What should I do, Bill? she asked. Should I do this or not?

You have to ask yourself one question, he replied. Of all the people running, would I be the best president? If you can answer yes, then you need to run. If you're not sure, then you need to think more about it, and if the answer is no, don't do it. That's all I can tell you, Bill said.

Not long after, Solis Doyle's phone rang back in Washington.

"Bill said that if I really feel like I can do this, and do a good job and be the best one, then I should do it," Hillary said. "And I do do believe that." believe that."

Solis Doyle exhaled and smiled.

"Okay! Let's go, then!" Patti said, and they were finally off and running.

THE TEAM THAT CLINTON put in charge of her campaign represented a stroll down the path of least resistance. She didn't so much a.s.semble an organization as reconfigure Hillaryland and give its key players new t.i.tles. Penn was named the chief strategist, Solis Doyle, the campaign manager. As communications director, Clinton installed her trusted press guru, Howard Wolfson, whose depth of contacts in the national media was unrivaled and whose reputation for aggression was balanced by a subtle grasp of old media and new. The campaign's ad maker would be Grunwald, whose toughness and capacity to tap into the appealing qualities of her clients had allowed her to succeed in what was basically a boy's business-and inspired enormous confidence in Clinton. Neera Tanden, a brilliant issues wonk with a degree from Yale Law School, would run the policy shop. And Ickes, though working only part time on the campaign, would focus on delegate strategy and help Solis Doyle ride herd on the budget of what would be a multimillion-dollar operation.

Two salient facts about this team stood out above all. The first was its long and deep service to the Clinton cause. All six of the senior players had been involved in both Hillary's election and reelection campaigns to the Senate, and some of them had connections to the couple dating back even further. Both Grunwald and Ickes had labored for Bill Clinton in 1992; Penn had joined the jamboree four years later. Indeed, the only significant outsider whom Hillary brought in was the deputy campaign manager, Mike Henry, a reputed whiz kid who had helped win a succession of tough statewide races, including Tim Kaine's election as governor of Virginia in 2005.

The second fact was that, when it came to Team Clinton, familiarity had failed to breed a spirit of bonhomie. From day one, the operation was a simmering cauldron of long-held animosities-most of them directed at Penn. Solis Doyle, Wolfson, Tanden, and Ickes all were distinctly more liberal than the chief strategist was. (Some considered him a closet Republican.) None of them trusted Penn's poll numbers or the way he wielded them, always in support of whatever strategy he happened to favor. But more than that, the rest of Hillaryland detested Penn personally. They thought him arrogant and amoral, a detrimental force whose perniciousness was amplified by his inexplicably tight bond with the Clintons.

Penn felt no more warmly toward most of his comrades. He regarded Solis Doyle as unqualified for her job. Ickes he routinely called a fabulist and an idiot barely capable of speaking English. When Penn was counseled to be nicer to the team, he found it hard to comprehend. I'm not nice or un-nice I'm not nice or un-nice, he thought. I'm trying to do my job. I'm trying to do my job.

Solis Doyle, by contrast, was much beloved in Hillaryland. But even among her friends there were concerns that she would be overmatched by the campaign manager's post. Both Ickes and Williams had tried to dissuade her from taking it, arguing that the first manager in many campaigns winds up getting sacked, that she was better off being the power behind the throne. Solis Doyle had heard as well that Bill Clinton doubted her ability, and that McAuliffe, who would be the campaign's chairman, was trashing her behind her back. But Solis Doyle was tired of being a hidden hand. In Hillary's first Senate race, she felt that, in effect, she had run the show-and yet hadn't gotten any credit. Do I really want to do the job without the t.i.tle and be little Patti Solis Doyle again? Do I really want to do the job without the t.i.tle and be little Patti Solis Doyle again? she thought. The answer was no: she wanted the responsibility and, with it, the recognition. she thought. The answer was no: she wanted the responsibility and, with it, the recognition.

Hillary was well aware of the knocks against both Solis Doyle and Penn, but she dismissed them. For years she'd seen Patti make the trains run on time with ruthless efficiency, and she saw no reason to think that her protegee wouldn't continue to do it now. About Penn, Clinton's feelings were more mixed. Largely because her husband had such faith in Penn's strategic a.n.a.lysis, she put faith in it too. But she gave him no authority to hire or fire, barred him from decisions regarding budgeting and spending, and told Solis Doyle she preferred that he not have an office at campaign headquarters. (Her distaste for socializing with Penn was evident; once, he'd shown up at Whitehaven uninvited, and Hillary was aghast.) That Solis Doyle and Penn despised each other didn't bother Clinton at all. Nor did the other discontents that bubbled in Hillaryland. She didn't encourage dissension in her ranks, but she tolerated it and even expected it. Her husband's campaign in 1992 had been fractious, yet that hadn't prevented Bill from winning. And this same team of hers had helped win two Senate races.

Like so many Washingtonians, Hillary had read Doris Kearns Goodwin's totemic book on Lincoln and his Cabinet, Team of Rivals. Team of Rivals. The model made eminent sense to her. And for a while, it even seemed to work. The model made eminent sense to her. And for a while, it even seemed to work.

CLINTON ANNOUNCED ON HER website that she was running. "I'm in," she wrote. "And I'm in to win."

