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Is the era of big Clintons set to end?
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 | Dem dream ticket remains just that May 25: Amid a continuing campaign battle, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s campaigns insist there has been no formal discussion of a shared ticket. NBC’s Lee Cowan reports. Nightly News |
Clinton II
She was diligent from the start, attentive to constituent needs and a hard worker on the Armed Services Committee. She promised to be "pretty New York-centric," and was.
But everything she did was colored by the expectation of a presidential run.
The most polarizing woman in politics turned into a workhorse and formed surprising alliances with Republicans.
She edged toward the center and attempted to accomplish in little pieces what she could not pull off as a whole in her years as first lady.
Clinton joined Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, an architect of her husband's impeachment, in a law improving health coverage for members of the National Reserve and Guard serving in Iraq.
She pushed for tighter regulation of prescription drugs for children and help for recovery workers whose health was impaired by laboring at the site of the 2001 World Trade Center terrorist attack.
And she voted to authorize the Iraq invasion, which she would never live down after she cruised to re-election in 2006.
No monumental law bears her name.
But in the campaign, universal health care returned to her agenda. This time, she said, she would learn from her experience and do it right — more openly and less intrusively on parts of the health care system that work.
Clinton was the one to beat out of the gate. Everyone knew her, for one thing.
"Ninety-nine percent of the country feels they have a relationship with her," said Mike McCurry, former press secretary to President Clinton.
And there was Bill, still in everyone's face. He stumped for his wife as if possessed. Hillary Clinton flashed him that bright smile on stage through thick and thin.
For some voters, that was one Clinton — or two — too many.
"We've had enough of the Clintons," said Haydon Grubbs, 77, of Shalimar, Fla. "New direction, right?"
Grubbs, a Republican who voted in the past for the "He Clinton," backed Obama this time.
The "She Clinton" found her own voice.
But, like her husband, she seemed the strongest when her back was against the wall.
As the odds of beating Obama sank into the nearly impossible, she campaigned as if there were some previously undiscovered "third way" to win, just as Bill Clinton had sought a third way to govern between the old politics of left and right.
On Friday, she cited the 1968 Democratic primaries as a reason why she should stay in the race. She mentioned the assassination of Robert Kennedy in June of that year, then apologized for bringing it up.
Bounced back, over and over
Together, Bill and Hillary Clinton have pulled it out of the fire over and over, going back to 1976, when he bounced back from losing a congressional race two years earlier. He won election as Arkansas attorney general.
Two years after that, at 32, he became the nation's youngest governor.
Then, defeat in 1980 when he sought a second term. It would be his final election loss, but hardly the last dip in the Clintons' seemingly endless cycle of failure and renewal.
By the mid-1980s, when he was back in office in Little Rock, Clinton's name was floating as a Democratic presidential prospect.
He took a pass in 1988. But that year marked one benchmark in the rollout of the Clinton era.
He delivered a speech at the Democratic convention laying out a new orthodoxy that he would bring to the presidential race himself four years later, his activist wife at his side.
The Clintons' national conversation had begun.
The speech went on for so long that some people wondered if it would ever end.
In a way, it never did. Not until now.
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