Can Hillary Be a Healer?

As they hold their private summit in Washington tonight, the question that hangs in the air, whether she is on Obama's ticket or not, is: Can Hillary Clinton rise above a lifetime of experience to help heal the Democratic Party?

As someone who has had to fight all her public life, from the 1992 health care fiasco through her husband's impeachment and a year and a half of brass-knuckles campaigning, who has had to show voters she is tough enough to be Commander-in-Chief, who has had to carry the accumulated anger and resentments of her gender, and now their bitter disappointment, is it humanly possible for one woman, however resilient, to turn away from all that and use her strength to bring peace to a fractured party?

This moment is as much a test for Hillary Clinton as her 2002 vote for the resolution authorizing Bush to invade Iraq. Back then, none of the potential Democratic candidates could summon the courage to oppose it for fear of appearing weak. They all failed, but how much more pressure did she feel then as a woman in that position and five years later not to admit it was mistake?

As it turned out, the need to appear tough hurt her candidacy, and in the past few weeks, her posture as "a fighter" in the face of impending defeat and in the past few days her refusal to acknowledge the reality of it have damaged her even further.

But now, in these next days, Hillary Clinton has a chance to turn away from all that. As her backers try to blackmail Obama into putting her on the ticket, her statement today that the choice is his alone is a good start.

It would be heartening to see her rise above the politicking of this moment and show the wisdom and leadership her party needs to start repairing the damage that eight years of nasty Bush-Rove politics has done to the country.

The Gender Agenda

"If many of Mrs. Clinton’s legions of female supporters believe she was undone even in part by gender discrimination," the New York Times asks today, "how eagerly will they embrace Senator Barack Obama, the man who beat her?"

The question underscores how crucial it is for Democrats to untangle the issue of what derailed America's first woman president from what seemed her clear path to the White House only a year ago. Was Hillary Clinton's campaign undone by the message or the messengers?

In the latter category, Sen. Clinton, although she bears ultimate responsibility, was clearly hampered not only by her husband but hot-shot strategist Mark Penn, who failed to see that voters would be turned off by a play-it-safe campaign fueled by what looked like a sense of entitlement. (They overlooked the lesson of what Harry Truman did to Thomas E. Dewey in 1948, a "sure" year for Republicans.)

"When people look at the arc of the campaign, it will be seen that being a woman, in the end, was not a detriment and if anything it was a help to her,” presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin points out. Her candidacy faltered as a result of “strategic, tactical things that have nothing to do with her being a woman.”

No matter how true that may be, and even if they accept its validity, that will bring cold comfort to millions of women who have so much hope invested in what Hillary Clinton calls breaking "the highest and hardest glass ceiling" in American life.

All other calculations aside, and there are many, this frustration has to be taken into account in Barack Obama's choice of a running mate. With consideration and without condescension, the potential first African-American President has to think long and hard about the symbolic and practical value of breaking through American prejudice with two for the price of one.