It was January 20, 2007, four days after Obama had formed his exploratory committee and three Sat.u.r.days before he declared his candidacy in Springfield. Hillary offered no equivalent grandiloquence. Her Web post contained a link to a one-minute-and-forty-three-second video of her, seated on a beige couch in the sunroom at Whitehaven, wearing a claret-colored jacket over a black blouse, her right arm propped on a chintz pillow. "I'm not just starting a campaign," she said, "I'm beginning a conversation with America. . . . So let's talk. Let's chat. Let's start a dialogue about your ideas and mine."

The launch of Clinton's campaign had been laid out a month earlier in an internal memo by Penn, who argued for positioning Clinton not as a transformational figure, but as a solid, stolid juggernaut. "We are the establishment, experienced candidate," he wrote. "Our goal in this first quarter is to show we have the muscle to win-to live up to the financial expectations. We want to intimidate the possibility of late entrants like Gore. We want to show Obama how it is really done."

In the days leading up to her announcement, Clinton traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan, flashing her national security expertise. Shortly afterward, she began a fund-raising drive that was designed to be a show of overwhelming force. Her campaign proclaimed that it intended to raise $15 million in the first three months of 2007 and $75 million by the end of the year, both aggressive-sounding goals that were in fact low-ball numbers. Behind the scenes, the campaign was pressing its upper-echelon bundlers to raise at least $250,000, and ideally $1 million, apiece. The tacit message to big-dollar Democrats was that it was time to choose between Hillary and Obama. At a book party in Los Angeles attended by scores of potential donors, McAuliffe said, half-jokingly, "You're either with us or against us."

But, lurking just beneath the machismo, there was a defensiveness to the Clinton strategy. Penn's polling found that Hillary was seen by many as unelectable. Her experience as First Lady was discounted and her war vote held against her by the base. The notion of the flagrant, self-serving Clintons returning to the White House still made some voters shudder.

Hillary's rollout was all about addressing these vulnerabilities: "in to win" and the fund-raising push, about electability; the soft-sell video, about her perceived hardness and inauthenticity; the trip to Iraq, about setting the stage for a further leftward shimmy on the war. (On returning, she declared her opposition to the troop surge announced by Bush two weeks earlier.) Penn's strategy was for Hillary to consolidate her strengths and bulldoze her way through her weaknesses.

Not everyone in Hillaryland embraced the course he charted. Wolfson and Grunwald believed that Clinton needed to show her human side, be accessible, empathic. Many of the skeptics of Penn's approach recalled with concern a presentation he'd given in a meeting late in 2006 that summed up what they considered his point of view: Hillary needed to be seen by Democrats as the inevitable nominee. Ickes raised his hand and observed that, back in 1972, he'd worked for another supposedly inevitable Democratic candidate. "How many of you ever shook hands," Ickes asked, "with President Ed Muskie?"

But Clinton was happy prosecuting a front-runner's campaign. She liked being seen as formidable and imposing. She had no taste for softening her image or for pandering to the base. She appreciated that Penn always had an eye on the general election, because she expected to end up there. Really, who was going to stop her? Edwards, true, was white, southern, and male, all qualities possessed by every Democratic president since Kennedy, but Clinton regarded him as a "total phony."

As for Obama, Hillary could still barely fathom that he was in the race at all. She had tried to help him, she'd been on his side. The whole party had rallied around him, lifting him out of obscurity, giving him a chance to grow into something special. But rather than being grateful and waiting his turn, he was now trying to jump the line, with conceivably disastrous results-not for himself but for the party. His constant touting of his early opposition to the war held out the danger of pushing the debate too far left for the Democrats' own good. Hillary a.s.sumed that, in time, the party would see him for what he was: infinitely promising, but, right now, naive, callow, and insubstantial.

There were moments, however, when some doubts crept in. At the DNC's annual winter meeting, in early February at the Washington Hilton, she was standing offstage with an aide when Obama took the podium. The other candidates had packed the hall with supporters. The Obamans had done nothing-no crowd-building, no b.u.t.tons, no b.u.mper stickers. (They didn't want to waste the money.) Obama's speech was cool, cerebral, and sober. The audience sat raptly, silently, gazing up at him as if he were some kind of savior. Turning to her staffer, Hillary said quietly, "I don't know if this is going to work out. I don't know how to do this. I really don't know how to deal with these people."

THE OLD JACK WARNER house sat on Angelo Drive at the top of Beverly Hills. Built in the thirties, it now belonged to the billionaire entertainment mogul David Geffen, who had spent much of the nineties remodeling the estate from top to bottom. Inside, the walls were covered with world-cla.s.s art: Rauschenbergs, de Koonings, Pollocks, Gorkys, a Jasper Johns target, a Jasper Johns flag.

On the night of February 20, 2007, Obama was there for a private dinner in his honor. Earlier that evening, Geffen and his partners in DreamWorks SKG, Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, had hosted a $1.3 million fund-raiser for him at the Beverly Hilton, attended by some three hundred members of the glitterati. From the time the event was announced, it had drawn notice, signifying that at least a portion of Hollywood, including some longtime backers of the Clintons, was attracted to Obama. Privately, Hillary and her aides were shaken by the symbolism and practical implications of such an encroachment on a world that she'd spent years cultivating. She considered people such as the DreamWorks chiefs more than mere donors; she thought of them as friends. The event for Obama was nothing short of a betrayal.

