PART I

Okay, maybe you're not so excited that Hillary Clinton is running for president. After all, she's been around for a long time, there's always some kind of controversy swirling around her, she's no spring chicken, she's married to Bill, she wears those jackets, she's got that midwestern accent, plus she's so serious and wonky all the time. What's left to be said? You've already made up your mind about her. She might not be as crazy as those guys on the other side—but that doesn't mean that you have to be happy about the prospect of another President Clinton.

But what if the story isn't about what you know but rather about what you don't? Politicians always say that "there's never been more at stake in an election"—when it happens to be the election in which they're running.

But what if, this time out, that's true? What if this is, like, it, the main event, the conclusion of a long-running series, the climax of a nearly metaphysical battle that started before most people had ever heard of her? Think of a story you read once upon a time in which someone is selected for a fate more profound than anybody suspects—think Harry Potter but with Hermione, the grind, the perpetual A student, as the one scarred by the Dark Lord's lightning. Sure, Hillary Clinton is an unlikely prospect for such a heroine. She's so familiar. What she says might change but she's always the same. But you've read the books. If a person seems to be an unlikely fulcrum for forces much larger than herself, that only means...she is.

PART II

She stands in a classroom, writing on a whiteboard. She is alone—alone as she ever is—and unhurried. There are some people in the room, but they give her space, and her back is to them. She does not turn around. She continues in her condensed handwriting. To her right hangs an American flag and, taped to the board, the text of the Pledge of Allegiance; to her left is the message left to her by the teacher who normally presides over this room. It says, in black marker, "Go Hillary! You are an inspiration to women and young girls across the globe." Then, in red, "Thank you and Happy Holidays to you and your family."

Her own answer is partially hidden by her body—standing close to the board, she looks like a painter who doesn't want anyone to spy her handiwork. She's wearing a high-collared jacket that's the blazing pink of a children's antibiotic, black slacks, and black boots, surprisingly pointy and high at the heel. She is not tall, but she has a strong physical presence, and her expensive blond coif identifies her instantly, even with her back turned. She stops writing for a second and inspects what she's left behind before stepping back and allowing people to see.

Darren McCollester

"Leeann—Thank you for teaching! And, Happy Holidays to you and your students! Hillary Rodham Clinton."

It is the perfect HRC (as her aides call her) moment. The care that she took to find out the teacher's name and employ it; the effort she expended on her handwriting, which has the spindly flourish of calligraphy; the time and fierce concentration she applied to a message at once graceful and perfectly commonplace, to a teacher yet, in a school—she is, indeed, nothing if not diligent. And when she is finished, she does what she does with everyone she meets, greeting me by name in that bracingly enthusiastic voice of hers, then shows me to a low table set for our interview, with two bottles of water already poured to the halfway point of two identical glasses.

"How are you doing tonight?" I ask.

"Excellent! Excellent!" she says, though no exclamation points can quite capture the exclamatory nature of her reply—the carry of her voice in the nearly empty classroom or the sudden and almost startled alacrity of her wide-open blue eyes. "We had a good event…."

I have been following her campaign for more than a month by now. I have seen many good events. I have seen events in Iowa and New Hampshire, in Boston and New York, in Nashville and Charleston. I have heard her deliver variations of the same speech over and over, introduce the same plans, tell the same jokes, play the same songs—I have seen her, in other words, prove herself adept at the politician's task of making the novel seem familiar and the familiar seem novel. She never gets tired, just tiring, for she applies her indefatigability to the daily exercise of what her aides call "staying in her lane" and "executing." She doesn't try to appear extraordinary, only formidably accomplished, and on most days she succeeds at doing just that.

At the same time, we have all seen history itself run a very different campaign—brutal, intemperate, improvisatory, and utterly over-the-top. There has been Trump, of course. There has been terror. And on some days they seem to have joined forces for the purpose of mocking the pretensions of a politician like Hillary Clinton—or any politician who tries to make believe that history is driven by anything more than madness and blood. Every day brings what feels like a new outrage or a new horror or a new loosening of the bonds of either civility or civilization; every day history has asked Hillary Clinton to respond.

