An overview:

From the first voting in Iowa on Jan. 3 she had to prove that Clintons Are Magic. She wound up losing 11 in a row. Meaning Clintons aren’t magic. He had to take her out in New Hampshire, on Super Tuesday or Junior Tuesday. He didn’t. Meaning Obama isn’t magic.

Two nonmagical beings are left.

What the Democrats lost this week was the chance to paint the ‘08 campaign as a brilliant Napoleonic twinning of strategy and tactics that left history awed. What they have instead is a ticket to Verdun. Trench warfare, and the daily, wearying life of the soldier under siege. The mud, the cold, the dank water rotting the boots, all of it punctuated by mad cries of "Over the top," bayonets fixed.

Do I understate? Not according to the bitter officers debating doomed strategy back in HQ. More on that in a minute.

This is slightly good for John McCain. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama hemorrhage money, exhaust themselves, bloody each other. He holds barbecues for the press and gets rid of a White House appearance in which the incumbent offers his dread embrace. Do it now, they’ll forget by the summer. The president does not understand how unpopular he is and after a year on the trail with the faithful neither does Mr. McCain. Mr. Bush confided to a friend a few months ago, as he predicted a Giuliani win, that he’ll eventually come out and campaign for the nominee big time. Talk about throwing the drowning man an anvil.

But it is not good for Mr. McCain that when he officially won this week it barely made page three. The lightning is on the Democratic side. Everything else seems old, like something that happened a year ago that you forgot to notice.

How did Hillary come back? Her own staff doesn’t know. They fight over it because if they don’t know how she carried Ohio and Texas they can’t repeat the strategy.

So they figure backward. She won on Tuesday and did the following things in the weeks before, so . . . it was the kitchen-sink strategy. Or Hispanic outreach. Or the 3 a.m. ad. (The amazing thing was not that they lifted the concept from Walter Mondale’s ‘84 run, but that the answer to the question "Who are you safer with?" was, The Woman. Not that people really view Hillary as a woman, but still: That would not have been the answer even 20 years ago.)

Did she come back because Mr. Obama’s speech got a little boring? Was he coasting and playing it safe? Or was it that he didn’t hit her hard enough? "He hasn’t been able to find a way to be tough with a woman opponent," they say on TV. But that’s not it, or is only half the truth. The other half is that it has long been agreed in the Democratic Party that one must not, one cannot, ever, refer to the long caravan of scandals that have followed the Clintons for 15 years. "We don’t speak of the Clintons that way."

But why not? Everyone else does. Yes, the Obama sages will respond, that’s the point: Everyone knows about cattle futures, etc. Everyone knows that if you Yahoo "Clintons" and "scandals" you get 4,430,000 hits.

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By Eleanor Clift

The day of reckoning for Hillary Clinton is almost here. The voters in Ohio will either deal a final blow to her campaign or provide a much needed victory that at best will give her a reprieve in the long march to the nomination. A visitor from another country recently paid a call on the Clinton campaign headquarters in Ballston, Va., a place just over the bridge from Washington but light years away. He imagined he would be present at a moment of great triumph. Instead he found a campaign on the verge of imploding. Phone bank tables were unmanned. Bins full of mail sent over from the Senate sat unattended. A lot of young women, fanatical Hillary fans all, rushed about, seemingly unclear about what they were supposed to be doing. Other aides sat in front of computer screens, gloomily reading coverage of the campaign. Howard Wolfson and Phil Singer, the campaign’s communications team, weren’t speaking with anybody else, just doing their own thing, whatever that might have been. In short, it was not a happy family.

No amount of spin can overcome Hillary’s disappointing performance Tuesday night in Cleveland. MSNBC called it a draw, but hardly anybody else did. Hillary didn’t land a single blow. Her insistence on sticking with health-care reform as an issue for the first 16 minutes of the debate only reminded people how unbending she can be when convinced of the rectitude of her position. The debate was perhaps her last chance to turn the tide after 11 straight losses. As aides sat looking at polls coming in with the gaps widening, a new reality took hold. They’ve given up winning in Texas and they fear they may not win in Ohio.

Clinton once led Obama in all the national polls; now she’s behind him by a growing margin—as much as 13 or 18 percent in some soundings. In Texas, which votes on March 4, Obama is now ahead in most polls. For the first time he has also surged ahead of her in an Ohio poll—one taken before the debate. Hillary leads in three other polls, but by a margin of 4 percent at best. This is a state where she has the backing of the governor and once led by a double-digit margin. Campaign aides are dejected and demoralized, and they’re turning up for work late. It’s as if they’ve given up. Talk of a dream ticket—the idea that a deal would be struck to combine his youth and her experience—was once an exciting prospect. Now the likelihood of that happening seems to fade by the day.

