Editor’s note: This week, The Economist asks why Hillary Clinton is deeply reviled by so many (see article). This hatred has a long history. On December 5th 1992, six weeks before her husband’s inauguration, our Lexington columnist wrote that Mrs Clinton, clearly a brilliant woman, was being judged by an “absurd double-standard”

WHAT is it about Hillary Clinton? To her fans she is the first authentic superwoman, attractive and successful. To her enemies she is hell in an Alice-band: an ambitious, left-wing creature who manipulates her droopy-jawed husband; a sexless Joan of Arc ready to lead her monstrous regiment of supporters into battle. Where does the truth lie?

As a well-known lawyer and policy activist long before she was the first-lady designate, Mrs Clinton has made enemies. Even her friends say that she can be abrupt to the point of seeming rude, and thoughtless to those who (for example) put their homes at the disposal of her husband’s campaign. Barbara Bush made a habit of littering the nation with thank-you notes: do not expect Mrs Clinton to do the same. Campaign veterans who are prepared to talk (and plenty will not talk about Mrs Clinton, on or off the record) say that the whole staff was scared of her.

Even to observers sympathetic to her husband’s campaign, there was something manipulative about the way she transformed herself between March and July. In the spring, in Chicago, she snapped at a reporter who asked about her work: “I suppose I could have stayed home, baked cookies and made teas.” This was not a good line, and she knew it. By the time she got to New York for the Democratic convention, her recipe for chocolate-chip cookies was distributed and she had learnt how to look at her husband lovingly as he made a speech. Though she does not have Nancy Reagan’s adoring gaze, Mrs Clinton has something just as distinctive. This is the Hillary Nod, in which the head is constantly (but not emphatically) bobbed, while the face maintains a look of concerned solicitude. Among women of a certain age, it is now all the rage.

Moreover, there is something in the argument that Mrs Clinton’s natural allies in the Democratic Party are to the left of her husband. The Children’s Defence Fund (CDF), of which she has been the chairwoman, is a conventionally liberal operation that lobbies for welfare programmes and gets much of its support from the public-sector unions. And doubtless some of the people who adore Mrs Clinton are irritating bores. When, shortly after the election, she spoke at a CDF reception in Washington, DC, an actress, Glenn Close, remarked with eyes glistening how much safer she felt “as a mother” to know Mrs Clinton would soon be in the White House. The thought of Ms Close and her Hollywood friends descending maternally on Washington, DC is not a happy one. The central point about Mrs Clinton, however, is that she is being judged by an absurd double-standard. By any respectable measure, she is one of the most impressive Democrats of her generation. If any Democrat other than her husband was about to be president, she would now be on a short list for high office. If she was a man, her toughness and intellect would win universal approval. And it is wrong to think that she is adored only by yuppie lawyers as they enter middle age. In New Hampshire (a most conservative state) last winter, she was mobbed by ordinary working-class folk in shopping malls. These people were impressed, and rightly so, by the grace under pressure she showed when her husband was accused of adultery. It was not only feminists who were offended by Marilyn Quayle’s cheap attack on Mrs Clinton at the Republican convention. Nor, by any standards except those of the American right, is she a flaming left-winger. Anywhere but modern America, nobody would be put out by her mild social democracy, which seeks to improve capitalism but in no sense replace it (she used to sit on three company boards, one of them a French multinational). She has worked effectively with Republicans like Bill Brock, Ronald Reagan’s labour secretary, on the urgent need to improve America’s training programmes. Nor is she heartless. As a brilliant graduate of Yale law school in the 1970s, at just the time when Wall Street firms where anxious to recruit women, she must have had her pick of plum jobs. Instead, she followed her boyfriend to Arkansas. Of course, her boyfriend wanted to be president (and will be); but for all she knew at the time, he could just as easily have ended up as a law professor at the university there, too liberal to win election to anything. This is not the curriculum vitae of an unfeeling harridan. In the end, Mrs Clinton provokes strong reactions from both her supporters and her enemies less for who she is and what she believes in than for what she symbolises. Although there have been powerful women in the White House since Martha Washington’s time, there has never before been a woman in the White House who has had both a successful career and an independent power base before she arrived there. But there will be plenty after her, in both parties. She is a genuine trail-blazer.

In these circumstances, it is more than unfortunate that the law prevents Mrs Clinton from being appointed to a position of real authority, like a cabinet post. That way, she could be held accountable for at least some of her influence on administration policy. As it is, she is bound to suffer from a thousand rumours the she is the real power in the White House. That is unfair; and it will so hobble her that her talent is bound to be wasted.

Still, remember this. When he is either 50 or 54, Bill Clinton’s career will be over, and University College Oxford will be wondering if he can be persuaded to be its second American master. But there is no reason why Mrs Clinton’s work should finish when her husband’s does. And if she is half as clever as she seems to be she will long since have worked that out. Secretary of health and human services in Dave McCurdy’s administration? You read it here first.