In 1992, as in 1980, the Clintons forced Americans to confront an unsettled landscape of shifting cultural boundaries; voters might have rejected Marilyn Quayle’s worldview, but they had not yet fully embraced Hillary’s. It fell to Hillary to resolve a conflict that Americans had not yet really resolved for themselves, and her response was what we now recognize as the quintessential Clintonian defense: to offer up a cosmetically reassuring version of “Hillary” while resolving thereafter to reveal as little of Hillary as possible. A pattern had also emerged that would carry on throughout Clinton’s public life: Her protectors would overprotect; her attackers would overattack. And the American public would emerge from the episode with a welling distaste for all parties involved.

Clinton’s decision in 1999 to seek office herself — motivated, the longtime Clinton friend Paul Begala says, by “a real desire for the legitimacy that comes from earning votes” — meant that the first lady was now a legitimate target. Once again, however, the Republicans overplayed their hand. Rick Lazio, her opponent in the 2000 Senate race after Rudy Giuliani dropped out, pursued a campaign strategy that was foremost about driving up her negatives — in particular, the ghosts of Clinton controversies past. He devoted a speech to Whitewater and mocked the Clintons’ failed health-care initiative — which was criticized for the secrecy Hillary imposed on policy discussions — as “an unmitigated disaster.” He released an ad attacking her untrustworthiness. “At the heart of this campaign,” Lazio said during their first debate, “are two words: character and trust.”

It backfired. “In the polling data, it was clear people still remembered Hillarycare, and plenty of them didn’t like her,” recalls Lazio’s campaign manager, Bill Dal Col. “But the biggest thing was the sympathy factor. The Lewinsky scandal clearly gave her another breath of life. Trustworthiness was the back end of the chain at that point. It was, ‘Look at what this woman’s been through.’ ”

But in the Senate, Clinton found that once again, the act of making herself into the person voters seemed to want her to be made her an object of suspicion. She embraced the grind of the job, distancing herself from the accusations of dilettantism and entitlement that had been leveled in the 2000 race. In so doing, however, she acquired a new stigma: that of Washington insider. And the first rivals to exploit it were her fellow Democrats.

In late 2006, Barack Obama commissioned the pollster Larry Grisolano to conduct a series of focus groups in Iowa and New Hampshire to test themes that might support an insurgent candidacy by the first-term senator. “What that research showed,” Grisolano recalls, “was that there was a market for a fresh truth-teller like Obama. And it worked well in contrast to somebody who was eagerly grabbing the mantle of the establishment.” But Clinton’s senior strategist, Mark Penn, argued that she should emphasize her gravitas over the history-making prospect of a female president. “We opted for qualified and experienced over relatable,” says her former campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, “which I think was a mistake.”

Clinton didn’t need much convincing. She was proud of her hard-earned experience in Washington and affronted by Obama’s lack of it, and she campaigned accordingly. “The one thing everybody in America knew about her,” says her former speechwriter Lissa Muscatine, “was that she was tough and strong. What they didn’t know was her 40 years of advocacy, the background she came from, how her faith motivated her. All of this history got swept away. Her campaign should have been a movement campaign like Obama’s. And it never was.”

At the Democratic National Convention in July, the retelling of Clinton’s story fell chiefly to her husband, who labored over his speech for days, showing it to no one until a couple of hours before he delivered it on Tuesday night. (He did proudly share the opening line — “In the spring of 1971, I met a girl” — to at least one close adviser on the phone the night before.) When it was the nominee’s own turn to speak, she devoted a scant three minutes to her drape-making father, her orphaned mother and her early work with the Children’s Defense Fund. Then she beat a retreat into the working-class stories of others she met on her long road to becoming the most famous unknowable person on the planet.