We're all creatures of good sides and bad sides. Most of us, anyway.
Hillary Clinton's conflicting components have always seemed uncommonly pronounced and disproportionately revealed, more publicly bad than good.
There is the side of Hillary that we have read about, and that I have seen, that is cold, nearly tyrannical and profanely unpleasant.
Maybe the explanation is simply that, back in those days when I was in a position to observe, Clinton was in a place she didn't want to be--Arkansas--with a husband who, shall we say, lacked discipline.
Then there is the side I've also seen that can charm easily and warmly at a social function and extend a thoughtful private kindness.
I remember from the 1980s that Hillary's late best friend, Diane Blair, had befriended a working-class constable in London, where she often visited, and had told Hillary about him. Blair also had put me in touch with this dear and talkative fellow, now deceased. He took a day off from guarding Parliament's gate to lead Shalah and me up to Big Ben and into the back corridors of Parliament.
So the constable subsequently also led Hillary, at the time the first lady of Arkansas, on a day's tour on her own London holiday.
Then, as first lady of the United States, Hillary asked Blair for the name and address of that constable and his wife. She wanted to get them invited to a rarefied reception that she would be attending at the ambassador's residence in London.
The London tabloid press was sent into a frenzy as it scrambled to find the story behind this obviously middle-class gentleman, if that, who, oddly, was apparently some kind of friend of the first lady of the United States.
She didn't have to do that. It is revealing that she thought to do it.
In her public manner, Hillary has mostly seemed forced, ill-at-ease and contrived--the hearty laughs not real and the remarks transparently based on calculation rather than instinct. But close friends routinely have insisted that, in private, she is real, and warm, and guffawing, and faith-driven.
So then came CNN's town-hall meeting in New Hampshire on Wednesday evening.
A rabbi rose to tell her of a parable that we carry our ego in one pocket and, in the other, the dust and ashes that represent the sum of what we inevitably will amount to. Our task, he said, is to balance those pockets. He wondered how anyone running to be president could balance the essential ego of such presumption with the vital humility commanded by the dust and ashes in the other pocket.
I don't know that I've ever heard a better metaphor or question.
And I know for certain that I've never beheld a better public moment for Hillary than hers in response.
She admitted to the humanity of doubt, frailty and distress that nag at her at least once a day.
She talked about the scriptural lesson a close friend in the clergy deposits in her email inbox every morning.
She said the cumulative effect of years of bitter partisan assaults on her had left her at times unrecognizable to herself. She said the lesson she was striving to learn and apply was to consider criticism constructively but not take it personally.
The best way she'd found, she said, was to try to live by the teaching of a favorite Jesuit writer who said that the goal at the end of every day, whether a good or bad one, should be "gratitude" for life itself and its experience and opportunities.
Not to be politically mercenary about it, but I must say that I could see Clinton closing the polling gap on Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire with every sentence she uttered.
This, I was thinking, is her big New Hampshire moment, like Walter Mondale's asking, "Where's the beef?" Like Ronald Reagan saying, "I paid for this microphone." Like Bill Clinton proclaiming himself the "comeback kid."
Alas, though, there came the bad side.
Asked moments later about taking $675,000 from Goldman Sachs for three speeches after she had been secretary of state, Clinton said, "That's what they offered."
You know how the media are. That comment was the highlighted quotation on the Yahoo home page the next day.
Actually, though, it might be that the comment didn't come from her bad side, exactly. Maybe she was heady with candor run amok.
When I criticized her flippancy on Twitter, someone asked if I'd have taken $675,000 for three speeches.
Why, sure.
What's my explanation for the far-lesser speaking fees those natural gas associations and veterinary distributors paid in 1993 for me to come to their resort conferences and tell them about their new president from Arkansas?
It's what they offered.
And I haven't experienced a millisecond's feeling of obligation to the natural gas industry or veterinary distributors since.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 02/07/2016