After the fund-raiser, a more intimate group of thirty-five repaired to Geffen's mansion, spreading themselves out across three tables. Among them were Mich.e.l.le Obama, Spielberg and Katzenberg, former Disney and Fox studio head Joe Roth, William Morris Agency chairman Jim Wiatt, Walk the Line Walk the Line writer and director James Mangold, writer and director James Mangold, Sleepless in Seattle Sleepless in Seattle producer Lynda Obst, and producer Lynda Obst, and New York Times New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. columnist Maureen Dowd.

As the dinner wound down, Geffen approached Obama, holding a printout of a Web page with a column by Dowd that would be appearing in the next day's Times. Times. The piece was all about Geffen's disenchantment with the Clintons. It contained harsh words, and lots of them, that would reverberate through the political world for months. Handing it to Obama, Geffen said, "I think I should show you this." The piece was all about Geffen's disenchantment with the Clintons. It contained harsh words, and lots of them, that would reverberate through the political world for months. Handing it to Obama, Geffen said, "I think I should show you this."

Geffen and Dowd were a colorful pair of friends-a mischievous dyad, each with a long and complicated relationship with the Clintons. Coquettish and flame-haired, Dowd was liberal, but never earnest or doctrinaire, and her scorn for hypocrisy and self-infatuation trumped any ideological predispositions she possessed. She had won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1999, for a series of columns that folded, spindled, and mutilated Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair.

Geffen's relationship with Clinton began to change toward the end of Bill's White House years. Before that, the mogul and the president had been tight, the former raising millions for the latter and sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom more than once. Clinton would phone Geffen all the time-at home, in the car, late at night-and would often stay with Geffen when he was in Hollywood.

Already troubled by Clinton's flaws, Geffen was pushed over the edge in 2001, when the outgoing president pardoned fugitive financier Marc Rich but didn't do the same for Leonard Peltier-a Native American activist who some in Hollywood believed was wrongly convicted and sentenced to life in prison for murdering two federal agents. Geffen lobbied Clinton for the Peltier pardon, and saw Clinton's divergent treatment of Peltier and Rich as a sign of corrupted values. In the years that followed, Geffen heard constant Hollywood chatter about Clinton's exploits with Ron Burkle, who lived around the corner from Geffen in Beverly Hills. When people asked Geffen if he thought Clinton was still fooling around, Geffen would reply, "Do you think the Pope's a Catholic?"

Geffen, meanwhile, had always admired Hillary, regarded her as smart and capable. He contributed to her Senate campaign in 2000, but never felt the personal spark. By contrast, he was dazzled by Obama from the moment he watched the 2004 convention speech. Soon afterward, Geffen called Obama and predicted he would run for president one day. The next year, he invited Obama to his house for dinner with the Katzenbergs and Warren Beatty-and was swept away by Obama's cool demeanor, his lack of ent.i.tlement or self-importance, which Geffen found a refreshing departure from the Clintons.

Early in 2005, while making a public appearance in New York at the 92nd Street Y, Geffen was asked a question about Hillary by a member of the audience. "She can't win and she's an incredibly polarizing figure," Geffen replied. "And ambition is just not a good enough reason." The crowd broke into applause, which surprised Geffen, who'd always a.s.sumed that the Upper East Side was Clinton country.

Dowd, in the audience, was surprised, too, and started hounding Geffen to let her write a column about what he had said. Over the course of two years, she asked him about it again and again, but Geffen always demurred. "What, are you crazy?" he would tell her. "No!" Dowd understood what a big story Geffen disowning the Clintons would be. So she kept on pushing. Dining at his house the night before the February fund-raiser for Obama, Dowd implored, Let's do an interview. When it's over, if you don't want me to use it, I won't. What do you have to lose? Geffen finally relented.

The interview lasted fifteen minutes. Dowd left and wrote her column, then called Geffen and read it to him. The column quoted him saying that Hillary would be unable to "bring the country together." That her husband was "a reckless guy who gave his enemies a lot of ammunition to hurt him." That the Clintons were "unwilling to stand for the things that they genuinely believe in. Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease, it's troubling."

Dowd warned Geffen that the column would be explosive. She asked if he wanted to take any of his words back. "Absolutely not," Geffen answered, fully dispensing with his past reticence. "That's exactly what I said, that's exactly what I feel."

Now, as Geffen showed the text of the column to Obama, he wondered how the candidate would react. Obama read it, gave Geffen a wide-eyed what-have-you-done look, and laughed. This is going to cause some conversation, Obama said dryly. They're not going to be happy with this.

"I hope it doesn't cause too much trouble," Geffen said.

"Trouble for whom?" Obama replied and laughed again.

The Dowd column was explosive, all right. It went off like an atom bomb inside Hillaryland. After coming across it on the Web late that night, at 1:15 a.m. Penn shot an email to Wolfson with the subject line "How do we hit back?" Penn suggested releasing any doc.u.ments from Bill Clinton's still-under-seal presidential library records regarding the Peltier pardon that reflected badly on Geffen. "We should see if we can use this interview to reveal a vicious personal agenda on Geffen's part and undermine the whole 'new politics' agenda of Obama," he wrote. "And consider-will Obama disavow this interview or does Geffen speak for him? (If he disavows, will he give back the money from Geffen? If he does not disavow, then how is this new politics-looks like the old 'slash and burn' he railed against just hours before.)"

