The Player : The drubbing the Democrats took this fall was aimed at both the President and his wife. But Hillary Rodham Clinton is not a First Lady in retreat. She will likely continue her stormy relationship with a nation that both admires her and resents her.

The blistering message delivered by voters this fall was indisputably directed at this nation’s President. But perhaps for the first time in history, such a rejection was also aimed at this nation’s First Lady.

Never since polling began has the popularity of the President’s wife fallen as low as the President’s--in some states, lower. But then never has a First Lady embodied an Administration gestalt to this degree.

When the buck stopped on health care, it stopped at Hillary Rodham Clinton’s door, and it is said no other issue did as much to put Republicans in control of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

With her liberal presence at his side, many concluded, Bill Clinton could kiss four more years goodby. And the Washington rumor mill promptly lurched into high gear. Hillary Clinton was spiraling downward: in denial, secretly depressed, in post-electoral shock, headed for the White House kitchen to spend the remainder of her First Ladyship baking snickerdoodles.

But overlooked in this scenario is the woman herself--the most policy-minded First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt, the President’s closest adviser, a visionary with a mission no less sweeping than “redefining what it means to be a human being in the 20th Century.”

One reason she takes so many punches is because she is in the ring. “If four or five people sat around the table talking things over with the President, she would be one of the four or five. That’s pretty close to unprecedented,” says Norm Ornstein, political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

“And anybody who thinks she is going back to serving tea,” says Larry Sabato, professor of political science at the University of Virginia, “is living on Pluto.”

This is not a First Lady in retreat. After her health-care reform effort crashed, she was still deluged with requests for help on the campaign trail. In Indonesia with her husband after the election, Hillary Clinton’s position never wobbled: “I think the President has to stand for what he’s stood for.”

She denounced as “unbelievable and absurd” House Speaker-elect Newt Gingrich’s welfare reform suggestion that children be put in orphanages if their parents cannot support them. She reaffirmed that her role model for the next two years would be Eleanor Roosevelt.

“I, for better or for worse, have spoken out on public issues for 25 years. Some kind of First Lady amnesia would not have been credible,” she recently told students at a George Washington University forum.

But neither is Hillary Clinton expected to stay the formal policy-making course that dominated these past two years and made her a lightening rod for anti-government fury.

In these post-election weeks, the First Lady has been fine-tuning her role. And what is emerging is a woman intent on standing by her conscience, although quite likely in a less official, less public way.

“She certainly will not head up a welfare reform task force, but she may well have something important to say about welfare,” Sabato says. “And the only way we’ll hear about it is through the Washington whispers column.”

Not in more than 50 years has a First Lady kicked up so much dust. Rosalynn Carter attended Cabinet meetings and was chastised for having the gall to take notes. Nancy Reagan is said to have carried enough weight to get a summit with the Russians rescheduled on the advice of her astrologer.

But Hillary Clinton was the first to come to the White House as acknowledged partner--”two leaders dedicated to America’s future for the price of one” was the way the President put it. And when he placed his wife in charge of the 500-member task force that was to draw up the centerpiece of his policy agenda, he pushed the boundaries of this once ceremonial position to new limits.

That first spring, Hillary Clinton spent three days testifying before Congress, speaking in perfect paragraphs without a single note. Even her worst critics had to concede she was good at this, mastering the arcane technicalities and translating them to a human drama the masses could understand. She was Eleanor Roosevelt’s social conscience and Jackie Kennedy’s grace in composite.

But the national health-care dilemma that had been baffling Presidents for nearly 70 years--from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Harry S. Truman to Dwight D. Eisenhower--soon revealed itself a brier patch and Hillary Clinton was in the thorns.

Her reputation for arrogance, deserved or not, was fueled by a decision to convene the task force in secret, prompting a federal court order to open up the proceedings. If she mastered the technicalities of an extremely complex issue, she never got the atmospherics right. Members of Congress felt left out. One referred to the task force as working “in the biosphere.”

“We got the impression that Bill Clinton was scarcely in the loop,” says Fred I. Greenstein, professor of political science at Princeton University.

It appeared last October that Hillary had been “fired” when White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta announced presidential advisers Robert Rubin and Carol Rasco would head health-care reform next year.

Had the effort succeeded, Hillary Clinton might have bumped the First Couple into the stratosphere of public adoration. When it failed, they plunged to new depths. Republicans won control of both houses of Congress. Hillary came to epitomize much of what the voters disdained about the Clinton White House. And by the end of last month, a CBS poll showed her approval rating at a dismal 48%. (Barbara Bush’s, by comparison, was consistently as high as 83%).

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As the 104th Congress convenes today and the President sets out to recapture the centrist philosophy that got him elected, observers wonder whether his crusading partner, characterized by some as the Bobby Kennedy of his Administration, might damage his already troubled presidency by her very presence.

“There has never been a First Lady so organically bound to the life of a presidency as this one. It becomes like one of those Sherlock Holmes detective stories. If you figure out how Hillary fits in the picture, some of the mysteries seem to sort out,” Greenstein says, referring to Clinton’s sometimes baffling handling of Whitewater and other mini-scandals that plagued his first two years.

According to White House aides, Hillary Clinton will remain a voice on health care and concentrate on children’s issues--her area of expertise for more than 20 years and a topic that could encompass everything from welfare reform to juvenile crime.

Activists still hope she’ll be a rallying point for change, taking the press to the problem as Robert F. Kennedy did with poverty in West Virginia. But if she remains the voice for reform, she will not be its chief negotiator.

“She has got to decide how she is going to be effective, and we hope she will do that in a way that frees her from that official responsibility,” says Harriett Woods, president of the National Women’s Political Caucus. “There is going to be a need for someone who can speak out candidly--that is more the Eleanor Roosevelt model, an unguarded tongue, free to say it as it is.”

The struggle to reconcile images of what a First Lady should be, Hillary Clinton’s defenders say, may be less hers than the nation’s. To ask whether she will make policy or make cookies, they argue, is to ask the wrong question. Like most working women in America, she does both.

“The vast majority of American women are trying to balance those roles. They have to work and the kids need Christmas cookies for the school party,” Woods says. “But she is resented by some older women and some working men.

“The women’s movement generated changes not everyone is comfortable with and Hillary Clinton is the first woman in the White House who is a product of that.”

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But First Ladies of substance may be something the nation will have to get used to as women take their place in every level of the American work force.

Many of the wives of would-be 1996 Republican presidential candidates are ambitious and scholarly. Elizabeth Dole, wife of Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, is president of the Red Cross. Wendy L. Gramm, wife of Phil Gramm (R-Tex.), is an established economist and was the Bush Administration’s top commodities market regulator.

The days of Lou Henry Hoover putting aside her work as a geologist to take a back seat to her husband may be dead. And with them goes the luxury of instant and unfailing public affection. If Hillary Clinton stays in the game, she will doubtlessly continue a stormy relationship with a nation that both admires and resents her.

“Hillary Clinton is as viciously attacked as any First Lady has ever been,” says Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of “Eleanor Roosevelt Vol. I,” a biography.

“She has repeated her intention to model herself after Eleanor. If she does, she will become an aggressive liberal who does not cave in. We will see a bold, visionary and courageous First Lady who understands, as Eleanor did, that every woman in public life needs to develop ‘skin as tough as rhinoceros hide.’ ”