Hillary’s strength has been in refining the art of attack. Illustration by Richard Thompson

To watch Hillary Clinton during the final two weeks of the Ohio and Texas primary campaigns, as she defiantly ignored the pronouncements of her political demise and pounded away at her opponent in one more interview, at one more rally, was to bring to mind Jason or Freddy Krueger or the sitting governor of California, those Hollywood cyborgs and zombies who, despite bullets and stakes and explosions, will not under any circumstances be vanquished. Clinton’s public performances were marked by an eerily unflappable persistence as she executed an ungentle two-pronged attack: raising doubts about the readiness of her young opponent, Senator Barack Obama, to be Commander-in-Chief and challenging the depth of his commitment to the bread-and-butter concerns of the middle class. On February 25th, during a foreign-policy speech at George Washington University, she surrounded herself with six military men, including General Wesley Clark, himself a former Presidential candidate, and Major General Antonio M. Taguba, who forthrightly investigated the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, to the despair of the Pentagon leadership. Clinton attacked Obama from both the right (he would naïvely grant a Presidential audience to the world’s dictators) and the left (he would unilaterally attack terrorist enclaves in Pakistan). The charges might have been, at best, a distortion of Obama’s positions, but they were surely meant to paint him as unschooled and unseasoned––Barack the Unready.

Part of the way through her fusillade, Clinton broke into a spasm of coughing––much of the campaign entourage of aides and press had been battered with the flu and other transmittable ailments––and then, briefly, she lost her voice. The audience fell silent. For a dramatic moment, it was unclear if she could continue. But Clinton righted herself and struggled through some lines about Darfur without losing her place. It was as if she had managed to suppress the coughing through sheer will. An aide slipped in from the side and handed her a cough drop, which she discreetly popped into her mouth during a burst of applause.

Two days later, aboard Clinton’s chartered campaign plane (she took off in a blizzard from Cleveland and was on to Columbus), she spoke in the aisle, while reporters, some pinned against tray tables by overeager cameramen who had leaped over several seats to get a good angle, crushed in around her with their recorders. The plane began its descent, careering toward the runway. Oblivious of airline regulations, Clinton continued ticking off her anti-Obama lines: “What I feel is happening is that people are turning toward the big questions that they should have to answer in this campaign. You know, who can be the best Commander-in-Chief, who do you want in the White House answering the phone at 3 A.M.?” (The line was straight from a new Clinton television spot, in which a telephone is heard ringing, ominously, at three in the morning—a spot that belonged to a half-century tradition of scare ads involving red telephones and mushroom clouds.) The landing gear dropped, but Clinton was on to the subject of the subprime-lending crisis and home foreclosures. “Many of you are homeowners. Home values in America have dropped one-point-six trillion dollars in the last year. So everybody’s wealth is disintegrating.”

The runway came into view. A voice on the intercom demanded that passengers sit down and fasten their seat belts. Clinton, though, continued standing and talking calmly about why she was staying in the contest. “We’re now raising on average a million dollars a day on the Internet. People have just been, you know, really rallying to my candidacy.” Reporters glanced nervously out the window, but never for an instant did Clinton turn away from the cameras, lose her train of thought, or allow the imminent landing to interrupt the full ventilation of her talking points. Seconds before touchdown, an aide steered Hillary Clinton back to her seat.

Unlike Hubert Humphrey, Al Smith, or even her husband, Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail has never been able to project the image of the happy warrior. There is now, and has always been, a certain joylessness in her bearing. She has been trying to make discipline a selling point since her first “listening tour” of New York State, in the months before she ran for the United States Senate—a device designed to portray tireless commitment to voters suspicious of her carpetbagging and celebrity. After landing in Columbus, the campaign entourage headed by motorcade to Zanesville, a town of about twenty-five thousand, sixty miles away, for what was billed as an economic “summit.” The ninety-minute conversation among Clinton and fourteen politicians and business and labor leaders, and Ohioans with hard-luck stories, had all the drama of a Senate committee hearing. Some no doubt found the discussion riveting, but at one point the former Ohio senator and Mercury astronaut John Glenn, a panelist, was either very deep in thought about college loans, or fast asleep. Scores of audience members were similarly benumbed and fled the event before it was over. But Clinton seemed confident about the electoral power of relentless policy tedium. It was as if the sheer display of iron-pantsed discussion would further underscore her insistent theme: the hollowness of Obama’s charisma. When one speaker offered encomiums to Clinton rather than economic prescriptions, she gently reprimanded her, saying, “We’re going to put a moratorium on compliments.” Then, with the bonhomie of a high-school health teacher, she turned the conversation back toward government programs to help people “quit smoking, to get more exercise, to eat right, to take their vitamins.”

Endurance is the unseen requirement of a successful candidate. Even round-the-clock cable coverage does not quite convey the drumming repetition of a campaign, and Clinton, for all her weaknesses, is a master of this punishing, incessant rhythm. Unlike Obama, who can seem recessive when he tires, she is intent on masking the fatigue. Even on primary day, Clinton kept at it. She spent the morning in a Houston studio, taking part in twenty television interviews reaching every major market in Texas and Ohio. Clinton was methodical. In every Texas interview, as if for the first time, she patiently mentioned her military endorsements and the work that she did thirty-six years ago in George McGovern’s Presidential campaign, registering Latino voters in south Texas. (This last seemed ironic, considering that the Clinton campaign wants to portray Obama as a twenty-first-century McGovern––too soft, too naïve, and destined to lose in November.) In every Ohio interview, she raised what, in the last week of the campaign, had become a potent anti-Obama issue: the discrepancy between his public criticisms of the North American Free Trade Agreement and an Obama adviser’s alleged assurances to the Canadian government that the candidate’s sharp rhetoric was merely primary-season politics. “Senator Obama came to Ohio and said one thing about NAFTA, and then had a foreign government told something else,” she told a Dayton radio station. Her message control was interrupted only when another prolonged coughing fit forced her to take a break during a chat with a Corpus Christi station. Her break did not last long.

Later that morning, the campaign moved to the parking lot at the J. P. Henderson Elementary School, a polling place in a heavily Hispanic corner of southeast Houston that had been transformed into a tiny set. Salsa music filled the air, about a dozen smiling Latino children were brought in, and Clinton’s motorcade soon rumbled toward the school. Accompanying the candidate was a somewhat eclectic entourage: the actor Ted Danson, who wore an Irish tweed hat; his wife, the actress Mary Steenburgen, an Arkansan and longtime supporter of Bill and Hillary Clinton; Clinton’s soignée aide-de-camp, Huma Abedin, who was recently profiled in Vogue and currently was wearing a bright-orange sweater and black boots that shimmered in the sunlight; and Anthony Weiner, the wiry Brooklyn congressman and aspiring mayor of New York. Clinton’s eyes widened at the sight of the children, and with a cue from a staffer they began to chant, “Hill-ar-ee! Hill-are-ee!” Clinton bent and talked to a little girl in a black cowboy hat. The photographers swooped in for the picture of the day.