Days of Their Lives

...Hillary's fans have wondered for years where she would be on her own without him, free to fulfill what they saw as her limitless destiny, unfettered by scandal, undistracted by coping with bimbo eruptions, unencumbered by Bill and his escapades...

...As a sum, they are, and remain, an incredible story...

...The 1998-2000 span of The Clintons was the emotional high point of the show, and of Hillary Clinton herself...

...Bill won, and they swept into office as the first First Couple ever elected, an exciting new concept in joint political leadership...

...And so the last act of this unfolding drama is revealing some interesting things...

...Her bewildered opponent could not match this drama...

...Go the Jackie route, and do over the White House...

...His job was to run, be elected, and make himself famous...

...But with Hillary, a defiant and outspoken feminist who had sworn not to stand by her man like some helpless and put-upon housewife, the scriptwriters took a step of stunning audacity: They sent her out to campaign...

...when she tries to inspire, she is unconvincing...

...Elected in part as the country's first feminist president, whose respect for women surpassed all understanding, Bill was accused of being (a) a groper, (b) a rapist, (c) a lecherous boss who cornered state employees in hotel rooms, and (d) an adulterous cad who had carried on with an intern barely older than his daughter in the Oval Office (or in a pantry close to it), on Easter Sunday, after having first gone to church with his wife...

...Again, people who liked and disliked Bill could both vote for Hillary...

...It was a mystery, but all could agree that only she could have done what it was she was doing: giving her demoralized party someone to root for...

...he was a show horse, trying to find ways to fill empty hours...

...And if her job was tough, Bill's is still tougher: It is easier to discipline a huge and unruly political talent than to try to breathe talent into a humorless disciplinarian...

...As the duplici-tous miscreant, Bill had imperiled himself, and given his wronged wife a springboard to a startling new future...

...they were young...

...Midnight came, the coach turned back into a pumpkin, and the princess turned into not quite a scullery maid, but surely no rock star, and merely a commonplace pol...

...for the stand on the lawn in front of the White House on the dark day that he was impeached...

...When the series had its national premiere in January 1992, on Super Bowl Sunday, Hillary was sporting blonde bangs and an Alice-in-Wonderland hair band, defending Bill against charges of fooling around with a lounge singer named Gennifer, who had held a press conference to detail his adultery, and who looked and dressed, with dark roots and big shoulders, as if she had wandered over from a neighboring Dynasty set...

...And thus, as her road to power appears narrower and steeper, the pressure on Bill to save her has increased...

...And then the real problems began...

...In 1980, Bill lost his first race for reelection as governor, partly because Hillary irritated so many people by looking and acting like a campus insurgent, with baggy dresses, thick glasses, and brown frizzy hair...

...Things can still change, but in the year or so leading up to the very long battle, she has often run behind leading Republicans in head-to-head matchups...

...Friends say he is working harder than ever...

...Joan Crawford could hardly have pulled it off better...

...They were seldom at the same place at the same time in their big houses...

...Actually, she was on her way not to the kitchen, but to a bargain unique in American politics: She would support and advance Bill while he ran for office, while any power he won would be shared...

...She was no longer Nora leaving the Doll's House to embrace a new destiny...

...As the good husband, Bill Clinton had given her the health care issue, and she had lost Congress, and imperiled their future...

...With Bill in disgrace (or at least in recovery), she stepped into the void created by his absence, and went coast to coast campaigning for Democrats, rallying them against the assault on Bill by his enemies, the "vast right-wing conspiracy...

...Can the couple bring it off once again...

...And he, for this, and for all of the grief he has caused her, now has to pay up, big time...

...But along the way, the division of labor had not been quite equal, and (no surprise to most female viewers) she had borne the brunt...

...who lived it up on both coasts as a Miramax princess...

...she needed him to make her a national figure, and then she needed his scandals to make her a star...

...And so, her performance is creating a problem for the show...

...Like Bess Truman, and stay out of Washington...

...Like any successful duo, Hillary and Bill's complementary skills—her will and discipline, his political talents—could compensate for their individual deficits, and create one effective political animal...

...She was carrying on Bill's name and career while moving beyond him, declaring her independence while extending his name and his legacy...

...wives have followed husbands (usually dead ones) into the House or the Senate...

