Glenn Thrush is POLITICO's chief political correspondent. Annie Karni is a politics reporter.

Halfway through her long and humbling summer, Hillary Clinton ran into an old friend who wanted to know how she was bearing up under the pressure of near-daily revelations about the use of her private email server during her time in the State Department. Clinton was unmistakably unhappy.


“I am having two problems,” she bluntly told the supporter at a social event. “On the one hand, I feel like I’m rolling out a lot of substantive programs on issues that people care about. We’re getting one day’s news coverage. But there’s nothing larger knitting it together. We’re not breaking through. … And my team needs to get their act together on the email response.”

Clinton’s frustration with her own campaign staff was striking. So was her refusal for much of the year to characterize the escalating email controversy as anything other than a failure of communications, messaging or the vast right-wing-and-media conspiracy. Both complaints were consistent with what other campaign advisers told us in dozens of interviews for this story—except some of them laid equal blame on the candidate herself.

Indeed, from the minute news of Clinton’s secret personal email server broke this past March, she had reacted by lashing out at her enemies—and repeatedly demanding of her inner circle, “How do we get past this?” Neither the campaign nor the candidate have definitively answered that question, and the months of indecision, uncertainty and mounting legal threat have left Clinton, for the second time in her two presidential campaigns, a deeply vulnerable front-runner.

From the start, the email controversy—and her campaign’s handling of it—has been an exercise in exasperation, according to people involved in the effort. The wiry and wily John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, thought right away that she needed to dump everything out in public as quickly as possible to avoid the deadly drip-drip-drip. “We need to throw the facts to the dogs, and let ’em chew on it,” Podesta told the candidate. But Clinton’s answer—and that of her lawyer David Kendall and her former State Department chief of staff Cheryl Mills—was a “no” when Podesta and other advisers asked for some details. Foggy Bottom needed to review the emails, they were told, and besides, half of them, the ones deemed “personal,” had already been deleted.

At least Clinton was talking regularly with Podesta. In the concentric circles of Clintonworld, many of the political team she had put in place to run her campaign were still considered outsiders, hired hands more loyal to President Barack Obama or to her husband, former President Bill Clinton, than to the candidate herself, and as soon as the New York Times dropped its bombshell server story, they saw themselves as stymied by a legal team parsimonious with disclosure and a candidate reluctant to express remorse. Their daily conference calls, which could include as many as 15 staffers and lawyers on the line, often descended to little more than collective venting.

“Why does the other side always know more than we do?” an aide pointedly asked Kendall during one call early in the unfolding email drama. But little more was forthcoming, according to a longtime Clinton adviser who recounted the incident.

It sounds crazy, but I think she simply wasn’t equipped to deal with all this,” says one longtime ally.

The campaign was becoming just the kind of defensive race none of them, least of all the candidate, expected to be running, and for months and months the emails distracted and diverted a Clinton team that seemed powerless to move beyond the unfolding scandal. While her team bought Clinton’s basic argument that she had done nothing illegal or even fundamentally wrong, it rekindled longstanding concerns about her judgment. It was hard to avoid the view that she had walked right into a trap at a time when the GOP seemed to be imploding in a Trump-shaped mushroom cloud.

“It sounds crazy, but I think she simply wasn’t equipped to deal with all this,” says one longtime ally who has been in regular contact with Clinton. “She’s never been a great candidate, OK? She needed time and campaigns don’t give you time. … She was blindsided, and I think only now, after all this crap, is she finally in the right headspace.”

Nearly every one of 50 advisers, donors, Democratic operatives and friends we interviewed for this story thought Clinton was a mediocre candidate who would make a good president, if given the chance. They painted a portrait of a politician who talked about learning from past mistakes while methodically repeating them—a far cry from the formidable shatterer of glass ceilings who had put such a scare into Obama late in the 2008 primaries.

One longtime Clinton family adviser called the emails a “cancer” on her campaign. Another told us, “She’s her own worst enemy.” And many described moments of anxiety as Clinton, backed up by the protective firewall of her legal team, refused to take full personal responsibility even to her own aides. “I have done nothing wrong,” she repeatedly told them.

Facing pressure from within and without, Clinton by early fall had started a long-overdue contrition tour, apologizing publicly and privately as her beleaguered staff had urged her to do for months. Moreover, she had moved beyond some of the crippling caution that hampered her initial response, and her campaign finally seemed liberated to start whacking away at Republicans with some of the glee missing from the race’s early months. “Obviously, we got battered,” Podesta told us. “But we’re stabilizing.”

