WITH NO BENCH, WHAT OTHER CHOICE DO THEY HAVE?

The Hillary Paradox--that a woman of such excellent character should be capable of such tawdriness and worse--the paradox vanishes if you drop the first part of the proposition. Her reputation for good character, after all, rests largely on simple assertion, on what she says as a public figure, on her politics, rather than on what she's done. Leave aside the politics, and the shabby behavior is easily explainable: She does what she does because she is who she is. 

But renouncing their admiration is precisely what supporters of Hillary Clinton can't bring themselves to do. Otherwise her enemies might win.

It is odd the things they will swallow, and odd the things they choke on. During her last presidential campaign a group of left-wing women writers put together a book called Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary. Not all the essays were admiring, but I violated my rule and read them anyway. The writers objected to Clinton's caution, her ideological compromises, her weird devotion to her husband--and, strangely enough, to the "listening tour" with which she opened her first Senate campaign in 1999.

Remember? The candidate was photographed visiting coffee shops, classrooms, and shop floors in every corner of New York state, nodding as her future constituents prattled on. The listening tour was indeed a silly gimmick, executed with effortless smarm--politics as usual. 

But to Elizabeth Kolbert, a political writer for the New Yorker, it seemed to expose something especially worrisome. 

"That Clinton would engage in such a charade doesn't make one admire her," Kolbert wrote. "Women should wish for a more principled candidate. They should wish for one who's more honest. .  .  .

"Yet one simply has to admire her."

Yes. One simply has to.

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