...if you were enraged at Bill and wanted to teach him a lesson, you could slap him around by heeding her call and voting for Democrats, in support of the woman he had wronged...

...Wear stunning outfits at cultural evenings...

...In 1992, they seemed fresh and exciting...

...She was now one of a hundred United States senators, industrious, but not all that outstanding—prosaic, pedantic, and dull...

...As this was happening, in an attempt to sustain the plot, Hillary ran for the Senate, won, and began running for president, opening a whole new story line, plus a whole new vein of historical interest: Sons have succeeded fathers as president...

...she had real power, he had its memory...

...She had gone beyond being Bill's wife and become instead "Hillary...

...They say he is even on time...

...In the complex calculation of Clintonian balance, his scandals gave her the boost to get into the Senate, but may hurt her now with a national audience...

...In 1996, he won reelection, and the balance of power tipped back in his favor...

...She is proving a harder sell than she or Bill ever imagined...

...The downside was that their opposite deficits—his lack of discipline, her tin ear for politics—constantly threatened to scuttle the enterprise, creating an unending cycle of danger and rescue and blame...

...she was a workhorse, grinding away at her job...

...brothers have tried to follow brothers into the White House, and failed in the effort...

...Bill became president, and the ratings took off, ensnaring a new, international, audience...

...Democrats want their narratives to be like movies on Lifetime: They found Madeleine Albright an inspiring figure less because she was the first female secretary of state than because she ended up with a much bigger job than the husband who left her years earlier...

...all of the fun stuff...

...In the famous 1960s soap opera Camelot, the heroine, Jackie (the most deeply loved character ever to appear in a show of this nature), was said to have told her wandering spouse (the ferociously attractive but ill-fated Jack) that if she were ever embarrassed in public she would leave him, taking his children...

...As the marriage lost traction, so did the story and the fascination with it: People once intrigued by the strapping young president and the trim blonde with long hair lost interest in the haggard man with white hair, and the hard-looking woman who seemed to fill out her pant suits a little too amply...

...Hence, too, the unprecedented five-minute video he has released extolling her presidential qualities...

...Faced with the menace of early retirement, she began to turn blonder, took off her glasses, smartened her wardrobe, and became—well, not beautiful, but often quite pretty, especially in the later stages of the first run for president, when she sported soft little dresses and a well-coiffed blonde flip...

...Would he be like Eleanor, and busy himself with causes...

...There was some fear that she was going to get gypped out of something she had paid a real price for," an aide to the president said...

...In a strange way they had managed to trade situations: He had a symbolic role, she had a real one...

...The once thrilling drama of the first woman president has been wholly eclipsed by the still larger drama of the first viable black candidate...

...In a sense, Hillary has always been the real star of the series...

...In 1990, they thought of having her run to succeed him as governor...

...The Clintons had been running a very long time, and even some erstwhile fans were fatigued...

...One of the most appealing aspects of The Clintons was the way that the problems that roiled the country during the eight years of their joint term grew out of their private lives...

...A feminist favorite at high tide of the feminist movement, Hillary had been told all her life by her friends and relations that she had a spectacular and limitless future, and, if she wanted, could Go All The Way...

...As the lawyer, she would represent Clinton's interests, helping to resolve some of the most politically sensitive issues in Arkansas," including a dispute over a power plant in Mississippi and unresolved issues from the epic desegregation of the Little Rock public school system 30 years earlier...

...Go riding to hounds...

...The idea that she was both a star and a genius was a product of the 1998 midterm elections, when she rose from the ashes and hit the trail with a vengeance, the Pasionaria of the impeachment ordeal, the Woman Wronged, who—without mentioning either the wrong or the wrongdoer—was asking her party to stand by her man...

...Female viewers of The Clintons, especially, could share the concerns of the leading lady...

...Bill became Arkansas attorney general, and Hillary helped him...

...but never before has a former first lady tried to be elected president, and, in the process, make her husband the very first First Man...

...There was never a Lifetime movie quite like the 1998-2001 saga of Hillary!, the woman wronged who saved both her husband and party, who glowed on the cover of Vogue in Cartier jewels and in burgundy velvet...

...Bill ran for president, and Hillary helped him, now more than ever...