Tonight she did. Tonight, at the gymnasium of Woodbury Middle School in Salem, New Hampshire, she opened a town-hall meeting with these words: "I want to begin by saying something about the recent events in California." It has been a week since two Muslims—one of them American-born and American-raised—went on a spree of slaughter in San Bernardino. It has been one day since Donald Trump proposed refusing all Muslims entry to the United States. HRC's response was very much in keeping with who she is as a politician—she assured her audience that she's been "laying out a plan to defeat homegrown radical jihadists" and that Trump and his fellow Republicans have "been playing into ISIS's hands" with their rhetoric.

She sets great store by the power of laying out plans. She holds firmly to the belief that America abandons its values at great peril, not only morally but strategically. But we know that already. What I want to know, now that the event is over and I'm sitting with her in the classroom in Salem, is whether she knows the stakes of her run—the role she's been chosen to play, her…fate. Since I don't want to sound crazy, I simply ask her why she wants to be president now, at this time in history, in this season of extremism and attack.

And this is how she answers, in part:

"I think we're at a real turning point, and I don't want to see the America that I love—that gave me and my parents and my immigrant grandfather and everybody that I know a real chance to live up to their potential—in any way diminished…. I don't think we have any choice but to wage and win this election."

She knows!

At Wellesley College, 1969. Sygma/Corbis

PART III

Of course, she sounded paranoid back when she first said it—participants in apocalyptic battles always sound paranoid when they first say they're participants in apocalyptic battles. They sound especially paranoid when they answer a question in apocalyptic terms when the question was really about, well, blowjobs. This was a long time ago. This was back in 1998. Bill Clinton was the president of the United States of America. Hillary Clinton was the First Lady. He'd offended people by being a resourceful rascal. She'd offended people by saying something about cookies. They'd both offended people by trying and failing to bring about universal health care and by trying (and sort of failing) to allow gays to serve openly in the military. They'd been under investigation for years for something they'd supposedly done in Arkansas when, really, everyone knew the investigation was about sex—and secrets. He'd been accused of rape in the nascent right-wing press; she'd been accused of murder; and now they were finally caught. He had a secret, indeed—he'd had sex with a young woman in the White House and he'd testified, under oath, that he hadn't. He had sinned all right; he had sinned against her, his wife, so that now even she couldn't defend him. But she did. And she defended him by inveighing against them—against the "vast right-wing conspiracy."

She sounded a little crazy. She sounded guilty of, at the very least, bad faith. Except that what she was saying turned out to be true—there really was an obscurely wealthy man, Richard Mellon Scaife, bankrolling the attacks against her and her husband; there really was a right-wing media spawned by structural changes overtaking the news business, and it had found, in the Clintons, the template for every story that was to follow. Her only error was a matter of language. She used the word vast to describe what she faced. It wasn't vast, yet—

It is now. Nearly 30 years later, Richard Mellon Scaife has evolved into the Koch brothers, the then-fledgling right-wing media now claims the biggest and most powerful cable-news network among its ranks, and the money unleashed by the Citizens United decision has conjured a ring of super PACs organized specifically against her candidacy. The vast right-wing conspiracy is still here, and yet—and here's the thing—so is she. The vast right-wing conspiracy has outlasted everybody but her. From the start, the attacks on her have had a tendency to resolve themselves in the most mundane terms—the Whitewater investigation turned out to be about a husband lying about infidelity; the Benghazi investigation turned out to be about, of all things, Sidney Blumenthal. But that doesn't mean that both sides haven't known the stakes all along. She's always chosen to fight on metaphysical ground; she's always defended herself cosmically because she's been attacked cosmically, and so she's lived to fight another day. But now that day is here. She helped create the modern right wing; the modern right wing helped create her; and now there is no place for them to go except at each other. The 2016 election is nothing less than the climactic event of the last three decades of American politics, and—it's an amazing and scary thing to be able to write these words without irony—the future of the Free World lies in the balance.

