Why the Clintons will stay married, win or lose.

[JI7]

When Bill and Hillary Clinton's friends say they are exactly the same in public and private—well, except for the F-bombs—they tend to mean it literally: "I don't think I've ever heard them talk about anything but politics," says a friend who has known them since the McGovern campaign. Many a public person seems to feel cozier in crowds, abler at rope lines than at intimacy. But former White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta describes the Clintons' entire existence as the constant forward motion of two people who are "living, eating, drinking, and breathing politics"—to the point that Bill was always trying to line up recreational Democratic meet-and-greets even when he was supposed to be on vacation. "It's very surreal. You see a lot of drive and ambition" in Washington, of course, "but never like the Clintons, where it's ceaseless." Asked whether the president and the senator are at all distinguishable in that regard, Panetta says, "Probably she more than he—she being a human being, after all—it takes a toll on her." Yet even when the more flesh-and-blood half of the entity known as Theclintons does take a night off, it can turn into a busman's holiday, as when, according to their biographer Sally Bedell Smith, they spent their 25th anniversary, in October of 2000, at home in Chappaqua, N.Y., watching a Bush-Gore presidential debate. Which is not at all to say that their marriage is the dispassionate alliance some critics take it for: Would you accuse two hard-core philatelists of only being in it for the stamps?

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http://www.slate.com/id/2188751/