The old conventional wisdom: she’s inevitable. The new conventional wisdom: not so much.

The press loves a narrative. It drives our reporting and analysis, and the story for the better part of the past six months is that you might as well take a long nap between now and the moment that Hillary Clinton is sworn in as the next president of the United States.

If you were betting your life savings, you’d still be shrewd to put your money on the prevaricator, wherever she happens to be campaigning that day. But nothing is certain in politics; and the Clinton candidacy has been much less formidable so far than you have been led to believe.

The turning point, if it turns out to be one, was last Tuesday night in yet another Democratic debate. The hype was that Barack Obama was finally going to get tough with his main opponent.

But Obama seems unable to do such a thing. He sails elegantly above the fray, with complete paragraphs fluidly tripping off his tongue, his voice rarely rising above the even-tempered basso profundo of a college don. He has a quick grin, but not a rapier wit. He would have done rather poorly at the Oxford Union. Given several opportunities for a quick rhetorical kill against the frontrunner, he balked.

It was left to third-place John Edwards to keep hammering at Clinton’s core vulnerability: “The American people . . . deserve a president of the United States that they know will tell them the truth and won’t say one thing one time and something different at a different time.” You think?

It was up to another candidate, Senator Christopher Dodd, to remind Democrats that almost half the country have told pollsters they would never vote for Clinton. Shouldn’t that be a factor in the Democrats’ decision on their candidate for next year?

Edwards even sounded a little like a Republican Hillary-hater at times. “Will she be the person who brings about the change in this country? You know, I believe in Santa Claus. I believe in the tooth fairy,” he said. “But I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

The next day, Clinton’s slightly rattled machine played the gender card, describing the way she’d been piled into by her rivals as a classic case of six men attacking a woman. She sent out a fundraising letter complaining about the “pile-on”. Yes, Clinton is a feminist until she gets into trouble and then she plays the wounded woman card. It’s not a new schtick, of course. She was a feminist until she had the chance to run for office in the 1980s and chose to coopt political power via her husband first.

She was a feminist until her husband was sued for sexual harassment in the 1990s, and she had to smear his accusers. And she’s still a feminist until she turns in a poor debate performance.

Her pollster, Mark Penn, reassured nervous donors the next day that female voters were saying: “Senator Clinton needs our support now more than ever if we’re going to see this six-on-one to try to bring her down.” Can you imagine a real feminist – like, say, Margaret Thatcher – ever using that kind of excuse after a rough prime minister’s questions?

What actually happened last week is that, finally, the real Clinton was exposed. Since last year, she has very successfully Photoshopped all the rough edges off her real persona and launched a campaign as a “new Hillary”. She glowed. Her hair was fixed into one style, as feminine and yet as authoritative as it could get. She smiled and smiled and smiled.

She was much better at public speaking. She even road-tested a new laugh on a few Sunday morning talk shows – a laugh that subsequently disappeared from her repertoire after too many people heard what they thought was a cackle. (She had also practised it so well that it came off identically on every programme – the kind of thing you can no longer get away with in a YouTube political culture.)

Every detail of every programme was in place. She had nuanced her pro-Iraq-war vote into a melange that somehow managed to satisfy the liberal base of her party without making her vulnerable to a gung-ho Republican next year. She even presented a new, less statist healthcare plan to erase the miserable memory of her last attempt in 1994. The press lapped it up, and Democrats increasingly leant her way as the safe bet.

But the flipside of her carefully calibrated new image and her meticulously balanced positions was that she increasingly came off as the completely calculating and untrustworthy pure politician that she actually is. The mirage of benign Evita-style womanhood worked so long as she could maintain the generous aura of an inevitable elder stateswoman.

Behind the scenes, of course, it was the usual story: sleazy, relentless fundraising, brutal pressure on any Democratic party figure not beholden to her and her husband, and polls, polls, polls. But somehow, the Bush-Cheney era worked like some electro-convulsive therapy on many Americans, instantly erasing any bad memories of the Clinton sleaze of the 1990s and wiping the reality of Hillary’s true nature from the national psyche.

Her discipline in keeping this new image afloat is extraordinary. But every now and again, the mask slips. An unsavoury Chinatown fundraising link emerged. And then she did something really stupid: she supported a Senate amendment sponsored by hard-right Republican John Kyl and neoconservative Democrat Joe Lieberman, designating Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organisation and giving the Bush administration a green light to launch a possible air-strike against it. To a Democratic base already suspicious of Clinton for her vote for the Iraq war, this was unnervingly close to Bush.

And then last Tuesday came her debate debacle. She kept trying to have it both ways on almost every question – and suddenly, everyone could see the old Clinton casuistry. YouTube only echoed her two-faced posture. Her answers seemed always designed not to express her real views – if, after all these years of positioning, she can be said to have any real views left – but pure calculation. She did this to herself. Probably tired, a little cranky and more than a little overconfident, the veil fell and the old “say anything to get or keep power” Clinton emerged into the stage-light.

It is enough to give Democrats pause before her coronation. Is it enough to derail her? I don’t know. I do know that in Iowa, the one state where voters have really engaged with the candidates and broken through the national advertising and PR machine, she is faltering. There, she is running neck and neck with Obama, and Edwards is fading. The problem with a campaign built on inevitability is that the minute the inevitability aura is punctured, much can unravel. If she wins Iowa, it’s probably over for Obama. But if she loses there, her strongest argument – that she can win – will crumple. And Obama will still have the money and organisation to fight on.

The good thing for the Democrats and for America is that the real Clinton is now running for office. She has abilities and policies worth weighing in their own right – rather than crowning her as Miss Inevitability. Obama, moreover, has yet to make the sale to many Democrats worried by his somewhat detached persona. He didn’t win last week’s debate. She lost it.

This isn’t over. In many ways, it has just started.

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