But is she? Clinton’s unfavorable rating has spiked 10 to 15 points in the past year, the percentage of voters who say they trust her has plummeted to 35 percent in a pre-debate CBS poll, and Bernie Sanders, a career socialist who has publicly refused to endorse capitalism, is beating her in New Hampshire. Not to mention that each month brings a steady drumbeat of new disclosures as the State Department complies with a court order to review and make public the roughly 35,000 emails Clinton handed over.

And yet Clinton should not be counted out; she’s leading the nearest contender in the Democratic race by 20 percentage points and looking ahead to a general election against an internally divided Republican Party that seems intent on eating its own. Somehow, she still stands in a better position than any other establishment candidate in an anti-establishment 2016 cycle, with a lead in the primary over all comers, including Joe Biden. “Name me a candidate of either party who wouldn’t want to switch places with Hillary Clinton right now,” insists Tom Nides, a top Clinton fundraiser who served as her deputy secretary of state.

But no matter how it turns out, when the story of the 2016 campaign is written, this months-long fight over Hillary Clinton’s private email server—an enervating and possibly pointless controversy—will constitute the opening chapter. Here is the story of how she handled it.

***

March 2, 2015: Clinton’s favorable/unfavorable rating: 48%/46%

Hillary Clinton is a hard woman to counsel during a crisis. She is at times warm, at times withering—when staffers offer excuses, her favorite rejoinder is “shoulda, woulda, coulda!”—and she’s prone to fretting that her staff doesn’t have her back.

For all the dysfunction on her famously infighting 2008 campaign, Clinton’s team that year was made up of many old friends who knew how to navigate her moods and reassure her when things went sour. Facing the server scandal, Clinton headed into battle surrounded by people she hardly knew, and a staff so new that many weren’t even officially on the payroll yet. The fact that she spent most of her time working out of a Manhattan office and seldom visited her cubicle-farm headquarters in seriously un-hip downtown Brooklyn didn’t help either.

When the story splashed onto the New York Times website on the evening of March 2, Clinton was above all angry, and in the first strategy sessions—over the phone—she defaulted to what old Clinton hands refer to as “pity party mode,” dismissing the media frenzy over the emails as a whiffle-ball Whitewater while railing against the very real right-wing campaign amassed against her.

Podesta, often speaking on the road or from his home in Washington, counseled transparency and disclosure within the legal restrictions placed on him by Kendall. Clinton’s new pollster and strategist, Joel Benenson—a longtime Obama adviser with no longstanding personal relationship with the candidate—advised her to take responsibility for what had been, at the least, a political mistake. Campaign manager Robbie Mook and communications director Jennifer Palmieri—who would later help coax the candidate into issuing an apology—agreed, according to people close to the situation.

Even Mills, Clinton’s most trusted and protective adviser—a lawyer who had been aware of the server setup as Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department—agreed on the politics. Nonetheless, Mills had a knack for expressing the advice in the most frightening terms possible: Air your linen, she’d say, but you’ll pay a terrible personal price.

One thing was quite clear: Clinton was in no mood to apologize for, or even admit to, an error in judgment. She’d repeatedly tell her staff “I have done nothing wrong” and maintained she was simply following the example set by George W. Bush’s first secretary of state, Colin Powell, who had transacted much of his own State Department business over private email.

Clinton takes questions from Podesta, now her campaign chairman, at an event in Las Vegas in September 2014. | AP Photo

Then there was Bill Clinton. The former president, despite a low-key public role, was in fact already occupying an expansive strategic role in the campaign that had been denied him in 2008 (he participated in at least one critical campaign conference call), according to our sources, and he was offering what seemed to be contradictory advice: He wanted the pushback effort to be much more aggressive but also advised his wife to ignore the calls for candor.

“No matter how much you give them, it won’t be enough,” he lectured an ally when the story first came out—as he was fighting back against negative coverage of his charitable foundation. “Just shut it down. … Run your campaign and move on.”

***

April 13, 2015: Clinton’s Favorable/Unfavorable: 47%/47%

Two days after the server bombshell ran in the New York Times, Clinton tweeted out, “I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them.” But this, the first pushback, would set a vicious news cycle into motion: Soon after, a judge ordered the State Department to release batches of them every month through January 2016.

