any more than the old one.