Wolfson agreed. For weeks already, Hillaryland had been frustrated by its inability to engage Obama. Even though the campaign was just under way, Wolfson and Penn already had seen enough evidence to believe that Obama's charmed media ride was going to continue unless an outside force intervened. Here was a chance to do so in a way that would put Obama in a bind. After an early morning conference call among the staff, the high command sought approval from Clinton, who was stumping in Las Vegas. Because of the time difference, she was still asleep, so Solis Doyle, who was traveling with her, woke her up. Still groggy, Clinton heard the outrage in Penn's and Wolfson's voices. "Okay, do it," she said.

By 9:00 a.m., the campaign had put out a press release with the headline "CLINTON CAMP TO OBAMA: CUT TIES & RETURN CASH AFTER TOP BOOSTER'S VICIOUS ATTACKS." Wolfson got on the horn with journalists and went on cable TV to push the Clinton line. But the Obama campaign refused to be boxed in, instead floating placidly above the flap. Obama told a reporter, "It's not clear to me why I should be apologizing for someone else's remarks. My sense is that Mr. Geffen may have differences with the Clintons, but that doesn't really have anything to do with our campaign."

It wasn't long before Hillaryland realized that its response was boomeranging. Suddenly, their stern pushback looked like a defensive overreaction, and a heavy-handed one at that. For Wolfson, it was a seminal moment. In his conversations with reporters, he found they agreed with Geffen. Everyone knows what he said is true, the journalists casually remarked. By the end of the day, Hillaryland was in full retreat.

The reaction to the column stunned Geffen. Besieged by interview requests, he put out a statement saying Dowd had quoted him accurately. Some of Geffen's friends in Hollywood expressed disbelief. Warren Beatty told him, She's going to be president of the United States-you must be nuts to have done this. But many more congratulated Geffen for having the courage to say what everyone else was thinking but was too afraid to put on the record. They said he'd made them feel safer openly supporting or donating to Obama. Soon after, when Geffen visited New York, people in cars on Madison Avenue beeped their horns and gave him the thumbs-up as he walked down the street.

For the Clintons, the episode was more than bad; it was their worst nightmare splashed across the screen in garish Technicolor. Two paragons of the bicoastal liberal Establishment, one from Hollywood and one from the Times Times, conspiring to take down Hillary largely on the basis of her husband. Her campaign putting on the war paint but botching the job, then descending into a round of finger-pointing in the aftermath, with Penn calling the Clintons to blame Wolfson for mishandling the situation, suggesting he was in over his head. And most ominous of all, the press uniformly siding with Obama. The whole thing stank-and the whiff of trouble was only about to get more fragrant.

THE SEMIOFFICIAL RULES OF engagement in Hillaryland-particularly post-Geffen-were not to take on Obama directly for fear that it would only enhance his stature. But Penn and Bill Clinton formed a kind of dissident supercommittee of two. They were talking offline constantly, with Penn stovepiping data and a.n.a.lysis to the former president, each reinforcing the other's urgent certainty that something had to be done.

Penn saw Obama as a "phenomenon," and in his experience phenomena had to be quashed early, before the myths around them grew so potent they were undeflatable. Clinton, too, was increasingly outraged over what he saw as the fawning press coverage of Obama. It reminded him of 1992, the way the media s...o...b..red over his rival Paul Tsongas as the candidate of ideas and principle, when, in Clinton's opinion, Tsongas was neither. But unlike Tsongas and Bill Bradley, two cla.s.sic progressive reform candidates whom Obama resembled in his outlook and platform, the Illinois senator was certain to capture a large chunk of the black vote-a const.i.tuency that had always been a bedrock for the Clintons. In January, an ABC News/'Washington Post poll put Hillary ahead of Obama by a margin of 60 to 20 percent among black voters nationally; a month later, her lead had shrunk to 4433. poll put Hillary ahead of Obama by a margin of 60 to 20 percent among black voters nationally; a month later, her lead had shrunk to 4433.

Penn and Bill agreed they needed a "stopper"-something that would allow the campaign to kill Obama in the cradle. The stopper they seized on was Obama's record on Iraq. Without a majority of the black vote, Hillary would need to perform better among white liberals, and one way to make that happen would be to take Obama down a peg in their eyes. Penn observed that Obama's antiwar image was based almost entirely on his 2002 speech; his voting record in the Senate on Iraq was nearly identical to Hillary's. Now the campaign's research team discovered a pair of potentially damaging quotes from 2004: "I'm not privy to Senate intelligence reports. What would I have done? I don't know," Obama said when asked how he would have voted on authorizing the war had he been in the Senate at the time; and, "there's not much of a difference between my position on Iraq and George Bush's position at this stage."

To Penn and Bill, the quotes seemed like manna from heaven. The Hillaryland press shop went into overdrive trying to peddle them to the media, but reporters evinced scant interest. Bill monitored the situation closely, asking for regular updates about any progress in pushing the story, growing increasingly frustrated when it failed to click. Told that journalists didn't consider it news, he would wail, "Why not? Why not?" That so few reporters were biting reinforced his and Penn's conviction that Obama was getting a free ride.

Invited to speak at a forum at Harvard on March 19 along with the top strategists from the other campaigns, Penn decided it was time to take off the gloves and go public. Suspecting that the rest of Hillary's team would disagree, he chose not to consult them. He did seek permission from Bill Clinton, though. And Bill Clinton was all for it.

