Over the last nine months, Beltway pundits and insiders have cracked jokes about Clinton's standing in the Administration. But this month, HRC is riding high in the polls and dominating the media. Who's laughing now? A quick opinion piece in the new New York magazine tries to explain how Hillary rose to such heights: The sudden Clinton clamor in the media strikes the ear as especially cacophonous in light of how quiet she has been for most of her nine months in her new job. And the sound of silence out of State, in turn, has given rise to a clear conventional wisdom about Hillary's role in Obamaville, which is part of what she was reacting to in her interviews with NBC and ABC this week. The CW, put succinctly, is that Hillary is a virtual nonentity in the administration: that in terms of political status, she ranks in the second tier, and that when it comes to policy sway, she has been out-barked and out-bitten by the pack of alpha dogs that the president has installed around her. It's easy enough to understand this interpretation of Clinton's standing. After her soap-operatic campaign, the absence of drama around HRC creates cognitive dissonance for the punditocracy and other Beltway tea-leaf readers. Yet the truth is that the conventional wisdom is wrong, I think, in both its particulars and its overall verdict. And not just wrong but illustrative of a set of misapprehensions about how the woman thinks and operates-or, at least, how she's learned to do so, especially with respect to the navigation of new terrain. Indeed, one need only look back as far as her time in the Senate to understand how she now sees and plays the game, and why, on everything from the battle over U.S. policy in Afghanistan to the shaping of her future, she's perfectly likely to win. Opining that Clinton succeeded in the Senate by "being wonky and learning the ropes", writer John Heilemann sets up the argument that this was all part of Clinton's master plan: To the outside world, all this laying low has made Clinton look li...