Clinton intimated tears when a woman asked her how she bore up under the campaign strain. Pelosi quivered when she compared today’s heated rhetoric over health care reform and other Obama moves to late November 1978 in San Francisco, when Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk, the city’s first openly gay executive, were assassinated.

Clinton and Pelosi have reputations for being hard and unemotional. Many credited Clinton’s unexpected vulnerability for her primary win against Barack Obama. I wonder whether Pelosi’s show of vulnerability over the meanness in today’s charged political atmosphere will pay a parallel dividend. What that might be is being played out daily.