From New York Magazine:
Hillary's immersion in child advocacy consumed much of the rest of her time at Yale. Not that she stopped going to, or preparing for, class. “Her hand was always in the air, and her answers were usually cogent, thoughtful, and direct,” Reich remembers. “Bill, on the other hand, didn't attend most classes, and when he did, he'd rarely read the cases. And Clarence Thomas sat in the back of the class with a skullcap on and didn't say a word.”
Bill, of course, was Bill Clinton, whom Hillary started dating in the spring of 1971. “They were funny together, very lively,” one of Clinton's roommates told the author David Maraniss. “Hillary would not take any of Bill's soft stories, his southern-boy stuff.” Others could never quite figure out what Hillary saw in him. “The bottom line is, she's much nicer than he is,” says one friend from that time. “He had no real idea of how to engage people in conversation. He would just tell them stories and try to entertain them. He was always looking for applause. But she was, and is, more grounded.”
The article is actually on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's law school careers, and it's very, very good. But it's worth saying that reading it, you come away with a much clearer impression of who Hillary is, than who Obama is. And that's tracking with my experience -- and in this post, I'm only speaking of my experience, and not trying to describe anything objective -- of the campaign, too. As the race runs on, I feel less and less certain of my grasp on "who" Obama is, what he believes, what he'll do in office, how he'll do it. I know he's brilliant, and I know he envisions a transformative role for himself in American politics, but the disjuncture between the grand ambition of the rhetoric and the more modest output of his policy shop confuses me, as have some of his votes (including not voting on the Lieberman-Kyl amendment), as has his strange unwillingness to sharply distinguish himself from the rest of the field. He is, to be sure, an attractive enigma, and there's a sense in which he deploys this ambiguity judiciously to broaden his appeal, and retain his aura of immense possibility. But an attractive enigma is still an enigma.
