Todd S. Purdum is senior writer at Politico and contributing editor for Vanity Fair, as well as author of An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

If in January 2017, Hillary Clinton is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, historians may well point to this month as the moment her campaign turned around. Like the first brisk snap of fall, Clinton’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad summer has morphed overnight into the best week of her campaign: Joe Biden is out, her poll numbers are up, her crisp debate performance reassured nervous Democrats and her measured resolution before the House Benghazi committee made her interrogators (of both parties) seem small by comparison.

Meanwhile, with every passing week, the GOP looks less united, more angry and less able to govern.


But if Clinton has benefited from an undeniable run of good luck, in a larger sense, there is nothing sudden or surprising about where she finds herself today. Her reconsolidated status as the prohibitive 2016 Democratic front-runner is the predictable result of the grim determination that has always been her hallmark—and the penchant for overreaching that has long been her enemies’ Achilles' heel.

“She’s had the kind of couple of weeks that you pray for in presidential politics,” says Bob Shrum, the veteran Democratic consultant who has not shrunk in recent months from noting Clinton’s political vulnerabilities.

When they originally scheduled Thursday’s hearing, House Republicans had hoped to turn the Benghazi investigation into a Soviet show trial, knocking Clinton further down after a summer that’s seen her consistently playing defense. But by the time she actually sat down on Capitol Hill Thursday, Clinton didn’t have to make any real effort to paint the Benghazi inquiry as partisan. In all-too-honest statements, Republicans from House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy on down had already done that for her—and it was left largely to the committee’s ranking member, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, to attack the motives of the Republican Chairman Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, while Clinton pleaded for statesmanship and a bipartisan approach to diplomacy in a dangerous world.

“She’s very fortunate the committee did not grant her request to let her do this earlier,” Shrum says. “The Republicans always overplay their hand, especially when it comes to the Clintons—and they’re doing it again.”

Clinton debates; Biden announces he’s not running; Clinton testifies. | Getty and AP Photos

As committee members of both parties read staff-prepared questions and talking points, Clinton sat alone, and mostly without notes, at one point offering a riveting moment-by-moment account of the desperate efforts to save Ambassador Christopher Stevens in the State Department compound in Libya. In hours of even-tempered testimony, the contrast with her adversaries was striking. “I’ve lost more sleep than all of you put together,” she told the panel, explaining her anguish at the loss of four American lives in the 2012 attacks. The lines in her sober and evidently careworn face seemed proof enough of the claim.

After Thursday, the Benghazi affair looks less like a potential government cover-up and more like yet another easy-to-dismiss investigation into the Clintons’ lives, a script many Americans remember all too well from the 1990s. “My question is not will Benghazi rise to the level of Whitewater,” says the longtime Clinton family adviser Paul Begala. “It won’t because there’s no independent counsel, no Ken Starr with an unlimited budget and an unnatural curiosity about Bill Clinton’s sex life. Rather, will the Benghazi investigation rise to the level of the Clinton Christmas card investigation? You will recall that the GOP Congress logged 140 hours of testimony and called 34 witnesses while investigating President Clinton’s Christmas card list. Mr. Gowdy’s investigation looks even less fair.”

Sure, Clinton still faces serious public doubts about her trustworthiness as a result of her use of a private email server as secretary of state—and a real political threat in Iowa and New Hampshire from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders—but she has successfully parried the best blow the GOP had at its disposal this fall, and is now almost ideally positioned to make her case to Iowa Democrats at this weekend’s Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Des Moines, the same event where Barack Obama caught fire in his primary campaign against her eight years ago. And it’s a stage that, as of Wednesday, she won’t have to share with the popular sitting vice president.

In fact, across the board in the past 10 days—and after months when every news cycle seemed to bring more bad news for her—Clinton has seen event after event break her way, starting with last week’s strong debate performance. That news was fast followed by the fact that no candidate of either party came close to Clinton in total contributions raised or cash on hand in the latest Federal Election Commission filings this month (she raised nearly $30 million, with nearly $26 million on hand). Not only does that fact leave her with actual money in the bank, but it also helped put to rest donors’ fears that she might have tapped all the cash that she could—a fact that adds to her political capital in the bank as well.

The splintered GOP field, still led by two political neophytes, Donald Trump and Ben Carson, only emphasizes Clinton’s long experience in government and her presumed ability to do the job of president from Day One. A pair that weeks ago might have been dismissed as fad fringe candidates sure to fade—a la Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann in 2012—now increasingly looks like two well-financed representatives of the angry strain of blue-collar Republicans fed up with their party’s establishment. Both now look like they’ll carry this fight into the new year and into the first primaries and caucuses.

