CASCO BAY, Maine -- Surely, this was the right moment for transition. The torch was passed on the first night, not just from Bill to Al but from Hillary the political wife to Hillary the political candidate.
On the podium, Barbara Mikulski welcomed Hillary Rodham Clinton into the sisterhood of senators. For the last time, she performed a prime-time duet as Bill's wife and her own woman. Maybe it would be easier now to run than to juggle.
Watching this, I remembered the convention eight years ago when I sat at a rally of women being introduced to Hillary. A New Yorker in my row yelled above the crowd, ''Isn't she great!'' And then followed her cheer with a wistful aside, ''I wish she were running for the Senate.''
That was the Year of the Woman but most decidedly not the Year of the Wife. In 1992, women who liked Hillary wished, however quietly, that she was running on her own two feet. Women who didn't like Hillary wished she would shut up.
Late one night at the '92 convention, she acknowledged the difficulty of being seen as both independent and wifely. ''I thought I understood how to walk through that minefield of defining myself and striking a balance between my own needs and family needs that we all struggle with all the time,'' she said then. She was ''surprised,'' even ''bewildered'' by the national furor over her role. After all, she said, ''We are all trying to work this out.''
That year, Hillary took the slings and arrows that might otherwise have been aimed at the Boxers and Feinsteins. For the first time it was easier for a woman to be a candidate than the candidate's wife.
Eight years have passed. Bill may have been Houdini, but Hillary was caught in all the double binds. Tammy Wynette or Lady Macbeth? First lady or co-president? Victim or enabler? Candidate or carpetbagger?
Now, she told the country, she's moving on. ''Bill and I are closing one chapter of our lives and opening another.'' She is stepping up to her own political career, while he is stepping down from his post. But the page may still turn on the plot of her marriage. Can voters, women in particular, see her outside, around, over, behind, through the story of her marriage?
In a rash of LA interviews, Hillary told one TV anchor after another that the people fighting her actually oppose her positions on abortion or health care or children. Indeed, at the Republican convention the button that escaped the ''niceness'' censors read ''Stop Hillary Now,'' and in right-wing fund-raising, Hillary has replaced Ted Kennedy as liberal scarecrow.
But even among women who thought of her as a role model and share her agenda, the marriage matters. In one poll after another, white women choose the other guy - Giuliani or Lazio or whomever - by 5 to 9 points. The question that trips her up is not whether she is in favor of prescription drugs and a patient's bill of rights but ''Why did she stay with the guy?''
Suburban moms who should be her core don't ''get'' Hillary because they don't ''get'' her post-Monica marriage. They can't figure out how she functions because her marriage seems dysfunctional. And more to the point, they have trouble voting for someone they don't ''get.''
Is there a double standard at work here? Sure, but not the old one. We have special expectations of women in life and in politics. We expect women to see life whole, and in return we judge their whole lives. The political is more - perhaps, too? - personal for women as candidates and voters.
This is the first time since 1972 that I've attended a convention as a civilian in front of a screen instead of a journalist behind the scene. I watch Peter Jennings interview Hillary as wife and politician. As a pol, he asks how she feels about young women who ''resent you because you didn't leave your husband.'' As a wife, he asks, how will Bill handle his exit from power while she's running for the Senate: ''What if he needs you?'' No, she hasn't cut through the double bind.
But Bill Clinton has a split in his psyche of Grand Canyon proportions. Nearly two-thirds of Americans disapprove of him as a person and approve of him as a president. A flawed husband, a good leader? Do we allow this distinction for men, but not for women? For husbands, but not for wives? For Bill, but not for Hillary?
In a TV news story about public attitudes toward Bill, one woman offered up a pretty fair sound bite: ''I wouldn't want to be married to the guy, but I'd vote for him.'' Why is it so much harder to say, ''I wouldn't want to be married to the guy, but I'd vote for her''?
Ellen Goodman is a Globe columnist.
