There is a bit of received wisdom in this presidential election cycle that Hillary Clinton needs to be softer, nicer, less intimidating — the list goes on. Journalists write about whether she missed or seized a “humanizing moment,” because of course she is not human.  Mrs. Clinton, who has been struggling with her image since she entered public life as the wife of the governor of Arkansas, feels obliged to play into this narrative. She is trying to be grandmotherly, to display her sense of humor on TV. Stories about how giggly and funny she is in private are making the rounds again.  The sexism of this dynamic aside (and there is a powerfully sexist thread to the Hillary Clinton story), I’m not sure it’s good advice.  I like strong Hillary Clinton more than forced soft Hillary Clinton. Her performance on Thursday at the ridiculous 11-hour waste of Americans’ time by the House Select Committee on Benghazi was a perfect example.  The photographs of her smiling tolerantly at her questioners as one might do with a daft but unavoidable in-law at Thanksgiving dinner, or simply looking bored and flicking lint from her sleeve, are priceless. Faced with endlessly belligerent and pointless questions, Mrs. Clinton said at one point: “I’ve lost more sleep than all of you put together” over the Benghazi killings.  Representative Martha Roby, Republican of Alabama, asked what will go down as one of the most ridiculous questions ever posed in the halls of Congress: She wanted to know if Mrs. Clinton slept alone the entire night when the Benghazi attack occurred. “Yes, the whole night,” Mrs. Clinton said, letting out the braying laugh that some people tell her to suppress.  Mrs. Clinton had another great moment in the first Democratic debate, when Lincoln Chaffee tried to connect her email scandal to the Iraq war.  “We have to repair American credibility after we told the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which he didn’t,” Mr. Chaffee said. “So there’s an issue of American credibility out there. So any time someone is running to be our leader, and a world leader, which the American president is, credibility is an issue out there with the world. And we have repair work to be done. I think we need someone that has the best in ethical standards as our next president. That’s how I feel.”  The moderator, Anderson Cooper, asked Mrs. Clinton if she wanted to respond.  “No,” she replied without any audible inflection, to loud applause.  In her New York Senate race in 2000, Mrs. Clinton swatted away her Republican opponent Rick Lazio like that sleeve lint on Thursday after he tried the in-your-face approach during a debate, approaching Mrs. Clinton on the stage and trying to look strong and intimidating, which for Mr. Lazio was as a huge stretch. “The thing that probably prepared me best in dealing with things like that was having two younger brothers,” Mrs. Clinton said afterward.  I’m not disputing the fact that Mrs. Clinton has a relatively low “likability” index (though the fact that Donald Trump, of all people, does not continues to amaze me).  I’m just saying as one voter that Hillary Clinton does better when she’s not trying to disguise that she is a brilliant, talented and strong-minded person who has fought for her current position in the race and overcome some pretty astonishingly bad moments along the way (which I guess is what Representative Roby was trying to bring up in her maladroit questioning about who was in Mrs. Clinton’s bed that night).  The choice before us all is who will be the next president of the United States – a job for which warm and fuzzy is not really all that useful.  Correction: October 23, 2015 An earlier version of this post misstated the day on which Hillary Clinton testified before the House Select Committee on Benghazi. It was Thursday, not Friday.
Thursday’s hearing on Benghazi was a reminder that Mrs. Clinton does best when she doesn’t try to hide her toughness.