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PART IV

She likes to laugh. She's famous for it—the forced bark of her parodists. But in fact her laugh is the most spontaneous thing about her. It's the most appealing thing about her, because it shows her willingness to be entertained. She's not particularly funny, but she likes funny people. You can hear her laughing when she disappears into crowds; you can see her laughing when she's being introduced before her speeches. Her laugh overtakes her. It startles her, and sometimes she bends slightly at the waist to accommodate its force. It's restorative; it brings light into her eyes and her high, round cheekbones into sharp relief. She has a radiance sometimes, almost gravid, and it's usually when she's been laughing.

It's not like that in the classroom. It's not that she doesn't laugh in private or that her laughter is meant only for public display. She laughs easily and often. But when she laughs onstage, she looks like what she is—the most famous woman in the world, laughing. In the classroom, alone, she looks both tougher and more vulnerable than you might expect. She is 68 years old, and she is all that stands between Ted Cruz and the White House, Marco Rubio and the White House, Donald Trump and the White House. It's not as if she's unaware of what happens if she happens to lose. It's not as if she's unaffected by the extremism on display on what seems a daily basis.

"It certainly enhances the sense of responsibility I feel to try to make my case as effectively as possible. It's also troubling to me. It's so contrary to what I think politics should be about, and the kind of people who should run for the most important job in the world. So I try not to be distracted by it or be knocked off course by it. But I do feel extra pressure when I hear some of what they say...It's deeply offensive to me that they are setting out an agenda that's both unmoored from reality and really, at its core, mean-spirited about the American people and the struggles so many are facing."

Does that mean that she considers herself a firewall between an extremist candidate and the White House?

"I think to some extent that's a fair description. But I have to win. I have to win to be a firewall against that extreme partisanship and that real rejection of compromise."

She helped create the modern right wing; the modern right wing helped create her; and now there is no place for them to go except at each other.

A few minutes later, she's talking about a suggestion that's been made about Trump—that his very extremism will force a reckoning with currents that have lain submerged in the body politic for a long time. She rejects it. "I think that what he's saying about people is really shameless…. We live in a world of instantaneous communication. When he says something, he's not just talking to whoever those people are who come to his rallies. He's talking to the whole world, and what he's saying plays right into the hands of a group like ISIS…. It's fact-free but it's not cost-free. That's another reason we have to win. We have to make it very clear to the rest of the world that the United States is still the best opportunity-creator and freedom-defender that the world has ever seen."

That makes three. That is the third time, in a short interview, that Hillary Clinton says that she has to win.

Now, this will not surprise anyone who believes that what has always distinguished her is the overweening quality of her ambition—her willingness to say anything, do anything, countenance anything, and above all endure anything in her quest for power. And yes, an argument can be made that the determination and resolve she has exhibited since announcing her candidacy originates in the simple fact that this is her last chance. But that's just it: She is not just the first person targeted by the right wing; she is, right now, the last person with the chance to stop it. It is one thing to want to win as a matter of ambition. It is another to feel that you have to win as a matter of responsibility. She is the only candidate with a chance of winning the presidency—from either party—who speaks of preserving what we have rather than tearing it down and starting over. She is the only one who rejects the language of radicalism in her speeches. She is, indeed, the only instinctive moderate—left-leaning though she may be. The candidate who has a chance to become the first woman president turns out to be the last optimist at the apocalypse.

PART V

It wasn't supposed to be her. It was supposed to be him. It was supposed to be Barack Obama—he was supposed to defeat the partisan forces in which she was ensnared by transcending them altogether. She is not a transcendent figure. She does not pretend to be. She does not even want to be. When she ran against him for the Democratic nomination in 2008, her supporters believed that he was naive; his, that she was cynical. Her supporters turned out to be right. "Obama came to Washington saying there's no red America, there's no blue America," says one of Hillary Clinton's close friends. "That was just wrong. There's a battle going on over who the country works for. It's going to be a pitched battle, because people don't give up power easily. They're not going to roll over. You have to win the argument, and Hillary knows that."

