Hillary is us

In January 2001, before her husband had even vacated the White House, Hillary Rodham Clinton was improbably sworn in as the junior senator from New York, a state in which she had resided for one year. As she became the most popular girl on the Senate floor, there were only echoes of the figure she had cut eight years before. As senator, Clinton became positively sleek, fulsome and oleaginous as she slipped and slid from one side of the aisle to another. She was supple with surprisingly high approval ratings and buoyed by buzz about where her political career might next go.

Her youthful work on behalf of migrant workers was replaced by a 2003 radio assertion that she is "adamantly against illegal immigrants." Where she once fell on the sword of universal healthcare, she now partnered on a healthcare compromise with Newt Gingrich -- Gingrich who led the revolution against her husband in the name of that accursed health plan! Where she once advocated passionately on behalf of children's rights, she now pressed the Family Entertainment Protection Act, protecting hapless kids from the dangerous effects of video games.

She bid adieu to her longtime awkward support for Palestine with a final wanton embrace of Suha Arafat in 1999. In its place was an unctuous love of Israel, embodied by the introduction of one of those wily lost Jewish relatives who often appear on Methodist family trees when it is convenient to do so. Gone was her wonky devotion to her hometown Chicago Cubs. That particular loyalty was doffed in favor of a Yankees cap. The Yankees! What perfidy. No clumsy losers for the new Hillary Clinton, only slick, moneyed winners.

As senator, Clinton proposed flag-burning legislation -- flag-burning legislation -- to appease conservatives. After the 2004 election, the woman who wouldn't change her name and who was the keynote speaker at NARAL's 30th anniversary celebration joined the herd of Democrats distancing themselves from the pro-choice plank in the Democratic platform. Calling abortion a "sad, even tragic choice" for some, Clinton told an Albany audience of women's rights activists in January 2005, "I, for one, respect those who believe with all their hearts and conscience that there are no circumstances under which any abortion should ever be available."

Her gaffes were no longer the kind you could get behind -- all knees and elbows and Tammy Wynette. Now they were stomach-turning in their transparent need to please. In January of this year, speaking at a black Baptist church, she compared the House of Representatives to a plantation, adding with tone-deaf infelicity: "And you know what I'm talking about."

Then there is the fact that Clinton has refused to condemn George Bush and the war in Iraq. She voted for the war; she voted for the Patriot Act, a bill that stripped away the very civil liberties she was so keen to protect as a law school student. She resists the idea of designing a timetable for troop withdrawal. She has played both ways in the Connecticut Senate race: supporting her buddy Joe Lieberman, then later lending his opponent Ned Lamont her campaign manager Howard Wolfson.

And it's working. The woman is going over like gangbusters in unexpected venues. She's the first New York senator to sit on the Armed Services Committee. According to the Atlantic Monthly, she participates in an elite prayer breakfast, during which antiabortion, anti-gay, anti-evolution Kansas Republican Sam Brownback recently asked her forgiveness for having hated her in the past. Her approval ratings in New York are sky-high. She is the new poster child for bipartisan cooperation, and jaws could have been forgiven for dropping when, on a recent edition of NBC's "Meet the Press," the Republican candidate for Senate in Ohio, Mike DeWine, was more eager to name-drop his associations with Clinton than he was to assert his support for President Bush. Clinton has become, in her transformation from lawyer to political wife to senator to presidential hopeful, a one-size-fits-all likability machine who will juggle freedom and flag-burning if that means winning the talent show.

Meanwhile, the women who no longer see themselves or their political beliefs in Clinton, but have worked their whole lives to amend the single-sex backwater of American presidential history, are increasingly hamstrung in their feelings about her. They must ask themselves whether they should turn their backs on Clinton or whether this rare, flawed opportunity for progress is better than none at all.

For some, the choice is already made. Fourteen years after praising Clinton, Molly Ivins penned a column titled "I Will Not Support Hillary Clinton for President." "Sen. Clinton is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq, and that alone is enough to disqualify her," Ivins wrote. "Her failure to speak out on Terri Schiavo, not to mention that gross pandering on flag-burning, are just contemptible little dodges."

Actress Susan Sarandon appeared to sum up the attitude of many feminists when she flayed Clinton earlier this year in an interview with More, calling Clinton "a great disappointment." While Sarandon said that Clinton seemed to be "a very bright woman," she accused her of having "lost her progressive following because of her caution and centrist approach. It bothered me when she voted for the war. There were brave people who didn't. She's not worse than other politicians, but I hoped she would be better."

And that's it: Women hoped she would be better. Interviewed in New York magazine, Arianna Huffington -- herself a nimble political shape-shifter -- weighed in on Clinton, observing that "In Dante's Inferno, there's a special place reserved for those who know best and are not doing it."

Next page: Many feminists realize Clinton is navigating a political maze