A montage of televised images of First Lady Hillary Clinton over the course of the last two months displays a consistent woman, focused on a mission.
Since Bill Clinton's mid-August admission of infidelity, again, Mrs Clinton has been dramatically visible. No disease threatening the populace seems to have escaped her attention. There she is in the White House, holding forth on the importance of breast cancer research. There she is again, this time talking about colon cancer.
With a sly smile, she specifically invites members of the media to leave for their colon cancer tests immediately, a reference to a rather inelegant diagnostic procedure.
Her voice is tight, her smile tighter, her concentration as taut as an athlete's. This moment of political combat is her moment, her defining race, and Hillary Clinton is running it as an Olympian. In other words, she has not been sitting at home.
Tuesday's election in the US is being called a turn-out election. Which party wins will depend on how many partisans turn out. That may seem like an elementary proposition, but political professionals make critical distinctions about types of elections; those that are decided on the electorate's passions about a particular issue like abortion, or on an economic mandate, for example.
Mrs Clinton, with more enthusiasm and more straight political savvy than any other First Lady in history, has decided to hit the road campaigning for Democrats across the US. In one three-day period at the end of September she visited five states, travelling from New York to Colorado to Washington, Oregon and California.
In many instances Mrs Clinton's political safari has landed her in places where the President of the US would not, to be blunt, have been welcome. Seattle, Washington, was a good example. Washington State, famed for good coffee, grunge rock music and Microsoft, is about as far from Washington DC as possible, tucked away in the Pacific North-West.
Mrs Clinton appeared at a $500a-plate dinner attended by 175 people at the Westin Hotel to benefit a handful of congressional candidates. She posed for photos with people who had donated $2,500. Later that evening she attended an even more intimate soiree at an artist's glass studio on behalf of a congressional candidate named Jay Inslee.
Mr Inslee had made it clear he would not want the President to campaign on his behalf in today 's climate. He told a reporter: "I'm realistic enough to understand that the First Lady is a person who has many admirers."
For her part that night, Mrs Clinton was all diplomacy and restraint. The President's policies, the Democrats' policies, are paying off for all Americans. "We're on the right track," she said.
In Denver, Colorado, Mrs Clinton was loudly welcomed as she shook hands with children in front of an elementary school. There were a few protesters, carrying signs with slogans such as: "The Lyin' King and the Queen of Denial."
But again Mrs Clinton was there supporting the women, as she has in many of her travels. In Colorado she campaigned for the former governor's wife, Dottie Lamm, who is now running for the US Senate, and for Gail Schoettler, a candidate for governor.
In Illinois Mrs Clinton has done more than just visit the state three times to try and save the troubled re-election campaign of Carol Mosley-Braun, the nation's first black woman senator.
Mrs Clinton appeared in a 30-second television ad, and also wrote a personal fund-raising letter. The money appeal from Mrs Clinton brought in $145,000 in the first 10 days. No location has been too small, none too remote, no office too obscure. She has helped raise money for Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, running for lieutenant governor of Maryland. She showed up at 5.30 p.m. at a day-care centre in Sante Fe, New Mexico, a small city populated by many American Indians.
When a teacher there told Mrs Clinton that the children were tired because they had been kept later for her visit, according to the local paper, a weary Mrs Clinton responded: "I'm tired, too. It's time to go home, isn't it?"
But perhaps no state has been more personal for Mrs Clinton than New York. She is known to love New York City, recently saying that she would love to have an apartment there after leaving the White House. But Republican Senator Al d'Amato has been a critic of both Mr and Mrs Clinton.
He was one of the earliest and most adamant supporters of the Whitewater investigation, and especially of Mrs Clinton's role when she was a lawyer in Arkansas.
Mr d'Amato is now learning about Mrs Clinton's memory. While campaigning for Mr d'Amato's opponent, Congressman Charles Schumer, Mrs Clinton dropped all pretence of velvet gloves.
Speaking at a fund-raiser in Brooklyn recently, Mrs Clinton said: "Al d'Amato does not deserve the votes of the women of New York. He has consistently voted against so many issues that women care about, that we think about." She criticised Mr d'Amato for his anti-abortion position and for his support of cuts in the student loan programme.
She then spent the day making appearances with Mr Schumer and helping to raise $250,00 at a luncheon. Mrs Clinton knows that this election, rightly or wrongly, will be interpreted as crucial by historians and political anthropologists. One report yesterday even suggested Mrs Clinton may make an election eve statement concerning support for her husband.
