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The 46-year-old Mr Obama is just too green about the gills for the highest office in the land, Mr Young argued, and lacks a network of political allies that could sustain him in times of trouble. "To put a brother in there by himself is to set him up for crucifixion," he said. But he could not resist adding a kicker. "Bill [Clinton] is every bit as black as Barack--he's probably gone with more black women than Barack."Mr Young's faux pas is a tiffany money clip sale symptom of the Clinton campaign's troubles. Mrs Clinton's commanding leads in the make-or-break states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina have evaporated. And the much-vaunted Hillary machine is looking, for the moment at least, more Heath Robinson than Vorsprung durch Technik. The bad news keeps coming, and even the good news has a way of turning bad.

Mr Obama is proving to be Mrs Clinton's perfect nightmare. He has not only neutralised her most compelling claim for attention--the first black president is a more momentous prospect than the first woman president. He has also shaped the race. His early entry into the contest forced Mrs Clinton to declare her candidacy sooner than she had planned. His fund-raising prowess forced her to make much more use of her husband tiffany necklace sale she had intended. Last weekend stadium-sized crowds turned up to watch Oprah Winfrey, the only woman in America who can turn "Anna Karenina" into a bestseller, stumping for Mr Obama. Mrs Clinton was reduced to touring Iowa with her daughter, Chelsea, and her mother, Dorothy.

Mrs Clinton's problems have forced her to abandon the high horse of inevitability for the boxing ring. Yet so far she has proved to be no great shakes as a pugilist. She excused her poor performance in a debate in Philadelphia by accusing her fellow (male) candidates of "piling on". This feebly suggested that she wanted to be given special treatment because of her gender. Then she threw a succession of wild punches that made her look like an amateur. The Clinton campaign's decision to dredge up the fact that Mr Obama had written an essay in kindergarten on how he wanted to be president was particularly misguided. What tiffany pendant sale of person quotes a kindergarten essay against a rival?

Mrs Clinton's recent troubles have raised questions about what is arguably her most important selling-point, her competence. The Clintonistas have always presented her as a woman who is "tough enough" to deal with anything that is thrown at her--trained in the Clinton wars of the 1990s and always ready with a counter-punch. She is certainly one of America's most accomplished practitioners of the politics of personal destruction. But the skills that she perfected behind the scenes seem to be far less effective when they are practised in the limelight.Same old dirty politics

Mrs Clinton's troubles have also reminded people of what they most tiffany ring sale about the politics of the Clinton-Bush era. "She's run what Washington would call a textbook campaign," Mr Obama argues. "But the problem is the textbook itself." This is self-serving: all campaigns employ the dark arts of polls, story-planting and character assassination, and Mr Obama is no exception. But Mrs Clinton is vulnerable to the charge that she uses them more than most. She is surrounded by veteran pollsters and lobbyists from her husband's administration. She seems to delight in political warfare--"Now the fun part starts," she stupidly declared about her battle with Mr Obama. And her campaign seems addicted to spin. Mr Clinton did his wife no favours when he recently declared, despite evidence to the contrary, that he had opposed the Iraq war from the start.

Mrs Clinton's style inevitably raises questions about her character. Discuss her with voters and the same words keep cropping up--"disciplined", "robotic", "cold", "scripted", "calculating" (if childhoods are to be invoked, even her mother once said that "she just does tiffany accessories sale she has to do to get along and get ahead"). Large numbers of voters regard her as slippery and untrustworthy. This inevitably raises questions about her electability. Mrs Clinton sometimes manages to lose in head-to-head polls against leading Republicans, despite a tidal wave of anti-Republican sentiment. A recent Gallup poll showed that, with 47% of people favourably disposed to her and 50% unfavourably disposed, she had the highest "negatives" of any candidate in the race, Democratic or Republican. Those negatives are particularly high in swing states such as Colorado.