Then, another internal debate and another round of conference calls: how to address the controversy publicly? Some of her advisers counseled Clinton to sit down with a “trusted” reporter one-on-one. (NBC’s Andrea Mitchell was an early suggestion.) On one of the calls with staff, Clintonland veteran Mandy Grunwald, whose low profile belies an important internal strategic role going all the way back to Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign in 1992, pushed the idea of holding one big news conference, a bold gesture meant to underscore the candidate’s willingness to address all questions. The idea of getting all her teeth pulled in one session appealed to Clinton.

Clinton seemed resigned to her fate when she convened a prep session with her team’s brain trust—Podesta, Benenson, Palmieri, Grunwald, Mook, Mills, ad man Jim Margolis, image consultant Kristina Schake and the omnipresent Huma Abedin, the campaign’s vice chair—a few days later in her midtown personal office. It was a brisk session, and Clinton seemed relieved by assurances that Nick Merrill, her traveling press secretary, would select the questioners and “keep it short.”

On March 10, Clinton appeared in the lobby of the United Nations standing before a hostile media pack crammed next to a reproduction of Picasso’s grisly, iconic depiction of a massacre, Guernica. It was the first of many times that the email furor overshadowed what would otherwise have been a resonant political moment; Clinton was there to celebrate the 20th anniversary of her landmark “women’s rights are human rights” speech in Beijing.

New Window Covering Hillary: A Visual History (Click to view gallery.)

The visual prefigured the campaign that would follow. Instead of celebrating a landmark moment from her tenure as first lady, she was standing alone in a tweed jacket buttoned up to her throat, telling reporters that her decision to use the server “was for convenience.” When she was asked about the national security implications of her decisions, she was unequivocal. “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.”

At the time, Clinton’s team thought her performance was good; the firestorm over the server, they had reason to hope, would fade. The problem was that her statements, delivered with such certitude, were mostly, but not entirely, true. She didn’t maintain the server solely for convenience—everyone in her orbit knew she also wanted to preserve her privacy. And by summer, State Department officials would determine after the fact that some of her emails should have been classified—even if she didn’t necessarily do anything wrong.

The politics quickly turned, too. Clinton staffers attempting to enlist surrogates found themselves rebuffed by a perfectly rational rejoinder: Clinton hadn’t told the whole story—so why risk a reputation on her half-told tale? Donors were increasingly sounding the alarm, too, and peppering Benenson—who was often tasked with reassuring them—with their concerns. One longtime Clinton contributor stood up at a national finance committee meeting held at the offices of a Manhattan law firm around that time and bluntly told Clinton’s beleaguered team: “Our experience is reaching out to friends and colleagues, and people are saying they don’t like her and don’t trust her.”

Inside the Brooklyn headquarters, which occupied an entire floor of an anonymous back-office bank tower and teemed with the staff of a front-running candidate that amounted to hundreds of aides and volunteers, Mook, the campaign manager, was taking steps to ensure that none of his staff would be the source of any future email dumps or leaks.

Two campaign aides told us that early in the campaign Mook informed all employees that their own server was programmed to purge all staffers’ emails after 30 days. The practice, increasingly common at party campaign committees, wasn't popular among the Brooklyn rank-and-file. Despite complaints over the policy, Mook wouldn’t budge.

***

June 22, 2015: Clinton’s Favorable/Unfavorable: 45%/49%

For a while it seemed like the storm had lifted. There was a raft of good press—stories about Clinton’s deep connection to her late mother, Mook’s penny-pinching (workers who stayed late in Brooklyn were left to sweat because he’d lower the air-conditioning after office hours to save cash) and Clinton’s high-octane policy operation.

Clinton’s staff headed into her much-anticipated June 13 kickoff event on Roosevelt Island with an eye on the party’s left flank, not her old BlackBerry files—and she had spent weeks huddling with advisers to craft a series of pitches intended to deprive a rising Bernie Sanders of his momentum.

This was not school-uniform stuff: She rolled out proposals on student loans, campaign finance reform, universal pre-K, prescription drugs—and would by early fall come out against the Keystone XL pipeline and the Obama-backed Trans-Pacific Partnership she had helped promote.

From a personal standpoint, policy was like candy for a candidate having a hard time digesting the tough spinach of electoral politics. “We’re talking about three- and four-hour meetings, briefing papers, weeks of back-and-forth,” Jennifer Palmieri, told us back in April. “This is the foundational work of the election. She’s a wonk. This is stuff she loves to do.”

But translating all those proposals into a coherent rationale for Clinton’s candidacy—beyond her competence, her gender or her experience—was proving nearly as much of a challenge as it had been for her campaign in 2008. Like a sudden infection that masks an underlying chronic illness, the email scandal obscured an arguably even larger problem: Clinton’s perpetual struggle to define herself in a way that would appeal to a broad cross-section of voters.