That night at Harvard, Penn sat onstage with Axelrod and Jonathan Prince, the deputy manager of the Edwards campaign, and waited for his opening. Helpfully, one of the students in the audience asked about Hillary's war vote-and Penn launched into his spiel about Obama, citing both of the quotes that the research team had unearthed. Axelrod, annoyed, sought to clarify Obama's comments, then lectured Penn, "I really think that it is important, if we are going to run the kind of campaign that will unify our party and move this country forward, that we do it in an honest way, and that was not an honest tactic." Penn didn't care. That was a well-played segment That was a well-played segment, he thought.

And the segment wasn't over. The next day, on a conference call with a group of Hillary's bundlers-to which a reporter was conveniently allowed to listen-Bill Clinton echoed Penn. "I don't have a problem with anything Barack Obama said on this," Clinton stated. But "to characterize Hillary and Obama's positions on the war as polar opposites is ludicrous. This dichotomy that's been set up to allow him to become the raging hero of the antiwar crowd on the Internet is just factually inaccurate."

Hillaryland was livid at the freelancing. On a morning conference call of the high command, Wolfson and the rest pummeled Penn for going off the reservation, for a maladroit attempt to drive a story for which the press had no appet.i.te. They believed that Iraq was a losing issue for Hillary; they wanted not to talk about it. Penn defended himself, saying that Bill Clinton had signed off on the offensive. "Who's running this f.u.c.king campaign?" Tanden complained to Solis Doyle.

Where Hillary stood on the supercommittee's frustrations and efforts was unclear to her other advisers. Though she seemed to approve of Penn's ploy and had no doubt that Obama was having it both ways on the war, she was hesitant to raise the matter herself in a speech or at a press conference. And without her front and center, the issue was going nowhere. What it all added up to-the staff conflict, the one-off nature of the hit, the reluctance of Hillary to take the lead-was an early example of how hard the Clintonites would find it to put an effective negative frame on Obama.

The difficulty became all the greater two weeks later, when, on April 4, Obama's campaign released its fund-raising totals for the first quarter of the year. A few days earlier, the Clinton team had unveiled its numbers: $36 million, a staggering-sounding sum that turned out to be somewhat less than it appeared. Roughly $10 million of that was left over from Hillary's Senate reelection campaign and another $ 6 million was for use only in the general election (if she got there), leaving about $20 million in fresh cash for the nomination contest. The Obama numbers? Total: $25 million. For the primaries: $23.5 million, from a far broader base of donors.

The reaction in Hillaryland was confusion and shock. All along, a core predicate of Clinton's campaign was that she would possess a major financial advantage over everyone in the field. Now that was seriously in question-and Hillary was staring down the barrel of an objective, quantifiable metric of how redoubtable a combatant Obama would be. A series of frantic conference calls ensued, in which Clinton demanded answers. "This is a big deal, guys," she said grimly. "How did it happen?" "Someone explain this to me." "We have to do better."

Clinton wanted to believe Obama's first-quarter numbers were a fluke, but when he beat her again in the second quarter, by even more than in the first-$31 million to $21 million this time-panic set in.

One day that summer, after a fund-raising breakfast at the ritzy Hamptons weekend home of New York venture capitalist Alan Patricof, Hillary walked into the kitchen and started talking to Patricof and her finance director, Jonathan Mantz. Patricof noted that Obama was raking in money by selling T-shirts, b.u.t.tons, and posters with his campaign logo on them. "He's got a retail merchandise business going," Patricof said. "Why aren't we doing more of that?"

Hillary turned to Mantz and repeated the question: Why aren't aren't we doing more of that? But before Mantz could answer, Clinton began to unravel. we doing more of that? But before Mantz could answer, Clinton began to unravel.

We're losing the small-donor race, she said, her voice starting to rise. Why are we losing? What do we need to do? I just don't understand!

Hillary was nearly screaming now. Gesturing outside, she exclaimed, "Why don't we have merchandise being sold out back? We could've set up tables in the back!"

There were a lot of things Mantz could have said: Because you're not leading a movement. Because your donors aren't college kids. Because we're in the Hamptons and you don't hawk souvenirs on the lawn beside the swimming pool. Instead, he thought, Wow, this is the angriest I've ever seen her. Wow, this is the angriest I've ever seen her. And then simply said, "I'll fix it." And then simply said, "I'll fix it."

FIXING THE FUND-RAISING WAS one of many challenges facing Clinton in 2007-but in terms of urgency and long-range significance, none was in even the same galaxy as the problem of Iowa. Right after New Year's, Penn had put their first poll in the field to figure out where Clinton stood in the state ab initio. The results were discouraging: Edwards led with 38 percent, with Clinton and Obama tied at 16. In no other state in the country would Hillary, with her name recognition and national profile and popularity among Democrats, have fared so poorly. But hearing the numbers, she put on a brave face. "It's better than I thought it would be," she said. "We have our work cut out for us."

