Danielle Allen is a political theorist at Harvard University and a contributing columnist for The Post.

I admire Hillary Clinton. This is new for me. I have come to admire her only over the past year. Before Monday’s debate, she had already sealed the deal. But everything I have come to see was on display that evening: intelligence, fortitude, self-control, discipline, strength and grace.

Let me share my journey.

For almost twenty years, Hillary Rodham Clinton put her political aspirations on hold when she moved to Arkansas to marry Bill Clinton, who would become the country's 42nd president. The former New York senator, secretary of state and Democratic nominee for president would be the first woman to hold the office if she is elected. (Jayne Orenstein/The Washington Post)

In the fall of 1992, after the Los Angeles riots, I cast my first vote in a presidential election. I had attended the Democratic National Convention in New York as a summer intern for National Review. I still remember Bill Clinton’s tediously long acceptance speech, and I voted for George H.W. Bush. That first vote was also my last at the presidential level for a Republican.

I didn’t much like Bill then, but I didn’t like Hillary, either. I remember the interview about Gennifer Flowers. And weirdly, despite my general conservatism and aversion toward the pair, I also remember feeling betrayed as , over the course of the election, Hillary’s maiden name, Rodham, disappeared from view behind “Clinton.” My college suitemates and I all planned to keep our maiden names when we got married. We didn’t know it then, but in that choice we were among an already shrinking breed.

Post-election I moved from betrayal to shock. I was appalled by Hillary Clinton’s leadership of the health-care policy initiative. I was flabbergasted that an unelected spouse could presume to function, in effect, as a legislator. This seemed to me the antithesis of what democracy is about: elections and political accountability. The Lewinsky affair re-triggered my slightly off-kilter sense of feminist betrayal — how could she stand for that humiliation? — and my sense that the Clintons treated the burdens and prerogatives of office too lightly.

By the time Hillary Clinton ran in 2008, little had happened to change my mind. Then working on Obama field organizing teams in California taught me about the tight grasp that the Clinton machine held on local politicians. This didn’t make me feel any better about the United States’ power couple.

Yet somehow between Clinton’s 2015 campaign announcement and the present, I’ve come to admire her. What on earth happened? Call me crazy, but I read her emails. Or at least, I read as many of them as I could. You try it. It’s no small task. And what blazes out of those emails above all is a combination of discipline and dedication to the U.S. cause. Then I started listening to her town-hall events. The discipline and dedication were richly in evidence there, too.

A vast number of her emails concern her schedule. As it happens, I’m obsessed with calendars. I’m a reasonably busy person myself, and I’ve been interested in efficiency and time management ever since as a child I read “Cheaper by the Dozen.” I have never seen anything like Clinton’s discipline and efficiency. This is a woman who knows how to use her time to get things done. As a result, she has already won the greatest reward. As a working mom, she has a daughter who plainly, adoringly loves her. What’s more, this is a woman whose stamina is unlike anything I have ever seen.

These should all be seen as virtues. But, of course, Clinton’s intense drive for efficiency has gotten her into a significant amount of trouble. Efficiency does indeed appear to me to be a real motivation behind her decision to take her email work onto a private server. And efficiency and discipline are no good if they are harnessed to the wrong aspirations. And here, one question about her lingers: Is all that discipline, that fierce drive, that exceptional dedication a commitment to the nation’s cause, or only to her own? How should we measure her devotion?

Clinton has always thought of herself as a public servant, fighting for others. She began this campaign on just such terms. Her first slogan was “Fighting for us.” The slogan was accurate in capturing her orientation toward commitment and service, but it had the demerit of pointing to herself, insisting on her own heroic credentials.

When Clinton in May changed her slogan to “Stronger Together,” I believe she finally made the United States itself her calling. She had identified our fundamental problem and publicly committed herself to working to solve it. We need to build a connected society on these shores, one in which — for all that we enjoy the pleasure of our own social groups — we also maximize ties across boundaries of difference. Achieving such a connected society is a necessary part of solving all of our other problems — especially after the damage to our social fabric brought about by this year’s political campaign and many acts of public violence. Clinton is simply right: We will be stronger together. A connected society is the necessary foundation for strength in a democracy.

I have criticized Clinton this year — for trying to claim that she’s not a member of the establishment and for the remarkable and sometimes problematic entanglements of her family’s foundation. I lambasted her for overplaying the gender card. I have challenged her to move beyond her big-government orientation. Can she work with the National Governors Association, pulling an oar alongside it, rather than seeking to regulate states from above? I am ready to keep pressing those criticisms and to keep pushing Clinton in directions that hold out the greater hope for the achievement of a connected society.

But because I have come to admire her, I will also vote for Clinton in November with enthusiasm and pleasure. I will even consider it a privilege to do so.