Well, it finally arrived, the long-anticipated bump in Hillary Clinton’s road to the nomination, the bump that many predicted would slow her down and give her competitors a chance to catch up.

Or did it?

The media certainly thought so, and I don’t mean just the conservative media that pounce eagerly on any sign that she is faltering, or fudging, or over-reaching, or peaking too soon, or engaging in shady practices. (Unfortunately for the Fox-New York Post crowd, the Norman Hsu story doesn’t seem to have legs.) Everyone was writing her political obituary ten seconds after the last word was spoken in the October 29 debate. Liberal hand-wringers, self-identified feminists, concerned “old friends” – they were all standing over the body and taking bets on whether or not it could be revived.

The other Democratic candidates were already piling on during the debate. And in the days that followed they did more of the same.

Barack Obama just happened to be in the neighborhood when “Saturday Night Live” was doing its Halloween show and cleverly appeared as himself. Whipping off his Barack Obama mask to reveal – you guessed it – Barack Obama, he said to the actress playing Hillary that he was always the same person no matter where he was and no matter what the company. (Which means, I guess, that no matter where he is he always manages to say absolutely nothing in orotund and inspiring tones.)

An Edwards campaign commercial set to Strauss’s “Blue Danube Waltz” showed a split screen with Hillary on both halves pronouncing on opposite sides of the same issue (or so we were to believe).

And of course the Republicans waded in. Rudy Giuliani did Hillary imitations, complete with mincing steps and effete hand gestures, looking just like the cross-dresser we know him to be. Tucker Carlson whined that Hillary whined about getting beat up by an old boys club and harumphed that Obama, at least, didn’t ask people to stop attacking him because he was black. When his guest replied that no one was attacking Obama while everyone was attacking Clinton, Carlson muttered something about everyone being the object of attack in a political campaign. (A nice strategy: when the facts aren’t with you, rise above them.)

And what exactly did Clinton do to deserve all this? She answered a question posed by moderator (in this case pit-bull) Tim Russert of NBC: “Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer has proposed giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. You told the Nashua, New Hampshire, editorial board it makes a lot of sense. Why does it make a lot of sense to give an illegal immigrant a driver’s license?”

It is now set in cement that Clinton first said it did make sense and then said it didn’t. (She was for it before she was against it.) But that’s not right. She said that it didn’t make sense in the abstract – if the question is should illegal immigrants be given driver’s licenses, perhaps just after they cross the border, the answer is obviously no – but given the federal government’s failure to pass meaningful immigration reform, a governor who knows that many documented workers are driving on his state’s roads might well think that it made sense to bring them within the state’s ambit. This is a position one could quarrel with, but it is coherent and not double-sided.

Of course, it didn’t come across that way and that’s her fault. She began her answer by talking about Spitzer’s desire “to fill the vacuum left by the failure of this administration to bring about comprehensive immigration reform.” But this is too vague (what vacuum, exactly?) and seemed unresponsive.

What she should have done is said something like, “To answer your question, it is necessary to ask another one: why has Governor Spitzer been driven to this desperate measure? What set of conditions has given him the unhappy choice between endangering the citizens of his state and legitimating illegal immigrants?” With the context of Spitzer’s proposal established, the question of whether or not it made sense would have been seen to be more complicated than Russert’s formulation of it suggested. (It would have been a better version of “it depends what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”)

She could have then proceeded in a straight line to make her point and protected herself from the accusation – made by John Edwards on the spot – that she was talking out of both sides of her mouth. She wasn’t. It was a bad rap, although one she invited by failing to get the parts of her answers in the right order and thereby allowing her rivals to treat points that went together to form a whole as if they were separately, and inconsistently, made.

But maybe Clinton’s real sin was giving an answer with parts. Later, when she insisted that she “did not say that it should be done” (“should” is a normative, universalizing word and she wanted to distance herself from it), Russert wasn’t having any: “Do you support his [Spitzer’s] plan,” he asked insistently.

She replied that his was a “gotcha” question, and it was. It demanded either a yes or a no answer and therefore it was committed in advance to regarding any other answer – especially an answer with nuance – as waffling and equivocating.

Does it matter? Is this the banana peel she slips on? I think not. On the same show that Chris Matthews was solemnly discussing how much damage this dust-up had done to the Clinton campaign, he was reporting continuing double-digit leads and announcing that his team of expert analysts had named her the likely nominee by a large margin.

A few columns back I made some predictions that provoked outrage: that Clinton would reach 50 percent in the national polls; that fence-sitters would begin falling her way (hello, Walter Mondale); that she would begin pulling away in Iowa and New Hampshire. All that has happened, and I now make another prediction: get ready to hear “Hail to the Chieftess.”

(Note: An earlier version of this column included the phrase “Hobson’s choice.” It has been changed to “unhappy choice.”)