She has always known that, and now she has a chance to prove it. The election of 2008 was supposed to be epochal; it was not. The election of 2012 was supposed to be decisive; it was not. The president who was supposed to heal us only showed us the depth of our wounds; the country that congratulated itself for electing a black man to its highest office now stands riven by its most ancient and primal resentments and hatreds; the right wing that seemed outflanked by history in 2008 and demographics in 2012 has doubled down on unrepentant extremism. And the only person who can stop its ascendancy—who can, in the words of a close advisor, "break its back"—turns out to be the person the right wing was designed to destroy.

They know it, too: the Republican candidates. Even before Donald Trump unsettled the race and unhinged the rhetoric, they measured how far they could go by how far they could go in their hostility toward Hillary Clinton. In one debate after another, they tried to prove their toughness to Republican voters by saying tough things about a woman they knew Republican voters feared and despised. Chris Christie accused her of supporting "the systemic murder of children" and vowed to "prosecute" her should he be given the opportunity to debate her. Carly Fiorina called herself "Hillary Clinton's worst nightmare." Marco Rubio, nearly trembling with his own sense of righteousness, flatly called her "a liar." And Trump bragged that his contributions to the Clinton Foundation empowered him to compel her attendance at his wedding, the implication being that he and he alone was strong enough to make Hillary kneel. She was their historical enemy, and so she was the foundation for what their campaigns would become. A presidential race in which all candidates understood that there was nothing too extreme they could say about Hillary Clinton evolved into a race in which they realized that there was nothing too extreme they could say about anything or anybody at all.

And then came Paris and San Bernardino.

PART VI

She is not a perfect candidate. She never has been. Her friends and supporters say that, as well as her opponents. She doesn't have the oratorical powers of Barack Obama or her husband; she can't change her fortunes with a single speech. But she's a student, and she's not averse to studying herself. "She is well aware of her strengths and weaknesses," says one of her closest friends and advisors, "and so she knows how to get better. She's not the same person she was five years ago. Being able to read an audience, and then in real time to emphasize the part of the speech that people are getting: That's something she's gotten better and better at. She's better than most pundits give her credit for."

This is true. Anyone who says that she's a lousy politician hasn't watched crowds respond to her or, more important, hasn't seen her respond to crowds. "She loves it," says a former aide. What's more, you can see that she loves it, and if that's not the basis of political talent, it's at least the basis of something more important if you're a Clinton—forgiveness. Moreover, she has a power that none of the other candidates except possibly Trump possess, and that's celebrity. Is celebrity a power that might help a candidate actually obtain power? We don't know yet. But when you see its pull at a Hillary Clinton campaign event, you see what it does do when it's blended with technology—it keeps people interested. It keeps them from getting bored, which is a good thing for a candidate who mentions three or four policy proposals a speech. Strangely, celebrity even humanizes her, because it mediates the distance between her and her audience. When she works the line—the border between her apparatus of security and staff and her supporters—what people do, if they get close enough, is hand her their phone so she can take a selfie with them, and what they do if they don't get close enough is hold their phone aloft so they can take a photo of her from a better angle. You can see it from behind: a picket of extended arms and a mosaic of Hillary Clinton pieced together on a hundred swaying tiny black screens.

"The Tyranny of the Selfie," she says to me in the classroom.

"But you're good at it."

"Well, that's what people ask for. If I'm going to try to get to everybody, I have to be good at it. It used to be—and I was talking to President Obama about this the other day—it used to be that you would do an event like this [in Salem] and then you would shake hands with people and they would talk to you. They would say, 'I liked what you said about this' or 'You didn't mention that' or 'Can I tell you this?' And it was a constant learning and absorbing experience. Now it's just 'Can I take a selfie? Can I take a picture?' People just want to capture that moment, and I just try to be accommodating."

