Hillary's last stand: The battle she can't afford to lose

It is several hours before the lights come up in the Wolstein Centre at Cleveland State University, and the organisers are afraid. The stage is set – its darkness punctuated by a round, red carpet that seems to burn like a hot plate. But outside, the snow is howling. A winter storm has swept into Ohio, the worst of the season.

The news from the airport is grim – they have been opening and closing the runways all day. Yet no one really doubts that the debate set for last night between the Democrat presidential rivals Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would go ahead as scheduled. Neither would have dared miss this event, even if dog-drawn sleds were their only means of travel. The stakes are far too high. Ohio is far too important.

All roads to the White House, they say, lead through this state, a perennial bellwether in presidential politics. But first, there is the nomination to capture. Ohio, like Texas and two smaller states, is set to hold its nomination vote in six days from now. The pressure on both candidates is enormous. But it was Hillary Clinton's toes that were most likely to burn on that crimson carpet last night.

Right now, she is stuck in a Greek tragedy she seems unable to interrupt. Since Super Tuesday on 5 February, Senator Obama has won 11 contests in a row to her zero. Her campaign has spiralled into recriminations, firings and confusion. Her chances of catching up are now slim. She needs to win Texas and Ohio and, because of the delegate maths, by large margins. In the Lone Star State she appears to be in a dead heat with Obama. Latest polls show her holding on to a lead in Ohio, but it, too, is shrinking fast.

Ohio, in fact, might be Hillary's last best shot. It may mean little, if she can't win Texas as well, but at least victory here would help salvage a sliver of her pride. It is a state that still makes things – Goodyear tyres are in Akron and only Michigan has more car factories – with a large blue-collar constituency that is meant to favour the former first lady. And it is a state that has been hurt as much as any in America by the gathering economic downturn, with 200,000 manufacturing jobs lost since 2000, many abroad.

Yet if Ohio is beginning to smell a little like Wisconsin suddenly, it is nothing to do with the snow and the salt on the roads. That state was meant to be hers, too, for many of the same reasons. Last week, she lost it – by 17 points. Worse, it was in Wisconsin that Obama barrelled right through the protective walls around those Clinton bastions. He beat her among low-income voters, slaughtered her among white men, and even won over most women, except those aged 60 and above.

It is a whiff you could even have caught on the snow-slicked pavements of Cleveland's cheerless centre yesterday, where office workers on smoking breaks huddled in groups whereever there was shelter. Everyone had an opinion. (Just one admitted that they were planning to tune into American Idol during the debate.) Anxious to watch, certainly, was Laura Howard, whose friend was to be singing the national anthem for the candidates and 1,600-strong audience. She is 41 and a legal worker; surely a natural Hillary supporter.

"Obama," she says without hesitation. "I think that while everyone says he isn't experienced enough to be president, I take that the other way around. I think because he has less experience than her, he will bring the fresh outlook we need."

"Obamarama, that's what I call him. Watch – it will catch on," agrees Michelle Mullins, who is 28. She was a staunch Hillary gal until Obama grabbed her attention. "Now I have listened him some, I am probably going to go with him."

"Senator Clinton's lead remains substantial, but the trend line should be worrisome for her in a state that even her husband, former president Bill Clinton, has said she must win," commented Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, which published one of a flurry of Ohio polls this week. It showed her ahead of Obama by 51 per cent to 40 per cent. But that is not nearly as comfortable as the 55 per cent to 34 per cent when the same poll was taken earlier this month.

Hardly encouraging, meanwhile, were the latest national polling results published yesterday by CBS and The New York Times. These showed that across the country, Obama had the support of 54 per cent of Democratic voters compared with 38 per cent for Clinton. The headlines from these polls are important because they reinforce the impression among voters that he is the one who has the momentum and – more importantly – is more likely to beat the presumptive Republican nominee in November, John McCain.

