Is Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Bid Headed For A Great Fall?

Suddenly, the imagery surrounding New York Senator Hillary Clinton’s campaign is no longer about an “inevitable” nominee going through a seemingly pro-forma primary process who will face almost certain election in 2008 amid Republican ills.

Now, various developments and pundits’ comments make it clear that she could well be poised to be a kind of political Humpty Dumpty — now sitting on a political wall, about to fall. And all of the former President’s operatives and all the former President’s men may not be able to put her back together again…

You can see an emerging consensus now on several fronts:

–The Drudge Report (a site that reportedly has had good ties with the Clinton camp in recent months) has a big photo of Clinton and, using its typical journalistic “understatement,” asks: “IS IT THE END??”

Likely answer: Not necessarily. But media coverage creates a political context and Clinton is now being portrayed as someone on the ropes as her younger, less experienced but more likable and younger generation challenger is impressing a lot of pundits and voters because he doesn’t seem to be from the same cookie-cutter mode as politicos of her generation.

–Newsweek’s Howard Fineman says Clinton is on the brink of a series of possible early and potentially-devastating losses. That will further add to the increasing perception that she is on the wane while others are on the ascent and that she may be “damaged goods” for the part in November. Fineman:

Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign is teetering on the brink, no matter what the meaningless national horserace numbers say. The notion that she has a post-Iowa “firewall” in New Hampshire is a fantasy, and she is in danger of losing all four early contests, including Nevada and South Carolina – probably to Sen. Barack Obama, who is now, in momentum terms, the Democratic frontrunner.

Fineman writes what we have written REPEATEDLY about polling on this site. The individual poll numbers matter less than the TRENDING…and that is not good for Ms. Clinton:

National polls still give Hillary a double-digit lead. Those polls mean nothing. What matters now is not the number but the direction, and Obama is movin’ on up at a rapid pace. Little pieces of evidence matter. In Manchester, N.H., the other day, Democratic Gov. John Lynch showed up at the Obama-Oprah rally, ostensibly to introduce Oprah, but, really to cover his bets politically. The newest polls in the state show why: Obama is tied with Hillary, and people are literally exchanging her lawn signs for his.

Fineman points to other flaws: Hillary’s relatively sparse use of surrogates, Bill Clinton’s reluctance to hurt himself among black voters by going after Obama and Bill Clinton’s inner circle complaining about how Hillary’s campaign is being run. The “war room” seems to be in civil war…

All of these are signs that what was once a seemingly sure-footed campaign has lost its footing — at a time when one slip could mean a quick fall down the mountaintop. (The most recent development is that, even in South Carolina, a new poll shows Obama has cut into Clinton’s once-solid lead).

–The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan points to a series of signs that Clinton is scrambling, partially because of a flawed original strategy:

This thought occurs that Hillary Clinton’s entire campaign is, and always was, a Potemkin village, a giant head fake, a haughty facade hollow at the core. That she is disorganized on the ground in Iowa, taken aback by a challenge to her invincibility, that she doesn’t actually have an A team, that her advisers have always been chosen more for proven loyalty than talent, that her supporters don’t feel deep affection for her.

That she’s scrambling chaotically to catch up, with surrogates saying scuzzy things about Barack Obama and drug use, and her following up with apologies that will, as always, keep the story alive. That her guru-pollster, the almost universally disliked Mark Penn, has, according to Newsday, become the focus of charges that he has “mistakenly run Clinton as a de facto incumbent” and that the top officials on the campaign have never had a real understanding of Iowa.

This is true of Mrs. Clinton and her Iowa campaign: They thought it was a queenly procession, not a brawl. Now they’re reduced to spinning the idea that expectations are on Mr. Obama, that he’d better win big or it’s a loss. They’ve been reduced too to worrying about the weather. If there’s a blizzard on caucus day, her supporters, who skew old, may not turn out. The defining picture of the caucuses may be a 78-year-old woman being dragged from her home by young volunteers in a tinted-window SUV.

Could there be another factor in the background as well?

Could it be that in both the Bush and Clinton families there is, lurking in the background, a sense of entitlement to the White House that some voters pick up and resent? In some ways, the “brand name” may help, but in others it may hinder. It hurts the campaign by giving it a dangerous underlying self-confidence and it hurts because some voters who may support it are quick to leave if they’re given any decent excuse to leave. And Ms. Clinton has been giving some voters some reasons to start to look around.

–A top Edwards adviser contends Clinton and Obama have both now essentially “checkmated” each other and he (not surprisingly) sees an opening for his candidate. MSNBC’s Tim Curry recounts the sordid political tale of how Clinton’s New Hampshire political operative Bill Shaheen tried to raise the drug issue about Obama and get it into the press and resigned after a firestorm. Did it help Obama and Edwards in the end?

Edwards strategist Joe Trippi said the Clinton campaign was dogged by the reality that she has long been a Washington insider and can’t credibly campaign as a candidate who’ll radically break with the politics of the past, as Edwards and Obama each claim they will do.

“This (Shaheen episode) just makes them (the Clinton team) look even more political,” said Trippi. “They’re just digging themselves a deeper hole” into “the problem they’re trying to get out of.”

He added such attacks “are such a blunder” that they might help Obama.

But Trippi argued, using horse race imagery, “there’s a reason Obama has not run away from her and there’s a reason she hasn’t run away from him.” In other words, both horses are neck and neck on the backstretch.

“There’s a reason Obama hasn’t run away into the sunset and the reason is there’s a deep concern about his readiness to be president,” Tripp said.

Citing polling data on Obama, Trippi said, “A quarter of his own supporters think he’s not qualified to be president.”

Both Obama and Clinton are flawed candidates, he said, but “there’s another guy, John Edwards, who people here really like. They feel like they know him and they know he stands up for working people and they don’t have those kinds of doubts about him.”

The latter was a political commercial by Trippi, of course.

–NBC/NJ’s Aswini Anburajan has a report detailing a talk Obama had with Clinton about Shaheen that could have lead to the top operative’s ouster. It is a MUST READ.

The sourcing for this report is an Obama aide, but there has been no denial from the Clinton camp so far. At best, it paints a picture of a Clinton campaign that may not be in control of its operatives — if you believe that suggestion. But the piece notes how Obama was helped from the whole flap not just in terms of press COVERAGE but in preparing the press for how the campaign will handle the drug issue if Obama is the nominee and the issue comes up.

The bottom line: With media attention focused on the narrative of a campaign in trouble, Hillary Clinton more than ever will need a win…or some wins…quickly…

Or, like Humpty Dumpty, she’ll fall off the wall — and then really have to scramble.