There was pandemonium this week when an image of Barack Obama in African garb appeared on the Drudge Report, sourced to the Clinton campaign. A day of witch hunts apparently yielded nothing, and Obama took Hillary’s word that as far as she knew her campaign was not behind it. Donning unusual cultural costumes is a diplomatic gesture, not a career-ender (like when Michael Dukakis wore a helmet and rode around in a tank to prove his national-security bona fides). The furor died down pretty quickly—for now—but it was one more element in a budding storyline, nurtured by conservatives, that is calculated to paint Obama as somehow "other," not a red-blooded American, not one of us.

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Hillary Clinton came out of the Potomac Primaries in roughly the same position as Mike Huckabee: needing a miracle. Unless she wins the Texas and Ohio primaries next week nothing short of divine intervention will deliver the nomination to her. After losing eleven straight primaries (even Democrats abroad don’t like her) she is down to a final roll of the dice on March 4. Polls show her with a small lead in Ohio and essentially tied in Texas, but slipping fast in both must win states.

This week she turned up the heat on Barack Obama in a final attempt to save her faltering campaign. She aimed to show he was an unknown, untested candidate who failed to observe a cardinal rule of international travel — never put on a funny looking outfit over a polo shirt. (A photo of Barack Obama in Somalian garb was released, supposedly by a Clinton staffer.) She gave a foreign policy address contending he was foolhardy to be “penciling in” dictators on the White House calendar. She promised, “I will not broadcast intentions to take unilateral actions in a country like Pakistan.” (Iraq is a different matter, presumably.)

All this was part of her last push to demonstrate that Obama would be an easy target for John McCain. (She, along with Bill Keller of the New York Times, will be getting a dozen roses from him for their efforts in bolstering his conservative support.)

However, Democratic voters seemed skeptical of the proposition that she would fare better against McCain in the general election. After all, every national poll and many polls in key swing states showed Clinton doing worse than Obama against McCain. Moreover, only the dimmest of primary voters could have missed the fact that Republicans have been pining for a match up against the Clintons — both of them. What better way to fire up the base and to make McCain the fresher of the two nominees?

The Tuesday Ohio debate did nothing to change the trajectory of the race. With Tim Russert helping to pin her to the mat, there no sign that Hillary can convince voters there was any reason to abandon Obama — who had the temerity to call foul on her proclivity to claim all the credit but none of the blame for the Clinton presidency. If the best she could do was to wag her finger at Obama for not holding more oversight hearings (we know how important those are), final defeat looms next week.

Even a group of Clinton’s closest friends — the MSM — has been openly urging her to quit the race and move beyond the dream of recapturing the White House. Perhaps crashing the Democratic Party bus even before the nominee is officially selected is not such a good idea, they suggest. After all, there is more to life than the presidency, as Clinton herself said in the Austin debate last week, right?

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Tuesday night may have been the last time Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would face off in a debate this primary season. Not only because Hillary’s candidacy is hanging by the fraying thread in Ohio and Texas, but remarkably because she can no longer be confident of winning these contests.

It used to be a given that Hillary, policy wonk and master of detail, would outshine Obama, master of the set speech and crowd pleasing rallies. But in the same way he beat her in fundraising and organization, he eventually proved to be her equal around the debate table. At every turn she sought to expose his weakness, only to have the effort backfire.

At the root of this problem is Hillary’s need for an opponent to demonize in order to define herself. In Arkansas it was teachers’ unions who opposed merit pay and other education reforms. In the White House it was the insurance industry who opposed her efforts to reform health care. She succeeded in getting legislation passed in Arkansas while failing miserably at health care reform, but the pattern can be seen throughout her career. Pick an enemy and attack.

Hillary was always most comfortable battling the infamous Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. When she was fighting Republicans and defending her husband she had the natural support of her party; and many in the country who thought the GOP was over-reaching. She even managed to leverage this into a Senate seat.

In her presidential campaign, this ability to survive was to be her trump card. She proclaimed herself the only one tough enough to win in November. There was only one small problem: she had to win the primary first.

In this scenario who was to play the foil for her attack politics? At first it was George W. Bush. But this only goes so far as she wasn’t running against Bush and he wouldn’t be on the ballot.

At some point she was going to have to articulate a vision of the future. But her entire rationale for running was tied to the past; her money, her name recognition, her popularity were all tied to nostalgia for the economic good times of her husband’s administration. How could she run on “change” when she was the epitome of an establishment candidate?

When push came to shove Hillary’s instincts kicked in and she sought to run against someone rather than on where she would take the country. Her constant touting of her “experience” was in clear contrast to Obama’s inexperience. Her solutions were in contrast to his mere rhetoric.

But once Obama proved to be more than a lightweight good at speeches Hillary was at a loss. Obama had set a trap. He was explicitly running on a new approach to politics and against the old attack style politics with which Hillary was most comfortable. He was seeking to move beyond the very battles she was running on.

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Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton needed to do more than hold her own in Thursday’s debate with rival Sen. Barack Obama. She needed a U-turn heading into the Ohio and Texas primaries, just 12 days away. Anything short of a 5- to 7-point win in both states, and even her most ardent backers say her hopes for the presidency will vanish.

It might take more than that, and Thursday did not seem to get her any closer.

