Hillary's Moment

News flash: Hillary shows emotion.

I don't mean to be flip about it--all right, maybe just a little--but watching her choke up yesterday was a revealing moment.

It wasn't that she started weeping or anything. If you've seen the video, her voice breaks and she seems briefly overcome.

The networks' newscasts all led with it. The cable chatters chewed it over. By this morning, it was approaching Dean-scream frequency.

My reaction was thus: Hillary Clinton might have done better to let the voters see this side of her months ago, rather than the steely front she keeps up most of the time. The calculation, undoubtedly, was that a woman--a potential commander-in-chief--can't be perceived as weak. But the alternative was that she is seen as a tightly organized policy wonk running against a man who embodies inspiration, both through his rhetoric and his life story.

Think about Bill Clinton. He could ramble on about Medicare reform with the best of them, but he would bite the lower lip, feel voters' pain and otherwise connect on an emotional level.

Hillary Clinton isn't built that way. That's why her friends keep telling us she's funnier in person than she is in public, and so on. But yesterday, in that diner, she gave us a glimpse of the real person. I'm sure she'll be criticized for that. But not by me.

"In perhaps her most public display of emotion of the presidential campaign," says the NYT, "Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's eyes welled with tears, and her voice cracked dramatically on Monday, as she talked about holding up under the rigors of the race and her belief that she is the best candidate for the Democratic nomination.

"If it was not an Ed Muskie moment -- Mrs. Clinton did not cry (or look like she was crying) -- she was certainly on the verge of it after a woman asked her, at a round table discussion at a coffee shop here, how she managed to get out of bed and soldier through each day."

LAT: "Normally the most disciplined of candidates, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton teared up and her voice broke at the end of a campaign appearance here this morning while fielding a question about how she keeps herself together amid the rigors of campaigning."

New York Post: "With her dream of the White House in danger of becoming a nightmare, Hillary Rodham Clinton choked up with emotion yesterday . . . "

Daily News: "She blinked repeatedly as her eyes filled . . . Her voice caught and fluttered."