Benenson, who had provided the data to underpin the Obama hope-and-change narrative spun by his close friend David Axelrod during both successful Obama campaigns, was the man tasked with weaving the policy strands into a single Clinton persona. It wasn’t a natural fit. Inside the campaign it was common knowledge that both Clintons wanted a chief strategist who would occupy a bigger role—more akin to Axelrod’s, or even the one played by Clinton’s 2008 pollster-strategist Mark Penn. Many former Clinton staffers had viewed Penn as domineering and manipulative—but he knew the Clintons well, kibitzed with them all the time, and appealed to their desire to have an aide who offered “Wizard of Oz” omniscience, one close ally told us.

Benenson occupied a smaller footprint, and Podesta, for all his savvy and experience, didn’t fill that role either—he was a politically savvy policy heavyweight, and not a professional campaign operative. Benenson was a product of the more disciplined Obama political operation, and he took a narrower approach to his job than Penn—viewing his responsibility as presenting Clinton with unvarnished data and advice.

Benenson, a bearded former Daily News reporter, was frustrated, too, several Clinton insiders told us. (Benenson declined several interview requests.) Like everyone else on staff, he was forced to split his time defending her on emails and defining a path for her candidacy. And he faced a problem common to every outsider new to the Clintons’ world: However much access he had, they were always talking to someone else, off-line, and bringing up new approaches without sharing their provenance. Those who had the candidate’s ear as the email controversy unfolded included a rolling cast of dozens, we were told, including Tom Nides; Governor Terry McAuliffe of Virginia; Clinton’s longtime personal spokesman, Philippe Reines; Mills; longtime Hillary whisperer Sid Blumenthal; Media Matters founder David Brock; and a handful of top donors, among others.

There was a philosophical divide too: Benenson pushed for what he called “values messaging”—her fight for middle-class families—and believed that the policy-loving Clinton was too interested in publicizing the rollout of individual programs, an insider told us.

The easiest part of Benenson’s job was identifying the electorate’s mood. It was sour. In presentations to donors, Benenson identified two “pain points” among voters—the sense that the economic “deck was stacked against them” and universal anger at Washington gridlock. Connecting Clinton’s record to those themes wasn’t tough either—one of the campaign’s most compelling products was “Fighter,” a video that chronicled Clinton’s fights on behalf of women’s rights and health care.

If Clinton was Velcro for controversy, she was Teflon when it came to branding.

But the message simply wasn’t penetrating, and the candidate’s numbers were slowly sagging. If Clinton was Velcro for controversy, she was Teflon when it came to branding. Nothing seemed to stick, in part because the media was fixated on the emails, in part because voters held such a fixed view of Clinton even before the server issue.

In the Roosevelt Island speech, Clinton stressed the importance of the “four fights” to her campaign, an echo of FDR’s “Four Freedoms” speech. The four fights (“an economy for tomorrow,” strengthening families, defending core American values, and revitalizing “our democracy”) were featured prominently on her campaign website. Almost nobody noticed. On the trail, she hasn’t referenced her “four fights” since June—and mention of the slogan is now buried deep on her campaign site. Her staff came up with another catchphrase—deemed effective by Benenson’s focus group—saying she was making hers a campaign for “Everyday Americans.” But after a few months, that too has faded.

***

July 20, 2015, Clinton: Favorable/Unfavorable: 43%/49%

Clinton’s late spring listening tours in New Hampshire and Iowa went pretty well from the campaign’s perspective; aides told us privately it was geared less at the public than at the candidate herself, who urgently needed to re-acclimate to nitty-gritty domestic politics after more than six years of State Department tours, paid speeches and stilted book signings. Clinton seemed to enjoy herself and was cheered by encounters with old friends on the rope line.

But Sanders was starting to gain serious momentum as the not-Hillary, much as Obama had done, especially in Sanders’ neighboring state, New Hampshire. The summer had begun promisingly enough—Clinton’s campaign brought in a record $47 million second-quarter fundraising haul. But all anybody wanted to talk about (when they weren’t grilling her team about the emails) was the size and enthusiasm of Sanders’ crowds.

Clinton appreciated Sanders’ respectful campaigning style, but she was slow to view him as a serious threat. During one of her summer swings through the Midwest, she answered one supporter’s question about Sanders with her signature chuckle, saying, “Come on. … The man is a socialist!” At a fundraiser in the South around the same time, an attendee told us, Clinton told the group that all the major Democrats “agreed” on most basic policy issues except for one, “who doesn't even believe in capitalism.”

