"Jimmy Smits?" Mr. Moore asked.
"Yeah," she replied. "And he's hot."
Shedding a tear
A couple of weeks ago, Jay Barth, a professor of political science at Hendrix College in Conway, Ark., gave a talk on the primary races to a crowd made up mainly of Clinton supporters. The mood was downbeat. Mr. Obama was continuing his surge in the polls and observers had begun to suggest that Ms. Clinton would need an improbably convincing victory this Tuesday in Texas and Ohio to have a chance at winning the candidacy.
"They were just deeply bummed out," he says. "They just feel like she hasn't shown herself, and I think they're really frustrated by that. I think if [her character] had shone through this year, we might have been looking at a different race."
It did shine through in brief glimpses, as in New Hampshire, when a woman asked Ms. Clinton an innocuous question about how she managed to cope with the blood sport of the primary contest. In a now-infamous moment, her eyes welled up with tears. At first, critics complained that she was undermining her credibility as a potential commander-in-chief. But that lachrymose turn reignited a stuttering campaign, propelling her to victory in New Hampshire and punctuating the importance of wedding political credentials with personal warmth.
The episode also underscored the sort of tightrope Ms. Clinton must walk as a woman candidate — too tough and she's an "ice maiden," too emotional and she's "weak."
Few know this feeling like Geraldine Ferraro, who in 1984 became the first female vice-presidential candidate on the ill-fated Walter Mondale ticket.
In an interview this week, she confessed that she has become an "emotional nut" watching her friend's campaign unfold, and she accused Ms. Clinton's interlocutors in the mainstream media of cleaving to a sexist double standard.
Ms. Ferraro, 72, was regarded as tough and a fighter in her day too. Yet on Super Tuesday, as she prepared to cast her ballot for Ms. Clinton, she found herself weeping in a polling booth, considering both the historical significance of a woman finally making it to the White House — and the magnitude of the lost opportunity if she failed.
"I went in there, closed the curtains, put my hand on the lever, and I filled up with tears," she says. "It was tears that this woman has put herself out, and it is painful to watch how she's being beaten up. And it's only because she's a woman. It was just a whole sense of the history, of her campaign, of my campaign. I'm not going to be around to see another woman run. I'm really not."
One of the ironies in this contest is that when Ms. Clinton first plotted her candidacy, she doubtless viewed herself as the agent of change, a trailblazer in the mould of Ms. Ferraro who could make history by becoming the first woman to gain the presidency.
Instead, she encountered Mr. Obama, a charismatic and silver-tongued rival with a competing, and equally powerful, claim to history, which would put the first African American in the Oval Office. If he lacks her experience, he is also free of the burden of perceptions she has shouldered since her days in Washington.
"I wish she could come across as a little bit more of a 'bring us together' voice," Ms. McCoy says. "But she is a litigator — you can't change a leopard's spots. … And is that necessary? To really like our leaders?"
Another skilled Democrat, Bill Clinton, might say so. He famously remarked that Democrats prefer to fall in love with their candidates, while Republicans prefer to fall in line. Unfortunately for Hillary Clinton, his words appear to be ringing true.
Sinclair Stewart is a Globe and Mail reporter based in New York