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It was not meant to play out like this. For ever – really since the day husband Bill left the White House in early 2001 – Hillary Clinton has considered the taking of the 2008 Democratic nomination her birthright. She had the name recognition, the big donors to ensure a reliable flow of cash, and the party grandees were all behind her. When her field of rivals came into view early last year, her confidence grew even greater. John Edwards would put up a fight. As for that upstart Obama, she would swiftly put him away.

Supporters look back with nostalgia to those days. Remember, for example, that glittering night last October when Hillary and Bill invited friends, donors and celebrities – Billy Crystal played master of ceremonies – for a 60th birthday bash at the Beacon Theatre in Manhattan? The confidence filled the gods like helium in a balloon. It wasn't hard to read the faces of the scores of young volunteers ushering reporters to their seats. They were on the right train. Soon they would be working for President Hillary.

Heaven forfend, however, that the wheels should ever start to come loose. Such blatant self-assuredness will always invite media glee if it turns out to be misplaced. One of the symptoms of her campaign's disarray in recent days has been the whining of top aides about how the press has been unfair to her and overly cosy with Obama. So frustrated are some of Clinton's campaign staff that they have begun to call one of the US news channels the "Obama News Network – ONN".

They surely despaired, for example, at the opening sentence of ABC TV's main news bulletin, delivered by anchorman Charles Gibson. "Another day, another attack from Hillary Clinton." Advisers and surrogates are telling the press to reset their compasses, but to what avail remains to be seen. "Often, when she addresses her opponent, it's immediately seized upon by the press as negative," one adviser noted. "When he [Obama] makes personal character attacks, it's called 'sharpening your rhetoric'."

Blaming the press is so standard as to be almost risible. George Bush Sr resorted to it at every campaign appearance in late 1992 when he realised that another come-lately politician, from deepest Arkansas – Bill Clinton – was not only nipping at his heels, but had bitten off both his trouser legs.

Whether or not the media has been unfair to her, Hillary Clinton must also know that her campaign has made some baffling mistakes. It is not that she herself is a bad candidate. Even many of her detractors will admit she has been better on the stump than they might have expected. She is great in debates. Her main shortcoming is really beyond her control. That is, she simply doesn't have that connective quality that both Bill used to have and Barack can also draw upon. Voters can't quite feel her.

When she lost Iowa, back on 3 February, she got a scorching that should have taught her some useful lessons. It led, for example, to that café moment in New Hampshire when – at last – the candidate who is normally so corseted in a script concocted by her highly paid advisers showed a little leg, tearing up when asked about the pressures of campaigning day in and day out. The only other time we have seen even a glimpse of this was during her last, almost elegiac statement, in last Thursday's debate in Texas when she spoke of being honoured to be sharing a stage with Obama.

If she were winning, there would be none of these errors, of course. Stories wouldn't be appearing – as they have in recent days – about the astonishing sums of money her campaign has been spending. $100,000 on groceries in Nevada; $270,000 for the services of Howard Wolfson, her communications director (spinner-in-charge) for January alone. We wouldn't be tut-tutting her campaign for relying too heavily, especially earlier in the primary contests, on Bill to rustle up support for his wife and – the biggest mistake – lead early attacks on Obama.

Nor, of course, would be the inner circle of Hillary Clinton's advisers be in such a state of misery and mutual finger-pointing as it is now. Widely reported a few days ago was one shouting match at her campaign headquarters which saw Mark Penn, her lavishly remunerated chief adviser, admonishing another of her most loyal lieutenants, Mandy Grunwald, for an advertisement that he deemed below par. "Your ad doesn't work!" he reportedly yelled. "Oh, it's always the ad, never the message!" Grunwald shot back, before a third member of staff accused them both of acting like children and left the room.

Most egregious, perhaps, was the failure of the Clinton campaign to plan for what they always considered the most unlikely of contingencies – that she might not wrap up the nomination on 5 February, Super Tuesday, as they had always assumed. This astonishing show of hubris left Clinton proceeding almost naked into the votes that followed (and of which she has won not one.)

