Two days after Hillary Clinton’s stunning electoral defeat, a TV network showed a picture of her looking relaxed and radiant while walking in the woods. She had agreed to a selfie with a young mother and baby she encountered out for a hike.
It was striking that Clinton, who was widely expected to make history this election, had the appearance not of someone defensive or angry or grieving, but someone at peace with the world, and herself.
But then, she’s had experience handling disappointments. “I survived because of a combination of soul searching and relying on friends, the support of people who give advice, religious faith, long and hard discussions,” she told Talk magazine in 1999 after the Monica Lewinsky scandal blew up. It has been a tougher road for her supporters.
It isn’t just the deferred dream of a first female president, or the fear that a Trump presidency will reverse eight years of progress. It’s also the unfairness of a last-minute intervention by the FBI chief, with voting already underway, to stir up new doubts about old e-mails. Of a woman who spent a lifetime preparing for the nation’s top job losing to someone who hadn’t spent a day in public service and who boasts of not reading books.
Maybe it was karmic that America’s nastiest presidential campaign came when a woman was running, to test her strength and show how resilient a woman can be.
As she has so many times before, Clinton didn’t get rattled or lose her bearings. She shrugged insults off and stayed on point, just as she learned to do when she got slammed for saying she wasn’t the type to stay home and bake cookies, or when she said she forgave Bill for the Lewinsky scandal and people claimed she was making excuses for him.
Clinton used those lessons when running for the Senate, for president against Barack Obama and when she was secretary of state.
No number of apologies would ever be enough to be forgiven for using a private e-mail server or for US deaths in the Benghazi attack.
She was even opposed by a group of mothers who reject vaccinations for their children. Strange times we live in.
“Her biggest mistake,” I wrote in 1999, “may have been in not realising she was damned whether she talked or didn’t. If she didn’t wear her pain on her sleeve, she was evasive or made of steel. When she opened up, she lost her dignity.”
Not that Clinton hasn’t made her share of mistakes, as I have noted. Voting for the Iraq war was a huge one. Her strategies running against Obama were at times overbearing, even offensive. Her ties to corporations have felt too cozy.
This time around, her biggest failing seemed to be that people wanted someone angry, and she doesn’t do anger. She’s rational, methodical and even-keeled. To some, that suggested she didn’t care enough or was too calculated. (You’d be circumspect, too, if you’d seen your every word thrown back at you – even as your opponent got away with saying literally anything.)
But the Democratic National Committee and its former chair, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, seemed to be tone deaf about Bernie Sanders’ momentum in their clumsy efforts to anoint Clinton the party’s nominee.
Then some of Sanders’ followers convinced themselves that her administration would be no better than a Trump one and stayed home. They’ll soon see how wrong they were.
But Hillary Clinton should not move off into the sunset without getting the credit she deserves for putting herself out there time and again, and not giving up even when she was trashed, humiliated and misrepresented.
Even as I have questioned some of her stances, I have drawn personal strength and inspiration from the way she withstood the personal shaming and political savaging.
And that’s not to mention the gruelling schedules and the physical endurance it took to keep up the pace at an age when some of us are tempted to kick back and even – dare I say it ? – bake cookies.
Although Hillary Clinton will not get to fulfil the hopes of so many and become the first female president, she will have opened the door.
Comedian Seth Meyers, of all people, said it beautifully and emotionally in his post-election show. “Someone’s daughter is out there right now who will one day have that title,” he said of a first female president. “Maybe you’re a woman who’s currently a senator. Maybe you’re in college. Hopefully you’re not a toddler.... We don’t know who you are, but I imagine this moment will be a defining one for you, one that will make you work harder and strive farther.”
Wherever Clinton’s journey takes her next, she should know that many of us owe her a debt, and that someone someday will repay it in a way she’d celebrate.

*Rekha Basu is a columnist for the Des Moines Register. Readers may send her e-mail at rbasu@dmreg.com