The members of the Hillaryland high command were less sanguine. Unlike New Hampshire, where the Clinton name was platinum because of her husband, Iowa was a place where neither he nor she had spent much time. (In 1992, local guy Tom Harkin was in the race and had it sewn up, so the other candidates skipped the caucuses; in 1996, inc.u.mbent Clinton ran for the nomination unopposed.) Democrats in Iowa were decidedly liberal, with a peacenik streak; Hillary's war record was more vexatious there than anywhere else. Edwards had been working the state more or less constantly since 2003. Obama lived next door. If Hillary was going to be compet.i.tive in Iowa, she would need to go all out. The problem was, she hated it there. Every day felt like she was stuck in a Mobius strip: another barn, another living room, another set of questions about immigration (from people who were anti-) and the war (ditto). She'd get back on the plane, slump into her seat, heave a deep sigh, and grunt, "Ugh."

The Iowans didn't seem to be listening to her, just gawking at her, like she was an animal in a zoo. Hillary would hear from her staff the things voters were saying about her: "She's so much prettier in person," "She's so much nicer than I thought." It made her ill. She found the Iowans diffident and presumptuous; she felt they were making her grovel. Hillary detested pleading for anything, from money to endors.e.m.e.nts, and in Iowa it was no different. She resisted calling the local politicos whose support she needed. One time, she spent forty-five minutes on the phone wooing an activist, only to be told at the call's end that the woman was still deciding between her and another candidate. Hillary hung up in a huff.

"I can't believe this!" she said. "How many times am I going to have to meet these same people?"

Over and over, she complained about the system that gave Iowa so much power in selecting the nominee. "This is so stupid," she would say. "So unfair." She b.i.t.c.hed about Iowa's scruffy hotels and looked for excuses to avoid staying overnight. But among the sources of her frustration and bewilderment, the absence of connection was paramount. "I don't have a good feeling about this, guys," she told her staff on the plane. "I just don't have a good feeling about this place."

People Hillary respected, experts on Iowa, urged her to spend more time there. She seemed to understand, but her antipathy to the state only grew. Mike Henry grasped the scale of the problem and took a radical stab at remedying it. Dismayed by what he'd seen on a trip to Iowa that spring, Henry concluded that there was a sound case for Hillary bypa.s.sing the caucuses. In mid-May, after mulling the idea in private with Solis Doyle, Ickes, and political consultant Michael Whouley, Henry drafted a memo laying out his argument. Iowa, he wrote, was Hillary's consistently weakest state, and was likely to consume $15 million and seventy days of her schedule. "Worst case scenario: this effort may bankrupt the campaign and provide little if any political advantage," he wrote.

Henry sent the memo to Solis Doyle and Ickes, and also, inexplicably, to a friend of his named Sheila Nix, who worked in the office of Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. Within twelve hours, the memo had been leaked to The New York Times The New York Times and was all over the paper's front page. and was all over the paper's front page.

Ickes was baffled by Henry's foolishness: "Mike, what goes through your f.u.c.king mind?" But he also saw the irony in the situation. Hillary could never recede from Iowa under these circ.u.mstances. The leaking of the memo had locked her in, exactly the opposite outcome of what Henry had hoped for.

Henry's screwup, however, was an outward sign of a deeper malady in Hillaryland: the team of rivals the candidate had constructed was longer on rivalry-and backbiting, pettiness, and general-purpose dysfunction-than on teamwork.

Every decision Clinton had made (and not made) in structuring her campaign was coming back to bite her. She had effectively given both Penn and Solis Doyle veto power over hiring-which they regularly exercised to preserve their status, preventing any fresh blood or new ideas from penetrating Hillaryland. She had told Solis Doyle to keep a tight rein on the budget, but astronomical salaries abounded and spending was out of control. (A notorious tightwad, Clinton was forever complaining, "There are too many people on the road. . . . I don't know what all these people do.") She had empowered her senior advisers to govern by consensus, but Penn so frequently went directly to the Clintons to override choices with which he disagreed that his colleagues considered discussion futile. The level of animosity among them all was off the charts. Screaming matches erupted regularly on conference calls and in person. Solis Doyle's preferred name for Penn was "fat f.u.c.k."

The result was chaos. Meetings rarely started on time, had any discernible structure, or accomplished their ostensible purpose. Every decision was litigated and relitigated again and again, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. The campaign had neither a political director nor a field director; Henry was de facto both. There was almost no one with experience in Democratic presidential nomination fights. There were no significant budgets or plans in place for any states beyond the first four. The campaign's delegate operation was understaffed and unsophisticated. The most basic operational and political matters were frequently left unaddressed.

From the outside, none of this was apparent. Hillaryland looked like a colossus. Far ahead in the national polls and the hunt for endors.e.m.e.nts, she still appeared on track as the inevitable nominee. But Bill Clinton's old hands knew better. Locked out of Hillary's campaign, dismissed as old-school "white boys" by Solis Doyle, they could still see things others couldn't: that Hillaryland was a fractious, soulless mess-and that their old boss, the former president, was on the outside looking in, just like them.

BILL CLINTON JUMPED ON the conference call wondering what the point of it was. Carson, his spokesman, told him Hillary's people wanted to have a quick chat before he headed west. For the next three days, over the July 4 holiday, he would be at his wife's side all over Iowa: the state fairgrounds in Des Moines, the Independence Day parade in Clear Lake, private meetings with undecided caucus leaders and potential precinct captains. Hillary had been in the race for coming up on six months-and this was their first joint campaign swing.