She is still playing catch-up. Compare, for instance, campaign appearances by Clinton and Obama in the city of Lorain, just half-an-hour west of Cleveland on Lake Erie, which has seen more than its fair share of job dislocation. Lunchtime yesterday saw the former first lady holding a town hall meeting in a school. Well, fine. Town hall meetings in schools are what she has been doing for the past several months. Obama was in Lorain on Sunday and spoke in a freezing cold warehouse before workers at the National Gypsum Company, who, because of the recession in the construction industry, have seen their factory retreat from a seven- to a five-day operation, with overtime wiped out.

Which candidate was better served by their appearance? Obama. Again. And Francisco Gonzalez, a mill operator for National Gypsum, was grateful for the chance to see Obama, even if he has still not decided which way to vote next week. "I came to listen," he said. "Now I'll think about what was said. It's going to be a good tight race. It'll be hard to make up my mind, with so many good candidates."

Now the Clinton campaign faces perhaps the most crucial dilemma of all. The rush to negativity that we have seen in recent days – as Charles Gibson so pithily reminded television viewers – is widely seen as highly risky. As Steve McMahon, a Democratic strategist, told The New York Times: "There's a general rule in politics: a legitimate distinction which could be effective when drawn early in the campaign often backfires and could seem desperate when it happens in the final hours of a campaign."

Legitimate, perhaps, has been the squealing from Hillary Clinton about a mailshot sent out by the Obama campaign in Ohio branding her a long-time supporter of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta). Nothing in Ohio, with so many jobs lost, could be more toxic. In truth, both candidates have, over the years, offered a slightly confused mixture of caution and support for free trade. It is Hillary Clinton's misfortune, however, that the Nafta deal was not only signed into law during the first Bill Clinton White House term, but was thereafter viewed as one of his most important achievements.

But in taking the microphone on Saturday and blurting: "Shame on you, Barack Obama. Meet me in Ohio. Let's have a debate about your tactics and your behaviour in this campaign," Clinton appeared to some to be shrill and perhaps desperate, too.

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This new tone also reminds Raphe Sonenshein, a political scientist at California State University, of the predicament of Bush the elder, 16 years ago. "Front-runners who fully expect to win... often get really nasty when they lose," he said. "I think the Clinton team is getting into that zone, mixing frustrated entitlement with bafflement at their apparent fate. I remember George Bush the elder marvelling that he was losing to this inexperienced 'kid' from Arkansas in 1992. It really hurts."

Nothing was nastier than the motives that seemingly lurked behind the release to the Drudge Report website on Monday of those pictures of Obama in Somali garb, including a sort of head-wrap that somebody among Clinton's deeply frustrated staffers thought might resurrect the canard about him being not quite American and even – perish the thought – a Muslim. (He is, of course, a practising Christian.) "BUM WRAP" was the splash headline of one New York tabloid yesterday, while its competitor blared "SMEAR WE GO".

"Silliness" is what Obama called the photo-flap, as well as other recent attacks against him. Are we wrong to assume that most voters would agree? "It's just ridiculous when personal politics get in the way like this," was the opinion of David Beachdell, 23, who was among the smokers shivering on Cleveland's streets yesterday. (He is still undecided between the two candidates.)

Hillary's campaign chiefs first tried to ignore the release of the photo and then, realising that was perhaps a mistake, too, strained to reassure everyone that they knew nothing about it. Probably true, but the timing for Clinton as she went into last night's debate could barely have been more inauspicious, giving her rival the chance to take the high ground in front of the cameras – and in front of Ohio's voters.

If she loses Ohio as well as Texas, her long-incubated ambition to become the first woman president of the United States will finally and surely have been dashed. But it won't just be that picture of Obama in a turban she will have to blame. No, the list of mis-steps, bungles and cock-ups will be much, much longer.