...Bill Clinton back in the White House, where he would rewrite the rules for First Spouses, would unsettle more than a few people...

...in the third, she wins, Bill pulls her over the finish line, and they go back to the White House for four or eight years of the same old dynamic, but this time with her owing him...

...And now we know...

...She needed him to give her access to power, to make her a household word in the state house and White House...

...As a bit of theater, it was a psychological masterstroke: If you were for Bill, you could back him by following Hillary and voting against the Republican Congress...

...If they can't, it won't be the first time a show failed when main characters tried to spin off into separate series, losing much of the magic that made the act compelling...

...I worked hard as a woman to help her get the opportunities she was entitled to," one such woman said sadly, as she helped Hillary pack for her trek into exile...

...It was the campaign-as-a-bad-country-song syndrome, and onlookers were mesmerized...

...Away from the old script, her appeal flagging, she has had problems finding a role...

...Bill became governor, and Hillary helped him...

...The answer is yes...

...But you voted for Democrats however you felt about Bill...

...Did she need Bill, after all, to be noticed...

...Hers was to do everything else: to order their lives, make most of their money, and always to pick up after Bill...

...And of course, she won...

...She has to put up, to prove the claim her fans have been making since the couple emerged: that she is the one who ought to be president, a woman of genius and destiny...

...And as the plot now heats up, it makes us look anew at the two major characters, and their complex bargain...

...The series took off, and won a huge following, as one intriguing development followed the next...

...As the scandals grew dim, so did her celebrity aura: She was no longer the controversial co-president, the would-be Evita, the long-suffering spouse betrayed for the dubious charms of the thong-baring bimbo...

...As the public relations consultant, she would devote hours to courting John Robert Starr, the managing editor of the Arkansas Democrat, in an occasionally effective effort to persuade him to go easier on her husband...

...Hence the ferocity with which he is working the phones and the Rolodex...

...Some people," Maraniss wrote, "sensed a growing resentment in Hillary that she had to take on so many private duties in the partnership while at the same time she was being asked, unfairly, she thought, to sacrifice material things...

...in the second, she loses, makes Bill's life hell, and rages on at him and the world for the rest of eternity...

...Bill retired from office, after many adventures, having beaten back efforts to eject him for perjury...

...for her stoic campaign in the congressional midterms...

...when she goes on the offensive, her voice can rise to an earsplitting shriek...

...The base may adore him, but he has devalued his stock with a broader electorate...

...the left said it was all about privacy...

...With the crisis that was the dramatic high point of the series—the impeachment debate near the end of the couple's last term in office—the show took a stunning flight into uncharted territory, making its two leading characters go against type...

...A genial rogue, and a great favorite with some female viewers, Bill would break his marriage vows with a large cast of women, which made for some interesting plotlines and crises, but he would always keep faith with this part of their contract...

...How will the writers survive this last challenge...

...Their schedules, their interests, their circles were different...

...a dramatic phenomenon that defied definition...

...and neither forgiving nor blaming her husband, but shifting her rage to his foes...

...His role in a general election would be problematic—since 1998, most of the candidates he campaigned for have failed to win office— but among the Democratic primary flock, his touch remains golden, especially in raking in dough...

...Hillary's rise had the same heart-warming essence, and played well to much the same audience...

...they now lived separate lives...

...It will be must-see TV...

...As we all know, the story began many years ago, when Wellesley's star feminist met the altogether too plausible Arkansas charmer on the Yale Law School campus, and the two joined their young hearts and their rampant ambitions in an audacious plan to win and share power, of a kind never concocted before...

...Her charm offensives have not been too charming, and polls suggest that the more people see her, the higher her negatives rise...

...Other women in series like these—Lee Hart, for instance, in the TV movie Monkey Business—had also suffered in silence...

...She was her husband's public relations troubleshooter and legal problem-solver...

...Bill gave Hillary health care reform in return for her having helped him weather adultery charges, but was unwilling to check her when she handled it badly, and so he and his party lost Congress and were on the defensive for most of his tenure...

...However it ends, it will be quite a story...

...And so poor old Bill has been put back into harness, churning up mountains of cash...

...In the moment, she was a star and a princess, and a political juggernaut, but the moment was fleeting, and passed...