The Hillarylanders were nervous about the trip, afraid that Bill would overshadow her, that he'd talk too much-or, more to the point, talk too much about himself and not enough about her. Over the past couple of weeks, they'd worried the trip nearly to death, discussing and diagramming every aspect in minute detail. (Would he sit or stand onstage next to her? How would they work the rope line? Where would they sleep? Would they do any separate events?) Now the high command wished to go over the script again. Just want to make sure you're okay with everything, sir, Carson said. You've got your talking points; you should be fairly brief; turn it over to her and let her rip.

Yup, Clinton said, I got it-but apparently that wasn't sufficient. Grunwald had a few words to say, then Penn, then Wolfson, then Solis Doyle. All of them said the same thing as Carson had, just repackaged in different language.

"Yeah, okay, guys. I got got it," Clinton said, his voice heavy with sarcasm. "I'll try not to screw it up for her too bad while I'm out there." it," Clinton said, his voice heavy with sarcasm. "I'll try not to screw it up for her too bad while I'm out there."

Clinton was getting used to this kind of treatment from his wife's campaign-well, not used to it, but by now it was familiar. The press kept saying that he was Hillary's greatest a.s.set, a political genius, the sharpest strategist in the Democratic Party. But his involvement so far in 2007 had been close to nil, and certainly less by most measures than that of a typical candidate's spouse. That was how his wife's people wanted it: they saw him not as a priceless a.s.set, but as a problem to be managed. And Bill hadn't tried to fight his way in. Though he often questioned the campaign's strategy, he knew that he had to stay out of Hillary's way, let her win this thing herself. He just wished that Solis Doyle and all the rest of them would stop treating him like an infant. "You know, I did get myself elected president of the United States . . . twice!" he liked to say.

Bill was rusty. He knew that. Politics had changed a lot since he was in the game for real. After his heart surgeries, he'd lost a step or two, no doubt. And, he allowed, he didn't know beans about Iowa. He found himself parroting the conventional wisdom: Edwards is strong; Obama has a chance; it's Hillary's hardest row to hoe. That was one reason he was thrilled to be getting out there. Finally a chance to sniff around, test his instincts, see what was happening on the ground.

The July 4 trip went off without a hitch. Bill demonstrated discipline, giving the same six-minute speech every time, almost to the word. But the best part, from his point of view, was the time he got to spend in private, recruiting precinct captains and other activists for his wife, getting a handle on how the process worked, drilling down with Teresa Vilmain, the top-drawer organizer whom Hillary had just signed on to run the state for her.

On the flight home, Hillary was uncertain how the trip had gone. She was hoa.r.s.e and exhausted, worried about the press's parsing of her and Bill's body language, the criticisms that they'd been too programmed. Bill tried to buck her up. You did great, he said. You really touched people-the crowds were hanging on your every word.

But, in truth, Iowa was starting to plague Bill's mind. The campaign's local advisers had told him in no uncertain terms that the one thing Iowans wouldn't abide was negative campaigning, which meant it would be hard to take Obama down in the manner that Bill and Penn thought necessary. After the Henry memo, there was no getting out of Iowa for Hillary. And yet, after all the work she'd done there, she was still struggling as in no other state.

Bill Clinton wondered if Iowa was laying a triple whammy on his wife: she couldn't attack, she couldn't quit, and she couldn't win.

AND YET FOR ALL that had happened so far in 2007, for all the turbulence and doubts, for all the internal squabbles and external missteps, Hillary publicly didn't appear to be a beleaguered figure as the summer turned to fall. She didn't feel that way, either. While there was cause for disquiet, there were plenty of reasons for confidence. She had entered the year the front-runner and she was still the front-runner-now more than ever. And Obama seemed to be fading, just as she had predicted.

She had whipped him in the interminable series of Democratic debates that had taken place since April. Her mastery of the issues, her knowledge of every jot and t.i.ttle about every aspect of public policy, had been on full display-and Obama had been exposed for the naif she knew he was, coming across as vague and weak and windy. With Penn's help, she had neutralized many of her most glaring vulnerabilities. She had blurred the distinctions between her and Obama on Iraq, adroitly changing the subject from which candidate was most antiwar to who was more qualified to bring the conflict to an end. She had recast her awful history with health care reform, unveiling her long-awaited plan in mid-September and getting rave reviews for her substantive prowess, the detail and clarity of her presentation, and her self-deprecating allusions to her disastrous attempt to overhaul the system as First Lady. She'd watched as Obama's campaign was hammered for producing a proposal that was an obvious rip-off of hers. She'd begun to defuse her rival's message, giving speeches where she said "change is just a word without the strength and experience to make it happen." And, finally, in the third quarter of the year, she had succeeded in raising more money than Obama.