But, just as her campaign was beginning to grapple with the threat Sanders posed, it was again walloped by the New York Times—in a story that reignited the email controversy with a vengeance and sent the candidate, in the words of one adviser, “into a dark place.”

The article, on July 23, said the Justice Department had been asked to open its own investigation into whether the Clinton email cache violated rules for classified material, worrisome enough for a presidential campaign. Worse, the first version on the paper’s website reported that the probe was “criminal” and focused specifically on Clinton. The paper later corrected the story to clarify the investigation was into the “security” of the emails—and the campaign demanded the Times investigate how editors had permitted such a high-stakes mistake to occur. But the damage had already been done. The story not only had a second life, but it seemed to confirm the charges of critics who claimed Clinton wasn’t telling the truth.

In less than a month, the inspectors general at the State Department and intelligence services had found that some emails on the private server deemed unclassified at the time Clinton handled them were now deemed classified—and Kendall turned over the server and a thumb drive containing emails to Justice. Soon after, the former State Department IT staffer who set up the system at Clinton’s suburban New York mansion took the Fifth Amendment when he was subpoenaed by the House committee on Benghazi, which has investigated the matter.

The drip-drip-drip that Podesta had worried about was quickly becoming a political deluge. On August 1, Maureen Dowd, who had a long history of breaking unpleasant news regarding the Clintons, had penned a column claiming that Joe Biden’s dying son Beau had begged his father to run for president. Not long after came the unwelcome news that a Boston Herald-Franklin Pierce University poll found the socialist had surged to a narrow lead over Clinton in New Hampshire.

Her aides, especially Palmieri—who had worked as a young aide in the Clinton White House—wanted Clinton to issue some kind of mea culpa. But, if anything, her bitterness toward the media was making her angrier and less inclined to publicly admit she’d erred.

***

August 16, 2015: Clinton’s Favorable/Unfavorable: 42%/51%

For all her recalcitrance, Clinton could read the polls: In March, she had commanded the field with about 60 percent, with a definitely-not-running Biden at 12 percent and Sanders bouncing at the bottom with 5 percent; by mid-August, Clinton had dropped below 50 percent—with Biden and Sanders steadily gaining ground.

She answered one supporter’s question about Sanders with her signature chuckle, saying, “Come on. … The man is a socialist!”

Clinton knew she would eventually have to subject herself to a round of media interviews—but she wanted to do so on her own terms, and not until the fall. Instead, the one sit-down on-air interview she reluctantly accepted, with CNN’s Brianna Keilar in early July, turned into a minivan-over-the-cliff disaster. When Keilar asked Clinton about a recent poll showing a majority of Americans didn’t trust her, the candidate got defensive: “People should and do trust me,” Clinton said, adding that her decline in the polls was the result of a “constant barrage of attacks” from Republicans.

It was vintage 1990s Clinton defiance—but it masked her growing anxiety. She exploded after leaving the set, incensed that her staff hadn’t come up with a better battle plan—and, according to a campaign adviser, demanded that Podesta, who had been spending much of his time calming donors and helping to kick-start fundraising at the main pro-Clinton super PAC, play a central role in all future prep sessions.

The Q-and-As on the road weren’t going much better. In late August, she made news during a cringe-inducing back-and-forth with Fox reporter Ed Henry in which she claimed she didn’t understand the meaning of “wiping” a server clean: “What? With a cloth or something?”

But despite her penchant for blaming her woes on a predatory news media, staff and allies who spoke to Clinton said she wasn’t in her usual blame-the-media mood: She was taking a little more responsibility for her own plight, while also expressing open dissatisfaction with her team’s performance.

Ultimately, it was the press onslaught, more than the polls, that prodded Clinton toward an apology. Just before her annual Labor Day vacation in the Hamptons, Benenson convened a series of focus groups to look at the email controversy that painted a cover-up-is-worse-than-the-crime picture: Voters didn’t really think Clinton did anything wrong—but they weren’t inclined to her to heed the campaign’s positive message until she put the issue to rest.

The press shop was under siege—reporters simply didn’t want to talk about anything else. It was Palmieri, who spent her days in near-constant communication with the candidate (and the candidate’s tormenters in the media) who started to push Clinton hardest for an apology, with the support of Podesta. The candidate still didn’t want to hear it, and gave her staff the impression that she would never give ground on the issue, several advisers told us.

