Hillary Clinton is standing in her aircraft waiting to take off in blizzard conditions, sipping coffee from a styrofoam cup, when she suddenly rips the document she is reading in half and holds it out, without glancing up, for an aide to take away.

Five minutes later a second sheet is cut — guillotined — in similar fashion. Then a third and a fourth. The perfunctory way with which they are dispatched seems appropriate in a campaign that is going through different strategies, if not paper, at an alarming rate.

Mrs Clinton may be a proven “fighter” but she is also flailing, with new lines of attack on Barack Obama now having lifespans measured in hours, even minutes. She has charged him with plagiarism, scorned his big rallies, voiced anger at his leaflets, derided his messianic oratory, compared his foreign policy expertise to those of President Bush and branded him hypocritical on political funding.

In between chucking the “kitchen sink” at him she has also tried showing grace — saying how “absolutely honoured” she is to be sharing a platform with him — as well as setting out the type of substantive multipoint policy plans at which she has always excelled.

A race like a crackpot Dynasty

The contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton matches any fiction

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David Axelrod, Mr Obama's chief strategist, admits: “I'm finding it hard to fathom out what they will do next.” And nothing, as yet, seems to be working.

Bill Clinton, along with notable allies, suggests that her hopes are dead if she fails to win Tuesday's votes in Texas and Ohio where, with each passing day, polls show her support eroding. Attention is turning to the Democratic elders who may have to tell her it is all over — or rumours of a mass resignation by staff if she insists on continuing.

When Mrs Clinton walks down the plane to brief the press, reporters still body-dive over rows of seats to catch her every word. But then they ask her whether she can carry on, why she failed to deliver a knockout blow to Mr Obama in this week's debate — and how she can remain so relentlessly optimistic.

“What keeps me going is that I believe I will be the best president,” she says firmly.

The aircraft screeches as its prepares to land and it is only at the urging of secret servicemen that Mrs Clinton returns to buckle up in the front of the plane. Like any candidate playing catch-up in a race, she had so much more to say.

Mrs Clinton arrives in Zanesville, Ohio, but there are empty seats and stacks of surplus chairs at the sports hall where she is hosting an “Economic Solutions for America Summit”.

A dozen speakers are seated around her in an arrangement resembling the Last Supper — an occasion that might just have been more joyous — to discuss failing health, debt, foreclosure and job losses. Staff pick at tepid pizza as they digest fresh news of defections to Mr Obama's camp, knowing the miseries of industrial Ohio could soon visit their campaign.

On the stage Florine Mark, president of WeightWatchers, is describing how “kids are dying because they are fat” before explaining that she backs Mrs Clinton because, “when I think of [her], I think of the word 'safe'.”

An aide looks up from his BlackBerry to examine lunch. “Uh. Pepperoni?” The candidate herself says grimly that “we're going to put a moratorium on compliments”, but then pays tribute to the physical prowess of the former senator and astronaut John Glenn, 86, who appears to be slipping into some sort of coma at the table.

Being “safe” is no match for inspiration. While Mr Obama's rallies shake with emotion, some members of Mrs Clinton's largely white and elderly audience in Zanesville stir only to drive home early through the slush.

There is already a wave of “precriminations”. Mark Penn, her chief strategist and main target for internal criticism, suggests that he has been “misunderstood”, saying that the fault lies in organisation and funding rather than his message.

Harold Ickes, a long-time Clinton adviser and enemy of Mr Penn, chides the “lack of fight” shown among some staff, adding: “Even our chief strategists, dare I say, didn't think we were going to win New Hampshire.”

He suggests that Mrs Clinton is a “better candidate” than a campaign that relied on a myriad unfocused negative tactics, that never put a frame on Mr Obama and whose inconsistency chimed with her own problems establishing authenticity.

Others prefer to blame Mr Clinton, who has sometimes cast a long shadow over his wife's White House run just as he did when his Vice-President, Al Gore, stood in 2000. Although claims that Mr Clinton played the race card against Mr Obama have been overstated, his interventions have often been suffused with the resentment and egotism that reminded voters of darker days in his White House.

Still more say that Mrs Clinton has done the best she could against an opponent who has become a phenomenon. Attempts to bash Mr Obama on experience were countered by his “judgment” in declaring opposition to the Iraq war. Efforts to portray him as presumptuous were similarly short-circuited by his ethnicity and a spin operation never slow to declare any criticism as racially tinged.

Her best shot was to appear the inevitable choice, but that made her the establishment candidate — even though it was Mr Obama who built the superior fundraising and organisational machine while being coddled by as an underdog by the media. Yesterday her campaign announced that it had raised a record $35 million this month. Mr Obama's camp replied smugly that it had generated “considerably more”.

This week in Ohio Mrs Clinton appeared scarcely unable to contain her rage, railing against debate moderators for once more giving her the front-runner's tougher challenge of answering first.

“Maybe we should ask Barack if he's comfortable and needs another pillow?” she said, in what aides later insisted was an attempted joke.

Her sense of embittered entitlement has been picked up by YouTube videos comparing her to Reese Witherspoon's character in the 1999 film Election, when Tracy Flick vents her fury at the prospect of losing the school presidency to a popular young jock. “They just think that all of a sudden out of the blue with no qualifications whatsoever they can try to take away what other people have worked for very, VERY hard their entire lives,” she says.

In the movie, Flick eventually won her election and there is still a script that says that Mrs Clinton can do the same. She has the organisational strength on the ground in Texas and Ohio that she has lacked elsewhere, as well as deep pockets of voters such as Latinos and blue-collar workers who may remain loyal.

It remains possible, if improbable, that the party will fall into line if she wins these two states and then sweeps on to Pennsylvania in April and Puerto Rico in June.

Perceptions of Mr Obama as an unstoppable force may even help Mrs Clinton. At the summit in Zanesville, Pat Davis shrugs as she explains why she turned up. “I'm 68 and this is my first opportunity to vote for a woman president,” she says. “I figure I might as well use it now because I won't get the chance in the general election.”

In Mr Clinton's White House, they used to say that if the President had been the Titanic “the iceberg would have sunk”. Mr Obama's campaign says that it is “foolish to write off the Clintons”.

But it is also worth noting that there are no icebergs in Texas.

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