All the earlier debates happened before Super Tuesday, Feb. 5, when the rivals split delegates. Back then, Clinton needed only to stay even in a debate; it was Obama who needed to prove himself.

But after Obama’s recent 11-contest victory streak, it was Clinton who needed to show why she should have the nomination by convincingly dominating him Thursday night. She left with a draw.

Rumblings are growing among superdelegates in both camps that Democrats must rally around one candidate long before the Democratic convention in Denver in late August. The Clinton campaign’s talk of clinching the nomination after Puerto Rico votes June 7 is winning few converts among the 796 elected officials and party insiders who make up 40 percent of the 2,025 delegates needed to win the nomination. The last thing any of these Democrats wants is a civil war in Denver nine weeks before the November election.

The problem is that neither candidate is likely to reach 2,025 with pledged delegates alone, the kind elected by voters. Though Obama has won the last 11 contests, on Feb. 5 Clinton won four of the biggest states, including California, depriving Obama of the delegates he needs to win a clear majority. If Clinton takes Ohio and Texas on March 4, she will argue that she is winning the big states that count the most.

Party leaders are worried about this scenario.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, a kind of super-superdelegate whose stature could pull other superdelegates in line, said in Palo Alto on Wednesday that a candidate could take the nomination with fewer than 2,025 delegates.

"I believe this will be resolved before we get to the convention, and whether somebody has the 2,025 or not, they’ll be in range, and something will - it will take shape," Pelosi said. "Somebody will be ahead. Whether they have the 2,025 or not, someone will be ahead, and then the decision will have to be made."

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Before the Iowa caucuses, senior aides to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton fell into a heated argument during a 7:30 a.m. conference call about the basic message their candidate was delivering to voters.

Mark Penn, chief strategist and pollster, liked Clinton’s emphasis on her "strength and experience," and he defended the idea of her running as a quasi-incumbent best suited for the presidency. Harold Ickes and other advisors said that message was not working. A more promising strategy, they argued, would be to focus on the historic prospect of electing the first woman president.

Today, as Clinton tries to revive her campaign after losing 10 straight primary contests to Sen. Barack Obama, some insiders look back and wish that argument had produced a different outcome. Penn won the debate, say two people aware of the conversation, and Clinton went on to present herself to voters as a steely figure so familiar with the workings of government that she could lead from Day One.

The Clinton campaign now seems in peril, its precarious situation acknowledged on Wednesday even by former President Bill Clinton, who suggested that his wife could not survive a loss in either of the next two major contests, in Texas and Ohio on March 4.

"If she wins Texas and Ohio, I think she will be the nominee," the former president told an audience in Beaumont, Texas. "If you don’t deliver for her, I don’t think she can be."

Still, the campaign seems to be doubling its bet on the message that caused so much division among top aides before the first caucuses in Iowa.

Even as results rolled in from Wisconsin on Tuesday night, eventually yielding a 17-point loss, Clinton said she alone was best prepared to be commander in chief.

And at an evening rally in Brownsville, Texas, on Wednesday, she continued: "When you begin to talk to your friends, ask them: Who do they want to be in the White House when the phone rings at 3 in the morning with some problem or some crisis? We need a commander in chief who’s ready from Day One to be in charge of our country."

The internal friction over Clinton’s message was never fully resolved. A schism persists to this day. Some people close to the campaign’s inner circle believe Clinton should make more of an effort to show a warmer, softer side before the March 4 primaries. Her next opportunity to present herself to a national audience comes today with a debate against Obama in Austin, to be carried by CNN and Univision.

As they look for where the campaign went wrong, some people knowledgeable about it said that Hillary Clinton bore responsibility because she did not heed calls to limit the overarching power Penn wielded within the brain trust as both its pollster and message- maker.

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Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) mocked Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) Monday night for his high-flown rhetoric, suggesting she would fight important fights when he would back down.

Clinton, speaking on WJLA Channel 7 in Washington and Politico.com, also promised there would be no new scandals involving her husband, former President Bill Clinton. 

The senator was asked a question from a Politico.com reader in Santa Monica, Calif., who was seeking assurance that "no new business or personal scandal involving Bill Clinton" could erupt if she were in the White House and give fodder to Republicans.

"You know, I can assure this reader that that is not going to happen," she said. "You know, none of us can predict the future, no matter who we are and what we are running for, but I am very confident that that will not happen." 

During the half-hour conversation, she said that when she hears Obama’s oratory about a more civil politics, she wonder what fights he would avoid.

“You never hear the specifics,” Clinton said. “It’s all this kind of abstract, general talk about how we all need to get along. I want to get along, and I have gotten along, in the Senate. I will work with Republicans to find common cause whenever I can. But I will also stand my ground because there are fights worth having.”

Clinton also suggested that she was getting more fair coverage from Fox News than from MSNBC, which recently ran afoul of her campaign when correspondent David Shuster said her daughter Chelsea Clinton had been “pimped” out to help with the election.

“I really am troubled by this pattern of behavior and comments that you hear,” she said.

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