Strangely, celebrity humanizes Hillary Clinton, because it mediates the distance between her and her audience.

Her best moments on the stump, however, involve something much more personal than technology or celebrity. No, it's not the part of her speech where she talks about her immigrant grandfather working in the lace factory in Scranton. It's not even the part of her speech where she talks about her granddaughter and expresses hope that everybody's grandchild will have the same kind of opportunity her own grandchild has. She's no better than most politicians are at that kind of thing, and maybe a little worse, because she's so clearly trying to relate to people—if you're a normal person, you never want to seem like you're trying to act like a normal person. She is most authentic when she's drawing from an experience that no one in her audience has ever had, because it's her experience and hers alone. This is what they ask her at the town halls: "If you're elected president, are you going to be tough enough to handle the Republicans in Congress?" And this is how she answers, before being overtaken by applause: "Well, I just spent 11 hours…"

Of course, it's a reference to the Benghazi hearings. But it's also an invocation of everything that preceded Benghazi and her endurance in the face of it. Democrats want Hillary Clinton to stand up to Republicans just as much as Republicans want their candidates to take down Hillary Clinton; they want her to be their champion, and she gains authority when she does exactly that. What she rarely shows, however, is just how viscerally she can respond to the right's provocations.

Maybe she was tired when she gave me a glimpse of it. It was late; she had just completed the event. She was sitting in a chilly classroom with the crowd long gone; she was flying back to New York that night and then to Iowa in the morning. Her face was a little sallow under the fluorescent lights, and the metallic traces of her eye shadow seemed to weigh her eyelids down. She was sitting down at a table, the chairs a little small for her, but she had managed to find a rhythm with her right hand, as she does on the stump, pointing a finger and touching the blade of her hand against the tabletop as she drove home her points about the candidates vying for the Republican nomination:

"Usually in time of crisis, the country comes together. After 9/11, I was a senator from New York and I spent a lot of time with George W. Bush. He was very supportive of what we needed to do in New York, and when it came to 'You know, we need to get help,' he basically said, 'What do you need and here you go—get it.' Instead, we have these two terrible incidents, and you have Republican candidates just excoriating our president and insulting people who had nothing to do with the terrorism we were watching unfold, and who don't have realistic ideas, don't have any grounding in foreign policy or national security, and they just go off saying what they think will get a rise out of an audience. It's really distressing, because that's not how we should conduct ourselves."

I had always wondered when she was going to say, These guys aren't in my freaking league. Now she had come pretty close, and the expression that I saw animate her narrowed eyes and her tightened lips was not one of anger, or even frustration.

It was one of contempt.

Now that vast right-wing conspiracy—fueled by its hatred of the Clintons—is knocking on the White House door. Alex Wong/ Getty News

PART VII

"Our country is divided," she says. Well, yes…and there is no better measure of those divisions than HRC herself. Is it her destiny to keep Ted Cruz out of the White House? Ted Cruz looked in the mirror this morning and thought it his destiny to keep her out of the White House. The same idea that animates Democrats—the idea that electoral loss would lead not simply to an unsuitable president but to an unimaginable one—also animates Republicans. Indeed, everything asserted in these pages about the extremists on the right could be and is asserted by the extremists themselves about the candidacy of that notorious extremist Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Her supporters see her as a woman with a proven record of idealism, competence, and, yes, moderation. She was a good if controversial First Lady. She was a good if dutiful senator. She was a good if slightly hawkish and secretive secretary of state. Why shouldn't she be a good president? She has enjoyed excellent proximity from which to weaken the Republic, and never has. Why should the prospect of her election seem so catastrophic?

Now, there are two ways to answer this question. The first is to call Colin Reed, the executive director of America Rising, one of the super PACs organized to oppose her candidacy. He speaks frankly and reasonably about her vulnerabilities and how he plans to exploit them and make sure "she doesn't enjoy the advantages of an incumbent."

