THE first vote is still more than a year away, but the campaign to replace President George W Bush in the White House is already throwing up surprises.

Unfortunately for Senator Hillary Clinton, long the front-runner in the Democratic drive to retake the presidency, most of them are coming at her expense.

A brace of Christmas opinion polls has left Clinton with a political hangover after a year that had appeared to cement her status as the Democrats’ best-organised, best-financed and best-connected contender for her party’s presidential nomination.

Despite winning re-election to the US Senate by a handsome margin in mid-term voting last month, Clinton has had little to celebrate as polls from the presidential primary battlegrounds signalled early trouble for her historic bid to become America’s first woman president.

In Iowa, the Midwestern state that will once again open the primary season with its caucus votes on January 14, 2008, Clinton slumped to fourth place with only 10% of the vote in a survey of 600 likely Democratic voters.

In New Hampshire, which will hold the first full primary eight days later, Clinton had appeared to be cruising comfortably with a 23-point lead over her Democrat rivals — until last weekend, when a poll in the Concord Monitor newspaper showed her only one point ahead of Senator Barack Obama, the comparative political newcomer who is considering a similarly historic attempt to become America’s first black president.

Obama’s emergence as a charismatic alternative to the Democratic party’s veteran leadership — and the arrival in the race last week of former Senator John Edwards, the losing vice-presidential candidate in 2004 — have electrified Washington and placed Clinton under early pressure to abandon her cautious approach to the presidency and take to the hustings months earlier than she might have planned.

Several Democratic strategists last week urged Clinton to unleash a “charisma offensive” in the new year to counter the saturated media coverage that has helped propel Obama up the polls.

Clinton has been virtually invisible as first Obama and then Edwards — who launched his second presidential bid on Thursday in the back garden of a New Orleans house ruined by Hurricane Katrina — have been grabbing campaign headlines.

Last week’s Iowa poll showed Obama and Edwards tied for the primary lead with 22% each.

Clinton supporters argued that their candidate’s poor showing — she was also beaten by Tom Vilsack, the Iowa governor who is considering his own bid for the White House — reflected the fact that she was focused on her Senate re-election in New York and did not visit Iowa this year.

Yet Obama hasn’t visited Iowa either, and the same poll found that both Obama and Edwards would perform better than Clinton against the likely frontrunners for the Republican nomination — former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Senator John McCain of Arizona.

“She’s in a quandary right now,” acknowledged Ray Strother, a longtime Democratic political consultant.

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