Hillary looks 10 years younger than she did when she thought she was about to become the first woman president. She’s developed this ... glow. It appears that not only does she possess superhuman resilience; she positively thrives on crushing disappointment.  Michelle, on the other hand, has been looking slightly frayed. At the joint event, after the paean to Hillary, her speech went a little astray. Her mouth twitched and she seemed preoccupied with something else during her ritual call to reject the world as it is in favor of the world as it should be.  Preoccupation was entirely possible. Among the possible distractions were:  1) Husband arriving soon to give one of the most high-stake speeches in the history of American politics in a football field.  3) Fifteen little girls about to hold a sleepover in her hotel room.  Truly, this is a woman with an interesting life. Her spouse is flying in to accept the presidential nomination and, meanwhile, Joe Biden’s grandchildren are at the door in their pajamas.  Michelle would be only the second working mother to become a first lady, and there’s not all that much about Hillary’s experience that offers much comfort. Clinton has had an extraordinary career, but I doubt that she’ll look back at her White House years as the high point. It’s a tricky business, representing independent modern women while not creating political pain for your spouse, made even trickier if you’re an African-American who is almost 6 feet tall, possessed of stunning looks and a forceful personality.  Her signature issue is the job-family tensions of working women. This could actually be sort of revolutionary — a first lady constantly pointing out that the American economy is built around the idea that wives and mothers work, but provides almost no answer to the question of who’s supposed to take care of the kids. “I’ve talked to so many women who feel guilty — their kids are in child care longer than they’re with their mom,” Obama said Wednesday, on a break between appearances at the Hispanic caucus and the African-American caucus. She ran through a litany of parents working two shifts, military wives who keep getting transferred to bases with a long wait for day care and striving single mothers bowed down under college loan payments.  One big difference between Hillary and Michelle is that Obama shies away from providing specific answers and sticks to the stories about the problems. “I haven’t explored what’s been done, what hasn’t been done,” she says. “We need good child care. How much structure I don’t know. That’s the policy piece; that isn’t my forte.”  And just as her husband has little patience with the culture wars of the Clintons’ generation, Michelle has no interest in the mommy wars. She refuses to decry young women with Ivy League degrees who opt to use them on full-time motherhood or to worry that all the talk about the problems will discourage young women from trying to combine husband, kids and high-powered career. “I was raised to believe I could do it all, and that was very empowering,” she said. “Then I got into the work force and realized there was really no support for me to do it all. ... We either have to fix that or be honest about it.”  Her approach feels like a genuine preference, but, of course, it’s also politically pragmatic. She reminds every audience that she’s first and foremost a mom, albeit one who can bring home the bacon and fry it up in the pan. But if she comes under fire for being too soft, the Obama campaign headquarters will pass out Champagne.  A version of this op-ed appears in print on , on Page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: The Torch Passes. Really. Today's Paper|Subscribe
The Clintons did everything they were supposed to do and in politics, like so much of life, feelings are irrelevant to everyone except the persons doing the feeling.