"We've broken it down to three main buckets, in terms of our lines of attack," Reed says. "Bucket one is 'unethical'—how they make their money, foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation while she was secretary of state. Bucket two is 'untrustworthy'—the server; her willingness to say and do whatever's expedient at the time. The third bucket, the main bucket, is 'failed record,' pertaining to her time at the State Department. There's Syria and the rise of ISIS; there's the war in Libya, which she advocated; and there's the Russian reset, which only resulted in Putin becoming more aggressive. She's accomplished a lot in her life—she's a former First Lady, former senator, former secretary of state. But she doesn't have the raw political skills of a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama, and polls show that people don't trust her, even loyal Democrats. So we're frequently pointing out instances of hypocrisy to her left. I have found hypocrisy sells; it's a good story, no matter what your political convictions are."

The second way? The second way is to ask your uncle. Or your aunt. Or the person who sits next to you on the plane. This is America; a lot of people don't like Hillary Clinton. Hate, despise, and loathe Hillary Clinton, and use those words to describe their feelings. If you want to know why, you don't have to go very far to find them.

"Excuse me, sir. I noticed that you have a 'Hill No!' sticker on your car. Can you tell me why?"

I'm in the parking lot of the public library near my house. I live in a conservative area, where Hillary hatred is in the water. I don't have to go to it; it comes to me.

"I don't like her," the man says. He's about her age, small and hunched, wearing a windbreaker and ball cap. He never stops walking as I ask him questions, and he never looks at me. "I don't like anything about her. I don't like her tax policies. And she's never done anything. The only thing she did when she was secretary of state was travel around the world. She didn't solve anything!"

"Can you give me any details?"

"Look at the world!"

"Did her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, solve anything?"

"Sure she did! Of course she did!"

"Can you give me any details?"

"I'll have to look it up. But Hillary Clinton lied about Benghazi. She lied about that video. She does nothing but lie. Her whole life is a lie! Twenty-eight years—all lies!"

And there it is, the fundamental tenet of Hillary hatred: all lies. It is never one thing. It is never even ten things. It is everything. It is a totality. If you listen to any Republican debate or any newscast on Fox—or if you talk to your uncle—you will discover that the talking points promulgated by Colin Reed and other members of her industrial opposition have found a vast right-wing conspiracy of sympathetic ears. You will also come to understand that they are incidental to the main project, which is the creation of a woman whose every accomplishment doubles as an indictment, and whose every admirable public utterance must have a poisonous private echo. Her record of responsible service? Her center-left instincts on domestic issues and an attitude toward foreign policy that would have pleased an Eisenhower Republican? Her devotion to a difficult marriage? Don't you see? Can't you see? All lies!

She is far from an inevitability. "Twenty years ago, the job was to persuade the undecided," says an operative at one of the PACs promoting her candidacy. "Twenty to thirty percent of the voters were undecided. Now it's maybe five. So the job is to find and inspire those who already think the way that you do. Digging down. That's what the money is for. Their voter, the white conservative, is already highly motivated. Ours, not so much. If the Democratic voter comes out, we win, because there are more of us than there are of them. People of color, single women, millennials: the new majority. But if they don't come out, like 2010 or 2014, the Republicans could easily win."

It is, to some extent, the first gerrymandered national election, defined by its extremities and open to unpredictable influence. Hillary Clinton could lose because the left wing of her own party regards her as compromising and therefore compromised. She could lose because of a terrorist attack that occurs a week before the election. Or she could lose simply because so many people don't like or don't trust her. Her fate may be to keep Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio out of the White House. Her fate may also be to let one of them in.

PART VIII

He looks older than she does. He's thinner now, with a certain delicacy of movement, and with his hair a white fire burning over the pink embers of his face, he's beginning to look like Hal Holbrook playing a one-man version of Bill Clinton. Nevertheless: It's him. He's here, at a campaign barbecue hosted by the Democrats of Story County, Iowa, at the concrete-walled Iowa State University agricultural expo. Martin O'Malley is set to speak. So is Cornel West, as an eccentric surrogate for Bernie Sanders at an event peopled almost exclusively by white farmers. So is Hillary Clinton. And so is her husband.

