"Unlike Barack Obama, who will leave the White House with more or less the same handful of friends he came in with..."

"... the Clintons occupy their own unique and formidable and often exhausting place in American politics. Over the decades, they’ve operated like an Arkansas tumbleweed, collecting friends and devotees from Bill Clinton’s kindergarten class to Yale Law School to Little Rock to the White House to the Senate and beyond."

From the NYT Magazine article "Planet Hillary." The point about the Obamas' not making friends is also in that New Yorker article:

Obama’s favorite company is a small ensemble of Chicago friends—Valerie Jarrett, Marty Nesbitt and his wife, Anita Blanchard, an obstetrician, and Eric and Cheryl Whitaker, prominent doctors on the South Side. During the first Presidential campaign, the Obamas took a vow of “no new friends.”

Something else that caught my eye in the "Planet Hillary" article is the onion metaphor. (No, not onion rings. For that, go here.)

James Carville has compared the Clinton world, perhaps not so originally, to an onion (it’s safest, he has said, to exist in the third or fourth layer)....

Hillary Clinton’s truest challenge, it would seem, is not to make the country glimpse who she was 40 years ago; it’s to recognize that for all the layers that have been added to the onion, there’s still something at the center that’s aching for the rest to be peeled away.

I thought the whole point of the layers of the onion metaphor was that there is nothing inside. It's only layers. Layers aren't added to an onion. Layers are the onion. There is no core. And onions don't ache. And if they did, they wouldn't ache for all the layers to be peeled away. There'd be nothing left.