Half the country may be “with her” but are we “with him”?

Now that the Democratic convention is over and the nomination is official, we are confronting the possibility of not only the first woman president but also the first ex-president first spouse.

A few months ago this seemed incredibly exciting to Democrats. They were going to get back Bill Clinton! The president who had an eight-year term of falling deficits, growing employment, no wars, no major domestic disturbances! Oh, yes, there was the little matter of impeachment charges over lying about what sex is or is not, which were dismissed by the Senate. But in recent years, he has been the most popular politician in the country.

Oh, how cruel the vagaries of time. Even a few weeks. After Clinton inexplicably met for a 30-minute how-are-your-grandchildren-how-is-your-golf-game tarmac tete-a-tete with the attorney general who was deciding whether to indict his wife, he seems a little tarnished.

Women watching Clinton’s lengthy and forceful endorsement at the Democratic convention of his wife as president were struck by his lengthy introduction of her, which featured the story of how they met. In law school. In the law library. And his pursuit of her. Until she finally said yes and they formed a partnership and she became his best friend.

As a former White House reporter who covered the Clinton era, I truly believe the Clintons were and are and will always be best friends. But the smarmy, lengthy retelling of how they met, were on-and-off lovers and finally found true love or at least one of the most historically interesting relationships in world history was, to some, just a little too much.

Steve Schmidt, the pithy Republican political analyst who managed John McCain’s campaign in 2008, nailed it: “A wedding toast gone bad.”

And so we come to a fascinating and unprecedented dilemma: Do we want a man who is on his third marriage and has verbally disparaged women as “pigs,” or a woman who has had a somewhat stormy marriage and endured tribulations that can only make most of us shudder?

And here is the clincher: Does it matter?

When Democrats called Donald Trump, the other candidate, a war profiteer because he got $150,000 after 9/11 for supposed damage to his “small business,” that may have been a far more telling blow than any discussion of whose marriage is better.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan caused angst in many conservative circles because he was divorced. In the end, nobody cared, and his long, long love affair with Nancy Reagan was all that mattered.

Here we are in 2016, and it is quite likely, indeed, probable, that multiple divorces no longer are an issue, while a long-lasting marriage — the one the Clintons have — may be problematic because we have all been witnesses, albeit often reluctant ones, to their vicissitudes.

There are so many issues in this election season that historians will have the proverbial field day analyzing the reasons why either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump wins.

Melania Trumps’ case for her husband in Cleveland, marred as it was by the plagiarism of Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech for her husband, was impassioned. It was predictable. Bill Clinton’s speech for his wife was impassioned. It, too, was predictable. We were told to expect awesome.

We Americans have been through so much this year that it almost seems a surprise that we aren’t even going to vote and settle this for three more months.

The bottom line seems to be — who would have thought it just a few years ago — that Hillary Clinton will win or lose this election on her own merits — and being a mother and grandmother, according to her strategy. Bill Clinton will not be a factor. And neither will Donald Trump’s marriages.

Ann McFeatters is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service.