But she was inching toward accepting that she needed to say something, anything, to change the storyline. On September 4, she told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell she was “sorry” that people were bewildered by the controversy. No one was satisfied by her answer—especially the press—and even Benenson, who had counseled Clinton to eschew a full apology, was now convinced she needed to go all the way to quell the uproar. Meanwhile, polls released a few days before continued to show her overall disapproval rating sat at around 53 percent, as high as it had been during her bruising, losing 2008 campaign.

During the first weekend of September, Clinton, at home at her mansion in Chappaqua, dialed into another series of tense conference calls—finally agreeing to offer what amounted to acceptance of responsibility and a tempered, but unmistakable, apology. Saying “sorry” had always been a problem: She viewed backtracking as a sign of weakness, and in 2008 had repeatedly balked when confronted with past mistakes or misstatements, whether on voting yes for the Iraq war or overstating the risk of a trip she took as first lady to Bosnia.

But this time she would give in, even if she told people in her orbit that she believed it to be a meaningless Washington pound-of-flesh ritual aimed at stopping the media feeding frenzy. On September 8, she did it. “That was a mistake,” she told ABC’s David Muir when asked the same email question she had stiff-armed dozens of times. “I’m sorry about that.”

It was an emotional moment for Clinton; she choked up on-air when Muir asked her about her mother Dorothy, who died in 2011. The moment was equally cathartic for a staff given new hope that their campaign had turned a page. Had their candidate finally ditched the denial?

***

October 4, 2015: Clinton’s Favorable/Unfavorable: 39%/53%

Today, Clinton faces a long, hard climb back to where she was at the start of the campaign. Sanders, like Obama seven years ago, has torn off Clinton’s veil of inevitability—and as we write this he is leading by a wide margin in New Hampshire, running neck and neck with Clinton in Iowa, and coming within $2 million of matching her healthy third-quarter fundraising haul.

Behind the scenes, Clinton’s team is quietly shoring up support, and hoping to soothe frayed nerves. It’s been a struggle. In September, Benenson faced down a group of jittery donors and party activists in a closed-door briefing at Manhattan’s Harvard Club that was convened by Democratic activist Erica Payne. Look, he told the group in his reassuring Queens accent, Clinton still polled strongly with all Democrats. (“She’s nearly 80 percent approval” among Democratic voters, he said.)

But his suggestion that she could still prevail if Sanders were to win New Hampshire or Iowa didn’t go over well. “We are running a primary race and that is about delegates,” Benenson said, according to one participant’s notes. “And if you look ahead to the Super Tuesday states, with the most delegates, HRC has double digit leads in all of them.”

One national finance committee member in the room, fed up with the campaign’s response to the email scandal, called him out. “It’s not about facts, Joel,” the bundler said. “The facts may be on our side, but we need to argue more than that. We’re losing, and you in the campaign need to take notice and change strategy.”

Clinton greets supporters outside a campaign stop at Uncle Nancy's Coffee House in September 2015 in Newton, Iowa. | AP Photo

Benenson shot back: “I disagree. We’re not losing. We lost ground, yes, but we’re not losing.”

What a change from just a half-year ago. During a meeting at Clinton’s Washington mansion before she entered the race, David Plouffe, Obama’s steely 2008 campaign manager, had pointedly advised Clinton “not to waste 2015.” And certainly on many less visible fronts, she hadn’t—from building a state-of-the-art campaign data and analytics operation to assembling a crack field team in key battleground states.

And she seems to be a noticeably looser and more aggressive candidate since the Muir appearance. After months of lousy luck, she finally caught a major break when Kevin McCarthy, House Speaker John Boehner’s hand-picked successor, said on TV that one of the top accomplishments of the congressional Benghazi committee was to hurt her “numbers.” But Clinton and her team have been shaken, no doubt about it, and she will take encouragement where she can get it.

Backstage at a D.C. gala for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation in mid-September, Clinton got some encouragement from the man who wrote the anti-Hillary playbook being used by both Democrats and Republicans.

President Obama, who has been watching her struggles with a mix of personal sympathy and a little told-ya-so schadenfreude, walked up, put his hand on her shoulder and asked her if she was enjoying life on the trail. Yes, she replied, except for a new scourge that emerged after their 2008 duel—all those iPhone selfie requests. The encounter with Obama “really bucked her up,” said an official who witnessed the interaction.

At a recent fundraiser in New York, Clinton approached an old supporter and asked, hopefully, “Things are going OK—right?”

Her question elicited a hearty “Yes!”

