Hillary Clinton, speaking in Baltimore. Photograph by YURI GRIPAS/AFP/Getty

The memory of the nineteen-nineties has suffused the Democratic Presidential primary from the outset. But until last Thursday, when Bill Clinton was confronted by protesters over his 1994 crime bill, the decade’s main political protagonist had not really been engaged. Clinton was speaking in Philadelphia in front of four hundred people, a crowd small enough both to signify his peripheral status and to invite disruption. The protesters, “who won’t let you answer,” Clinton said, trying to quiet them, “are the ones who are afraid of the truth.” Clinton insisted that the crime bill was essentially a progressive document (the assault-weapons ban, money for after-school programming and community policing) that adopted strict sentencing provisions out of political necessity. Joe Biden, who authored the bill, insisted that it would not get out of committee unless Republicans got stricter sentencing as part of the deal, the former President said. Clinton said that he had consulted with African-American leaders, who had told him, “Take this deal, because our kids are being shot in the street by gangs.”

The main image of Bill Clinton in the political press now is as a perfect Machiavellian, and soon some writers were suggesting that Clinton’s remarks were part of a calculated appeal to white working-class voters ahead of the general election. “Let’s dispense once and for all with the fiction that Bill Clinton does not know what he’s doing,” the Washington Post insisted the next morning. But that was exactly how Clinton looked: like a man groping blindly through the tricky and half-remembered terrain of race, trying to recall where he’d been able to find moral authority before. It eluded him. By the next morning, he had "almost" apologized.

It took a while for Hillary Clinton to figure out how to respond to Bernie Sanders, who sees the nineties as representing, in the form of the Clintons, the capitulation of progressive ideals to political expedience. At first, she tried to insist that Sanders was an impure progressive: pro-gun, an obstacle to Ted Kennedy's immigration-reform project, a politician who “sided with the Koch brothers.” Some of this was disingenuous, and the rest relied on voters making the improbable judgment that Sanders is a sellout. But in the lead-up to the South Carolina primary, Clinton found a different line: that Sanders’s narrow focus on economic inequality left out too much. She has emphasized racial injustice and L.G.B.T. rights. She has taken to stressing, as she did at a New York campaign stop last week, the persistence of pay inequality: that women make seventy-eight cents on the dollar compared with men, black women sixty-eight cents, Hispanic women fifty-eight cents. Her surrogates have followed, not always gently. Representative John Lewis “never saw” Sanders during the civil-rights movement, he said in February. “But I met Hillary Clinton," he added. "I met President Clinton.” (The Sanders campaign responded by circulating a photo of Sanders being arrested at a 1963 protest on the South Side of Chicago.)

Campaigns are about contrast, the pros always say. One has slowly emerged in the Democratic race, subtler than the usual insider-vs.-outsider dynamic. Lost in the arguments over purity and compromise is that Clinton has claimed a separate progressive banner, equally powerful and so thoroughly realized that you can trace its influence even in the way she talks about foreign policy: not the project of mass consciousness but of individual liberation.

The line separating these two traditions is no longer so clear. What Bill Clinton seemed to miss about the protesters in Philadelphia was that the argument that he had consulted with traditional civil-rights groups was unlikely to move them. The nineties have come to symbolize not only prosperity but also a turn by liberals away from the poor and toward the aspirational middle class—a move summed up in the project of welfare reform and in Hillary Clinton’s statement, from long ago, that “superpredators” drove crime. (She recently apologized for that word.) Part of the urgency of the Black Lives Matter movement has come from its insistence that the fight for African-American dignity should take place not only on the middle-class ground of college admissions and political representation but in street encounters with police. The L.G.B.T. movement has taken a similar turn in its rising emphasis on transgender rights, and its insistence that the movement’s goals represent a more diverse and less established population than they sometimes did during marriage-equality campaigns. The intensifying women’s-rights rhetoric over pay equity, which Clinton has embraced, has also taken a more comprehensive view of who matters. These movements for individual liberation have spread into movements for mass consciousness.

Hillary Clinton now finds herself in an unusual position. She has given unremarkable speeches to unimposing crowds, underperformed in her own party’s caucuses and primaries, introduced no policy ideas that have meaningfully changed the race, acknowledged her own shortcomings as a candidate, and appeared out of step with the ideological urgency of the moment—and yet she is the heavy favorite to be the next President of the United States. By the conventional standards of a Presidential race, her path seems very easy. She has only to beat a self-described democratic socialist and (most likely) an offensive and politically inexperienced Republican, whom not even a majority of his party’s own voters can stand. But these circumstances mean that the great thematic questions that surrounded her campaign at the outset—of whether Clintonian liberalism still moved people, and whether the sensibility of the baby boom would be absorbed by a new generation or just retreat into itself—are less likely to be resolved.