Clinton Wins by Losing

Hillary Clinton won big by losing narrowly, shedding her toxic image and escaping her husband's ambiguous legacy to become a lionized figure for women, the left, and even some Republicans, John Heilemann writes in New York. "Although in the end she may wind up being dwarfed by Obama, for the moment she is something he is not: fully, poignantly human."

In Heilemann's postmortem, Mark Penn comes off as the murderer, having developed a "conventional, safe, inherently conservative" battle plan that put Clinton's experience at the fore—a strategem the candidate calls “a fundamental miscalculation." Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker, meanwhile, paints a darker picture for the party, prophesying that Obama will struggle to allay the "anger" of suburban white women. (More Hillary Clinton stories.)