Noemie Emery sees a changed Hillary Clinton and notes that she has apparently earned “An Exceedingly Strange New Respect” among some conservatives. We’ve noted the same phenomenon, but it doesn’t seem quite as strange to us. Excerpt of the Emery piece:

One observer once said that the main importance of PT-109 in the life of John Kennedy was that it was the only time in his life…when the power and wealth of his father couldn’t help him at all. Hillary in February 2008, after Obama’s stunning string of 10 victories, was like JFK in the water — everything she was used to relying on had proved to be useless…

After March 4, she suddenly seemed to look and sound different: She began to seem real. The shrillness was gone, and so was The Cackle, and so were the forced southern accents that once caused so many so much merriment. Hillary! — whoever that was — never really cohered as a character; her previous poses–the Perfect Wife, the Aggrieved Wife, the Empress-in-Waiting — were all unconvincing, but in her new role — the scrapper, forced to the wall, and hanging in there with ferocious and grim resolution — she is suddenly all of a piece. Along with her inner JFK, she has channeled her inner Robert F. Kennedy (going back to the days when he was still “ruthless”), along with her inner Margaret Thatcher — “No time to go wobbly” — along with echoes of the John McCain who clawed his way out of the grave only last winter, and the George W. Bush who just as tenaciously saved his Iraq policy…

It is a truism that liberals think people are formed by exterior forces around them and are helpless before them, while conservatives think individuals make their own destiny…Hillary may still be a nanny-state type in some of her policies, but in her own life she seems more and more of a Social Darwinian, refusing to lose, and insisting on shaping her destiny. If the fittest survive, she intends to be one of them…

It is no accident that it was just at this juncture that she began to rouse outrage in parts of what once was her base…what caused this display of intense irritation? She’s running a right-wing campaign. She’s running the classic Republican race against her opponent, running on toughness and use-of-force issues, the campaign that the elder George Bush ran against Michael Dukakis, that the younger George Bush waged in 2000 and then again against John Kerry, and that Ronald Reagan — “The Bear in the Forest” — ran against Jimmy Carter and Walter F. Mondale. And she’s doing it with much the same symbols.

We think that a number of Emery’s observations have merit. Senator Clinton is much improved as a speaker and a candidate from the Days of Coronation. Exhaustion, adrenalin, and desperation have a way of concentrating and revealing, indeed, even shaping a person’s core. Until these recent days, we had never heard Senator Clinton referred to as “one tough old broad.” Language aside, it was meant as a compliment.

Senator Clinton revealed something else about herself in April, and it has some significance: she is an incredibly rich woman, with $109 million in recent income, as well as the rest of the family business. It possibly eases some conservative minds to know that the Clintons have earned a fortune of several hundred million dollars (ill-gotten or not) and have quite a stake in the system. And inveighing against the “rich and powerful” can tend to be seen as party-line rhetoric once you’ve earned a checkbook that reaches nine figures. So the Hillary of today might seem safer than the Hillary of past decades to some conservatives.

Finally, it wasn’t so long ago that it was said that the “Clintons” were running for President, that a Hillary victory would be Bill’s third term. But that no longer seems so true, does it? If Hillary Clinton is elected President, it now seems more than likely that it will be Hillary, not Bill, who will be making the decisions. After all, she’s earned the damn thing, not him. That is a big change, perhaps the biggest of all (though of course it is much more worrisome when it comes to her actual policy views). Feeling that you’re not an interloper, that you’ve earned your place in life, is something that conservatives tend to respect quite a lot. Perhaps this new respect that Emery describes is not really “exceedingly strange”; Senator Clinton may well have earned it in the opinions of some conservatives — after all, you don’t have to hate your opponent to disagree with or vote against her.

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