Carson now actually leads Trump in some Iowa polling, even as the blustery billionaire Trump is focused on tearing down his GOP rivals, engaging in an increasingly bitter feud with Jeb Bush, not only over immigration, but over the Bush family’s legacy and George W. Bush’s responsibility for the Sept. 11 attacks (“The World Trade Center came down during his reign”). The Democratic debate looked like a high-minded exchange at the Oxford Union, compared to the backstabbing reality TV show of the GOP debates. The internal mudslinging has dragged the entire Republican field down in the mire—and the particularly fierce strain of nativism evident in many of the GOP squabbles further alienates Latino voters from the party, encouraging that vital voting bloc both to turn out next year—and to vote Democratic. At the same time, the ongoing self-immolation and open warfare of the House GOP caucus has limited the party’s ability to make a consistent or coherent case against Clinton and her fellow Democrats.

With her opposition in such disarray, is it really any wonder that Clinton is finally on a roll?

By any measure, Clinton has had a rocky six months. What she herself has called the “drip-drip-drip” of disclosures about her private email server have raised her unfavorable ratings in the polls, dampened the enthusiasm of even some die-hard Democratic supporters and handed her would-be Republican opponents an issue that has at least some legs, if only because it plays into her longstanding penchant for privacy and a wariness about her enemies that borders on arrogance, if not paranoia.

But Clinton’s adversaries and wavering supporters alike should remember one overriding truth: Like her husband, she is most prone to unforced errors when she is riding high, and she’s never a more skilled advocate for her own cause than when her back is against the wall. From the famous “pink press conference” as first lady when she defended her lucrative commodities trades in Arkansas to her comeback victory against Obama in New Hampshire in 2008, Clinton’s at her best when she’s on the ropes.

Clinton herself long ago shed any illusions about the level of scrutiny she would face—as first lady, senator, secretary of state or presidential candidate—even if she has not always met it with equanimity. In her first memoir, Living History, she recalls sharing a sunset drink with her lawyer David Kendall after the 1994 news conference on her commodities trading. “Though everyone thought I had done well,” she writes, “I felt somber about the situation and as we assessed the day’s events, I commented to David, ‘You know, they’re not going to let up. They’re just going to keep on coming at us, no matter what we do. We really don’t have any good choices here.’”

Indeed, over the ensuing two decades, Clinton has arguably faced as much scrutiny as any figure in modern American history. She has not always been her own best friend in responding to the glare. She sometimes comes across as defensive, evasive or politically tone-deaf, even when the facts are on her side. Her famous claim that the Monica Lewinsky investigation was the result of a “vast, right-wing conspiracy,” was seen in many quarters as outlandish and ill-advised at the time, but subsequent revelations showed that she was far from wrong.

Clinton remains a deeply polarizing figure for millions of Americans—a majority of whom believe that her handling of the email server reveals concerns about her character, according to the latest CNN/ORC Poll. Yet the same poll found that roughly 3-in-4 Americans regard the committee’s Benghazi investigation as politically motivated, while just one quarter view it as an objective effort to get at the facts.

Unlike her husband, Clinton has never been a political Happy Warrior. In times or triumph or turmoil, her fierce discipline rarely cracks, and her heart rarely visibly soars. There are many pitfalls on her potential road to the White House—the difficulty of any party in holding the presidency for three terms, fatigue with the Clinton brand, unforeseen events at home or abroad that could put the Obama administration and the Democratic Party more broadly on the defensive.

But for the moment, Clinton enjoys formidable advantages. Biden’s decision not to enter the race, and Sanders’ obvious signals in last week’s debate that he does not intend to run a negative campaign against Clinton, leave her with an apparently certain path to the Democratic nomination. Sanders, who over the summer had seemingly closed the polling gap with Hillary, has remained steadily in the mid-20s since Labor Day. He gave her a pass on last week’s debate, telling the crowd that “the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails,” and brought a broad smile to her face—a smile that reappeared several times Thursday as she sat back and watched the Benghazi committee members squabble among themselves.

And, as she contemplates the reversal of fortune she’s experienced since last week’s debate, there’s one more fact that should cause her to smile even further: In most polls, Hillary Clinton also still leads all Republican rivals in general election matchups.