...The nation was mesmerized...

...It was a shock and a letdown to some of these mentors when the place that she chose to go first was Arkansas, a place, so it seemed, at the far end of nowhere, in order to follow a man...

...As parts, however, they are merely stock players: an aging roue, who is almost too facile, and a grimly ambitious feminist lawyer, with a tough but conventional mind...

...Days of Their Lives The Hillary and Bill show, America's longest-running soap opera By Noemie Emery First there was Dallas and then there was Dynasty, family tales of intrigue in high places, guilty pleasures that kept us couch-bound each week in the 1980s, dazed by the money, the jets, the power, the houses, not to mention the rows and affairs...

...now they are part of the system and the problem...

...This is not the usual scene of the spouse merely trying to back up the partner...

...Thus far, her efforts have been inconclusive: Her jokes fall flat, and her accents are grating...

...Eight years had gone by since impeachment, and six years since Bill had left office...

...And then, in the mother of all public sex scandals, he tipped it back over again...

...Thus we all understood when Bill was elected, and she talked about becoming his chief of staff or a cabinet member...

...Writers are working on three different endings: In the first, she loses and goes back to the Senate, where she makes peace with her limits and destiny...

...This is crunch time for the Great Clinton Gamble, the one Hillary took in her deal with Bill: to serve his career first to gain power later, or more power sooner, than she might have won for herself...

...As a reward, she was given early in 1993 the task of reshaping the whole health care system, which she mishandled in such a spectacular manner that one year later the Republicans won control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years...

...she is being overshadowed by a younger man, Barack Obama, whose own story is more compelling than hers...

...This time, it was Bill to the rescue, slowly triangulating himself up out of irrelevance, while Hillary retreated from public exposure and reverted to her time-tested role as backstage adviser...

...She provided a full range of formal and informal services...

...The right said the campaign was all about perjury...

...Hillary had large policy roles as first lady of Arkansas...

...Then, just as these were reaching the end of their runs, along came The Clintons, a riveting saga of lust and ambition, a tale that never ran out of astounding new plot turns and still keeps the world on the edge of its seat...

...From the start, the thing that made The Clintons work was the unlikely union of opposites, held together in an attraction-revulsion dynamic, with the whole adding up to more than the sum of its parts...

...And once he was elected, Bill was more than true to his word...

...I thought she was throwing those opportunities away...

...But the fear was unfounded: She got what she paid for...

...Noemie Emery, a Weekly Standard contributing editor, is author, most recently, of Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families...

...Whether this pol will achieve her lifelong ambition is a whole other story, and one that is yet to be seen...

...It was only when she started running for president that it began falling apart...

...Hillary's run for the Senate two years later was the same, only more so: The brave little woman was trying to find a new life...

...By the mid-1980s . . . there had been several adjustments in the partnership, most of them made by Hillary," wrote David Maraniss of the Washington Post...

...now they're not far from the age that the elder George Bush was when they ran against him...

...Year by year in their joint political enterprise, she had taken on more tasks—some that her husband had asked her to do, some that she felt obliged to perform because it was clear to her that he did not want to do them or was not good at them...

...for the armchair psychiatrists and the gossip and giggles...

...In the end, the Republicans lost seats in both houses, defying expectations and history, and giving rise to a myth: that Hillary Clinton was a brilliant campaigner of large and hitherto unappreciated political talents, who could one day win the big prize on her own...

...Viewership soared...

...Even a man with a political future seemed a comedown compared with their fantasies...

...Bill was returned to office, and resumed his climb upward...

...Bill ran for president in 1992 on an openly two-for-one ticket...

...and then, as the spunky survivor, went to start life all over in a new state of mind...

...but to viewers at home, it was all about Hillary: how she could stand it, what she was feeling, and how she could do what she did...

...What ensued was an episode like none other in history...

...The Clintons left the White House in 2001 with the IOUs piling up on Bill's half of the desk: He owes Hillary for his continuation in office, and for the entire year of 1998: for the Today Show interview in January and the "vast right-wing conspiracy," for the stiff upper lip in the drip-by-drip process, for the fess-up in August, and the walk across the White House lawn en route to the frigid Martha's Vineyard vacation...

...Hillary had emerged as a star...