All along, Clinton had held a commanding lead over Obama in the national polls. Now, on October 3, came a new ABC News/Washington Post News/Washington Post survey that seemed to shift the appropriate description from "clear front-runner" to "prohibitive favorite." The poll put Hillary ahead of Obama by a staggering thirty-three-point margin, 5320. Despite all the efforts of her opponents to tar her as too polarizing to be electable, the poll found that 57 percent of voters rated her the most likely of the Democratic candidates to win in the fall. More heartening still, not only was Clinton leading decisively among voters who were looking for "strength and experience," but she was beating Obama 4531 among those seeking "new direction and new ideas." The poll was the talk of the political world. Even in Iowa, the race seemed to be tilting in her favor. Thanks in large part to Vilmain's labors, Hillary was now in a virtual three-way tie in the state. survey that seemed to shift the appropriate description from "clear front-runner" to "prohibitive favorite." The poll put Hillary ahead of Obama by a staggering thirty-three-point margin, 5320. Despite all the efforts of her opponents to tar her as too polarizing to be electable, the poll found that 57 percent of voters rated her the most likely of the Democratic candidates to win in the fall. More heartening still, not only was Clinton leading decisively among voters who were looking for "strength and experience," but she was beating Obama 4531 among those seeking "new direction and new ideas." The poll was the talk of the political world. Even in Iowa, the race seemed to be tilting in her favor. Thanks in large part to Vilmain's labors, Hillary was now in a virtual three-way tie in the state.

Two weeks later, Hillary received a piece of news that thrilled her beyond measure. She was getting the endors.e.m.e.nt of Georgia congressman John Lewis. Lewis was one of the civil rights era's greatest heroes, an African American student organizer beaten nearly to death by a white mob during the freedom rides of 1961. All year long, despite Hillary's aversion to b.u.t.tonholing superdelegates-elected officials and other party honchos who would vote automatically at the national convention the next summer in Denver-their endors.e.m.e.nts kept falling into her lap, while Obama collected virtually none. But Lewis was a particularly welcome feather in her cap and a harsh blow to Obama.

What all this said to Hillary was that the natural order was rea.s.serting itself. Despite the angst of the past ten months, the elements of Penn's plan were falling into place: the money, the Establishment support, the muscle to win. She was showing Obama, as Penn wrote in his December memo, "how it is really done." And the press corps, for all its disdain for her, was coming around to the opinion that the campaign had sought to instill from the start: Hillary's victory was inevitable.

And she seemed to believe it, too. How confident was Clinton? So extravagantly self-certain that she began to turn her attention to a question no rational candidate would have dared to contemplate this early: Who should be her running mate in the general election? She had already determined without a sliver of doubt that she was not going to choose Obama. She knew she would come under enormous pressure to do so from all corners of the party and the press, and she had already come up with a solution.

Clinton decided she needed to have a prominent African American or two to run her vice-presidential search process. She was inclined to tap Cheryl Mills and Vernon Jordan, a longtime friend of the Clintons and Washington's premier black power broker. When her aides asked who would be at the top of her VP short list, she mentioned Bayh, Biden, Vilsack, and Ohio governor Ted Strickland.

But Clinton was getting even further ahead of herself than that. One day that fall, she summoned her friend Roger Altman to meet with her in Washington. Altman was a major Wall Street player who had served as deputy treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. As they sat in her bas.e.m.e.nt hideaway office in the Capitol, Hillary asked Altman to undertake a secret project on her behalf. She wanted him to start planning right away for her eventual transition to the White House, on the a.s.sumption that she would win the general election. I don't want to get to the point, she said, where we're scrambling to do a transition. I want to be in the opposite position.

Altman already knew what Clinton was going to ask him to do. A few days earlier, he'd had a call from John Podesta, who told him that Hillary wanted them together to undertake the transition effort. For about half an hour, Altman and Clinton discussed how the plan would work, setting up a schedule for the next few months and focusing on the selection of chairs and co-chairs to run the preparation on a variety of issues. Hillary made clear how important it was that word of the endeavor not leak. She had devised a cover story: that the Altman-Podesta-led meetings were merely part of a project on presidential transitions already under way at Podesta's Center for American Progress.

At the Clinton campaign headquarters in b.a.l.l.ston, Virginia, just a few minutes outside Washington, the few aides who were aware of the transition preparations were alarmed by the whole scheme-by the presumptuousness of it, and even more by the risks involved. If news broke that Hillary had already started working on her presidential transition, the ensuing media maelstrom would be crippling, undermining the campaign's efforts to tamp down the perception of Clinton's arrogance and sense of privilege. Altman and Podesta, for their part, believed the undertaking was just another sign of Clinton's methodical commitment to preparation. She's such a planner She's such a planner, Altman thought. But they were spooked by the notion that Hillary might be jinxing herself. Let's hope this isn't the bell that tolls the finale for the campaign, they joked.

One night in October, as Clinton flew back east from a campaign stop in Arizona, she cracked open a bottle of white wine and kicked around the latest media offer on the table-a cover shoot and an accompanying inside photo spread in Vogue. Vogue. Anna Wintour, the magazine's glamorous editrix, and her people were wheedling the campaign. It will be good for Hillary, they said. Great photos. The first woman president-in-waiting. She should do it. Anna Wintour, the magazine's glamorous editrix, and her people were wheedling the campaign. It will be good for Hillary, they said. Great photos. The first woman president-in-waiting. She should do it.

Clinton's aides thought it was a fabulous idea, another opportunity to humanize their boss, but Clinton was skeptical.

I don't think a Vogue Vogue photo shoot is going to be helpful, Hillary said. I'm still trying to convince white men that I can be the commander in chief, and me looking pretty in a dress isn't gonna do that. photo shoot is going to be helpful, Hillary said. I'm still trying to convince white men that I can be the commander in chief, and me looking pretty in a dress isn't gonna do that.

Hillary took a sip of wine and let her mind drift toward the future.

"You realize," she said to her aides, "we're only Iowa away from winning this."