illary Rodham Clinton has a woman problem. For professional women, especially, she is our worst nightmare: the woman we fear we could become.
Polls show decreasing female support for the first lady, who recently announced a run for US Senate from the state of New York. Women are not yet rallying to the side of New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, but they are seriously ambivalent about backing his female opponent.
Some ambivalence is due to Clinton fatigue, a political cliche that happens to be true. Just looking at the recent news photograph of Hillary air-kissing Vice President Al Gore is enough to bring on a feverish urge to be rid of the entire administration, fast and forever.
Some of it can be attributed to the first lady's obvious desire to be all things to all women, such as the campaign video that has her dressed in pink and talking about mixing a ''mean tossed salad.''
There is also her startling political clumsiness, illustrated recently by the campaign breakfast stop that saw her stiff a single-mother waitress. Being a candidate is very different from being a candidate's wife. But even if we give the first lady leeway for inexperience, her natural instincts seem unnaturally poor. Doesn't she know women generally over-tip, to beat the stereotype that they are undesirable customers?
Women are always tough on each other. We judge each other on clothes and looks much more harshly than do men; and we are always looking for reasons to explain professional success beyond the obvious - brains. As we pick apart Hillary's hair-do and hips, I can hear the echo of thousands of catty conversations I have listened to or participated in.
But most of our ambivalence about this Clinton can be traced to our horror at her life. We want to believe we would never put up with Bill, nor with the vast parts of Mrs. Clinton's life that seem like a charade.
Yet I wonder how many of us do put up with a less dramatic version of it, and that's why watching her do it in the extreme is so painful.
Beyond marriage, the lives of many baby boomer women are filled with accommodation, compromise, and role confusion, just like Hillary Clinton's.
Sometimes I feel like I am living two separate lives - the one at home and the one at work. Each has different joys and burdens, expectations and disappointments. The skills that are valuable in one are often useless in the other. What is attractive in one world may be completely disdained in the other. Straddling these two worlds, you sometimes feel like a partial success in only one; or, worse, as a failure in both. Almost always, you feel torn.
At times, the straddling makes you do silly things, like tell people you make a mean tossed salad. However, most of us are lucky enough not to videotape such foolish statements for national consumption.
The first lady is straddling bigtime. She is staying married - for now - at the same time she is forever changing the dynamic in her marriage by striking out on her own. In this campaign, she is just Hillary - except she can't be, because we can't forget about Bill and neither can she.
We can hate her for it. We can hold her in contempt for refusing to extricate herself fully from one world before she plunges into a new one. We can call her a phony, a fraud, and a manipulator. But we should understand that in doing so, we are mostly trying to put psychological distance between us and her, to make sure no one would ever think we are capable of the same sorry scenario.
In the end, I don't think it has much to do with whether she would be a good US senator, any more than such matters have much to do with whether any one of us is a good lawyer, teacher, or journalist.
Many women who are turned off to Mrs. Clinton today will be voting for her in November. Her opponent is not much easier to like than she is and has a complicated marriage of his own.
This is one race where policy and issues might actually count more than personality. That would not guarantee Hillary Clinton a win. But it would mean that ultimately she will be judged as she should be, as a candidate for political office - not as a wife, mother, or female.
Joan Vennochi is a Globe columnist.