Shifting fortunes: how the money has followed the candidates

3 January
Obama wins in Iowa

Hillary's lead may have slipped in the weeks before the primaries began, but even over the holiday season she seemed unassailable. The first sign of trouble came when Obama trounced her in Iowa. Hillary's 30 per cent wasn't even enough to secure second, as Senator John Edwards inched her into third place.

7 January
Hillary cries, then wins New Hampshire

Clinton was concerned that her Iowa defeat would be repeated in New Hampshire. The polls seemed to spell her doom. Then she was caught, close to tears, in a Portsmouth coffee shop – and New Hampshire women flocked to vote for her . She went from "Felled Goliath" to "Comeback Kid," beating Obama by 3 per cent.

8 January
Bill weighs in

Calling Obama's record on the Iraq War into question, Bill Clinton described his media image as "the biggest fairy tale [he'd] ever seen". Obama was not opposed to the war early on, Clinton claimed, and his voting record on the issue had been the same as Hillary's.

26 January
The gloves come off

At a debate in South Carolina, Obama slammed Clinton for disseminating inaccurate information on his record, and Clinton bit back with accusations of flip-flopping. Obama took the state, with 55 per cent, overwhelming his rival's 27 per cent. He took 78 per cent of the African-American vote in a state with a large black population, who in the past would have been expected to turn out for Clinton.

28 January
Kennedy backs Barack

In another blow to the Clinton campaign, Senator Ted Kennedy, the patriarch of the remaining Kennedy clan, endorsed Obama wholeheartedly. The Kennedys still retain a reputation as kingmakers within the Democratic Party.

30 January
John Edwards drops out

John Edwards announced that he was bowing out of the race, having failed to win a primary. The remaining candidates have since made overtures to Edwards, but he has so far refused to endorse either Obama or Clinton.

5 February
An inconclusive Super Tuesday

Super Tuesday, on which 24 states held their presidential primaries, was meant to be the campaign's decisive moment, heralding a clear front-runner in the race for the Democratic nomination. It proved inconclusive, however: while Obama won more states and marginally more delegates, Hillary had come first in California – one of the contest's biggest trophies.

10 February
Patti Solis Doyle resigns

A major sign that Clinton's camp was in trouble came when her campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, resigned and was replaced by Maggie Williams, following the loss of five states. This started a long losing streak for Team Clinton.

21 February
Whatever happens, we'll be fine

Shaking Obama's hand at the end of a debate in Austin, Texas, Clinton had a resigned air: "You know, whatever happens," she said, "we are going to be fine." Pundits interpreted an air of desperation in the quote, which came after 10 straight wins for Obama.

26 February
Obama in dress-up

With Clinton drinking firmly in the last-chance saloon in the run-up to the Texas and Ohio primaries, another "dirty tricks" scandal erupted. A photograph showing Obama wearing a turban on a visit to Kenya in 2006 found its way into newspapers – exploiting false associations with militant Islamists and Osama bin Laden. Hillary rallied slightly in the polls after the photograph's release.

Team Hillary

Bill Clinton
Hillary's husband has been a crucial voice in her campaign but, some say, a damaging one: his public criticisms of Obama coincided with his wife's diminishing poll ratings

Chelsea Clinton
Chelsea is an important member of Team Hillary, and has been employed by the campaign to encourage young super-delegates and college kids to come out for her Mom

Mark Penn
As Clinton's chief strategist, Penn's robust tactics have consistently caused controversy since the start of the campaign. John Edwards has likened him to Karl Rove

Patti Solis Doyle
Doyle has been a Clinton aide for 16 years, and Hillary's campaign manager since 2000. She was ousted from that role earlier this month, but remains a senior adviser

Maggie Williams
Doyle's replacement as campaign manager is another long-term Clinton aide, and was Hillary's chief of staff in Bill's first term in office. She came on board after New Hampshire in January, and was promoted on 10 February