http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20071224/us_time/howclintonlostherinvincibility;_ylt=AuZEldKBcf4h0t8oFAQU.jTmWMcF<snip>
By JAY NEWTON-SMALL/GRUNDY CENTER
When Hillary Clinton launched her campaign nearly a year ago, the media buzz deemed it near impossible for the likes of Barack Obama and John Edwards to overcome her daunting campaign machine. The endorsements, the money, and the cream-of-the-crop strategists combined with the former First Lady's incumbent image to make her the clear-cut choice of the Democratic Party establishment.
But the onset of the Iowa caucuses finds Clinton aides racing to lower expectations, bracing for a possible loss there and contemplating a dwindling lead in the polls in New Hampshire and South Carolina. So, what has stripped the mighty Clinton campaign juggernaut of its image of invincibility?
For one thing, it has been a victim of the media hype it helped create. The campaign's warnings that Iowa was going to be a tough state for Clinton fell mostly on deaf ears. "Iowa was always going to be a challenge and we consistently said that," says Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson. "Nobody hands anyone a presidential nomination." But her campaign also failed to invest in Iowa until it was nearly too late. While Obama and Edwards spent the better part of the year moving in hundreds of staff and building relationships with grassroots Democratic constituencies, Clinton in the last month belatedly added a hundred staffers.
(see the photo at the link of Hillary Clinton holding a "Pledge Card" saying they'll vote for her - please tell me the other candidates aren't doing this Bush-type thing! I know Edwards didn't do it a few months ago, hopefully he's not now. If it's standard practice in Iowa then someone just explain, but otherwise it reminds me of the Bush campaign in '04)
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