He steps up to the podium first, on a stage improvised on a dirt floor crowded with folding tables and folding chairs. He has come to introduce her, but as soon as he steps into view, two things happen: First, he is greeted by a wave of applause that causes him to nod his head and bite his lip and lift his hand and become, by the very recognizability of his gestures, iconic. Second, he inspires a flurry of speculation amongst the reporters corralled in the back of the barn, who can't help but wonder why he's really shown up.

There it is, the fundamental tenet of Hillary hatred: all lies. It is never one thing. It is never even ten things. It is everything.

There is an obvious answer: It is the day after the Democratic debate in Des Moines. He always travels to the debates. He advises her and helps her prepare. She stayed overnight in Des Moines, and he stayed with her. They are married, and they have been married a long time.

The answer that her aides call "overthought" is that he has come to help her—that though she won the debate locally, with the voters in Iowa, she lost nationally, with the voters of these United States. She does not always live up to the moment, and she didn't last night. The debate took place the day after the terrorist attacks in Paris. The Republicans were in an opportunistic frenzy, and she had a chance to do some statesmanship. Instead, she came up with a rather technical answer that had already been reduced to a sound bite: "It's not our fight." She also defended her Wall Street associations by invoking 9/11 and showed what makes her such a fallible candidate, speaking an excuse of improvised convenience with such moral force that it called her moral force into question.

Long ago, when they introduced themselves to the nation, the Clintons did so as a package, as two for one, as a joint presidency. The nation wasn't ready for it, or maybe it was: They used her to attack him, and him to attack her, not as a political figure but in the most personal way possible—as a woman and a mother and a wife. It is different now. She talks to him every day, on the trail, by telephone. But she doesn't need him the way he needed her. She is one of a kind, and as a result she is all alone.

This is not to say that the right won't do it again. It will. After it attacks her record and she is still standing, it will attack him. His personal life, and therefore hers. It will attempt to revive the oldest of the Clinton calumnies; it will suggest that their long marriage is an "arrangement" she tolerates in order to preserve her opportunity for power. It might not be Trump, but Trump has taught the party well: There is nothing that can't be said, because there is no price to be paid for saying it. And before she is allowed to become president as a woman, she will as a woman be attacked.

"Yes, but there is no evidence that it works," says one of her closest advisors. "The evidence has always been to the contrary—that such things make women identify with her and make her stronger." Still, if her advisors know what lies in store, so does she. She must. "I have always known that this will be a very hard election if I'm the nominee," she told me in Salem. "Our country is divided politically, and I will have to work very hard for every vote. I'm going to have to make that case for myself."

It is impossible to know what anyone's marriage might be like, much less hers. It is impossible to imagine what her life might be like, based as it is on continuing cycles of attack and endurance—based as it is on the certainty that she will be attacked and that she has no choice but to endure. She is a singular woman, locked in symbiosis with America's right wing and also with her husband. She has said that when she first met him many years ago she knew that he could one day be president. He has not said the same thing about her. Now, however, as the applause for him dies down, he tells the audience how long he's known her, and then, with his old blue eyes still winking and his voice still a midnight croak, he says, "I've watched all these debates and I think I'm going to vote for her."

She does what she does when she's inordinately praised; standing in front of a blue curtain and wearing a boxy dark-blue jacket, she claps her hands along with everybody else and rocks with laughter, as if she's taken by surprise. She's in Iowa, but she could be in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, Georgia—anywhere along the endless trail. She is bigger than he is now, and if she wins she will be bigger than he ever was. That's his fate, and perhaps that's how, in the end, he's been faithful to her—faithful to a destiny he saw written upon her by an adversarial hand; faithful to the fate he must have known about all along, and kept to himself, as one of their secrets.

This article originally appears in the February 2016 issue.